Salesforce Marketing Cloud – A Comprehensive Guide

By 2027, the marketing cloud platform market is anticipated to be valued at $17.8 billion with a CAGR of 8.7%. 

Among other marketing clouds, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is making waves in the market. Numerous enterprises seeking to enhance their marketing strategies and contact management for their sales and marketing teams have succeeded with this solution. Their stories of increased efficiency and improved customer engagement are proof of the caliber of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Per a study conducted by Forrester Consulting, five respondents yielded an ROI of around 299% using Salesforce Marketing Cloud over a three-year period.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be the right choice for your business. How? Before you decide to go for this marketing cloud, you should know every relevant aspect. So, stick to the Salesforce marketing cloud guide to know its market status, how it can help your business, challenges that can interfere with your pathway, steps to connect the cloud with third-party sites, and a lot more.

Let’s get started!

What is Salesforce Marketing?

A Salesforce marketing cloud is a platform you can use to deliver related and personalized journeys to customers across devices and channels. This facilitates marketers to reach the customers with the right message at the right time at every milestone of the relationship. 

You can reap the advantage of its well-integrated solutions for better customer journey management, mobile, email, web, social personalization, content creation and management, advertising, and data analysis. You can even meet every customer engagement and interaction you imagine and guide them on their 1-to-1 journeys with your brand, which has always been challenging with any other marketing cloud. 

The Marketing Cloud is connected with the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud of Salesforce to enable coordination that emerges with a unified experience and prevents customers from being linked separately by marketers from every group. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Market Share And Statistics – Facts & Figures To Know

Now, let’s get deeper and unveil some known and yet-to-know facts and figures about the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

• As reported in 2023, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has captured a market share of about 14.7%, comparatively more than its closest competitors, like Adobe, which grabbed 11.1%, Microsoft, which caught 74.4%, and HubSpot, which attained 5.5%.
• In the marketing automation category, Salesforce Marketing Cloud competes with 327 other competitor tools.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud captures approximately 0.75% of the market share in the marketing automation market.
• Across the globe, numerous websites use Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and the US holds the largest, about 3,162.

As the figures say, you can think of maximizing the capability of Salesforce Marketing Cloud for your business in customer journey mapping, multichannel messaging, understanding your customers, and more.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Products: Build And Manage Personalized Customer Journey

Salesforce Marketing Cloud arrives with expansive products that assist businesses in effective marketing campaign management.

Email Studio

Email Studio helps users build and send personalized emails, basic newsletters, and even the most complex campaigns. So forth, Salesforce Marketing Product delivers transactional, promotional, and automated triggered messages. The users can track them and accordingly optimize them to drive improved performance.

Let’s get deeper and walk through the key functionalities of Email Studio:

1. Target Your Audience

With this tool, you can automate every business process and spare time to release unique campaigns. Besides, you discover the right audience, reach them with ideal content, and activate first-party email data across channels.

2. Email Creation

Email Studio facilitates the users’ creation of messages using customizable templates and responsive designs to deliver the best and most dynamic messages that inspire action and boost customer engagement.

3. Email Automation

Whether you have a huge customer base or less, be sure you reach every customer with 1-to-1 messages. Choose a suitable time when your customer is likely to see it. With this tool, you can set your email delivery schedule to let your customers experience your brand in your own way without any manual workload.

4. Email Tracking And Reporting

You can conduct A/B tests to get the performance reports after sending emails. This way, you can determine which campaign works for you and which you should pause.

Mobile Studio

Mobile Studio is a SFMC product that allows enterprises to communicate with customers on mobile devices. Using this product, you can send various types of messages, like surveys, offers, and transactional information.

Mobile Studio includes three modules explained below:

1. Group Connect

You can create and send messages to your contacts, review messaging activities, and manage the contact subscriptions using this module via messaging apps. The Line mobile messaging app and Facebook Messenger are currently used for this.

2. MobileConnect

Using this module of Mobile Studio, users can create, send, track, and receive SMS and MMS text messages. Besides, it sends transactional messages and alerts to subscribers using a drag-and-drop interface and templates. MobileConnect manages keywords, automatically responds to incoming messages, and performs more jobs.

3. MobilePush

Users can use this module to create and send notifications to boost app usage.

Automation Studio

A Marketing Cloud application, Automation Studio allows the execution of data management activities and multi-step marketing on a scheduled, immediate, or triggered basis.

Besides, the workflow canvas of Automation Studio creates simple or multi-step automation. This SFMC product includes an overview page that reveals every automation status. If an error emerges, the information and corresponding automation appear for a quick recovery. If required, you can run automation separately on this page.

Web Studio

SFMC Web Studio is a tool crafted to build and manage web experiences for varied marketing purposes. Also, it helps track every action of the customers to analyze their behavior and gain insights.

Here are the key functionalities of Web Studio. Let’s go through:

1. Landing Pages & Microsites

With Web Studio, you get a user-friendly and easy-to-use interface for design and development. Using it, you can create targeted landing pages to get leads or make microsites for specific product promotions or campaigns.

2. Personalization

Using data from Salesforce, like targeted content, CTAs, or offers according to visitor profiles, you can personalize the web experiences for every visitor.

3. Content Management

You can simply edit and manage web content, such as images, videos, or text, for your landing pages and microsites. This way, you can quickly update and adjust your campaigns.

4. Form Creation & Data Collection

With this tool, designing and integrating forms makes it easy to accumulate valuable data from website visitors, like preferences or email addresses. Ahead, you can use this data for segmentation, lead generation, and future marketing campaigns.

5. A/B Testing

You can perform A/B testing of various landing pages with Web Studio to check which performs better considering engagement or conversions. So forth, this data-driven approach leads to maximum impact by optimizing web experiences.

Marketing Cloud Engagement (Journey Builder)

With marketing cloud engagement (earlier Journey Builder), an engagement marketing platform, you can build customer relationships that orchestrate every time and match the messages with cohesive journeys, crafting a unified brand experience for every customer. This SFMC product activates business data to personalize campaigns, improve message relevance, and enhance customer lifetime value.

You can leverage this engagement marketing platform to manage and personalize email programs, provide cohesive customer experiences across mobile channels, and craft and deliver connected journeys across the lifecycle.

Let’s get deeper to know how exactly marketing cloud engagement works:

1. Customer Journey Mapping

With this tool, visualize and map your customer journeys to get users’ points of view. Next, you can communicate with them seamlessly across varied channels.

2. Automation

Obviously, the needs of customers will change with time. Here, using this tool, you can set an automated logic for your customer decisions, engagement, content tests, and random journey splits. Ahead, you can deliver personalized journeys to individual customers in no time. Then, the performance reporting and changing trends will be used to take action accordingly.

3. Personalization

First, analyze your collected data based on customers’ browsing behaviors, attributes, and purchase history to craft personalized messaging. You should trigger their journeys and adjust their paths constantly based on their predicted and current behavior.

Personalization Builder

Powered by Einstein, Personalization Builder, formerly Interaction Studio, delivers content or product recommendations to every individual customer via the web and email. This facilitates personalizing customer experience across multiple channels, chiefly aiming at email and web marketing.

Below are the functionalities that Personalization Builder performs:

1. Conclude Customer Preferences

Analyze customer actions and clicks to develop a behavioral profile for every customer that sketches their product and content tastes and preferences

2. Automatically Determine Next Content

Merges customer profiles with ML algorithms powered by Salesforce Einstein to predict the right content or products for customers.

3. Drive 1-to-1 Interactions

Create personalized experiences by delivering predictive content across varied channels.

Content Builder

The cross-channel management tool Content Builder facilitates users in consolidating documents, content, and images in a single spot for better use in marketing cloud engagement. Arriving with a simple drag-and-drop interface, Content Builder is considered a more efficient tool. It also includes the content management application (earlier Content Canvas), content repository (CMS) and API, and the latest HTML content editor.

Here are the key functionalities Content Builder performs:

1. Content Sharing Management

Users can create, share, and track across various digital channels from one spot to ease categorizing, searching, and filtering content. To find the content quickly, users can use quick search functionality that assigns campaign associations, tags, and owners to the content.

2. Deliver the Next Best Content

Create customer profiles based on preferences, ahead use sophisticated algorithms to determine the next best content, and send it with exciting offers or products for all individuals instantly and automatically across channels.

3. Create Amazing Content Easily

It arrives with drag-and-drop bright content blocks and mobile-optimized templates, which you can use to design and develop intelligent content messaging in a user-friendly content editor. Create only once and share everywhere.

Analytics Builder

Salesforce Analytics Builder facilitates users in gaining deep insight into their contacts’ interests and behaviors across different channels. Ahead, these insights are used to refine customer journeys and aim marketing goals.

Besides, Analytics Builder helps users in the following ways:

1. Monitor Progressive Customer Engagement

Track visitors’ behavior on your website and mobile app and emerge with new insights highlighting visitor location, abandoned cart value, and site search terms.

2. Reap The Power of Advanced Metrics

Email reporting helps you understand the number of opens, unsubscribes, clicks, and more for all the campaigns you can share with your team and colleagues. Custom reporting can get about advanced metrics, like best-performing send day, audience engagement over time, and more.

3. Real-time Tracking & Reporting To Take Timely Action

Put forth the reporting with a better visualization. Explain patterns and trends better with data bars, conditional formatting, robust filtering, and trend arrows. This eases timely response to data and testing outcomes.

4. Drive Predictive Insights

With predictive analysis, Salesforce Einstein discovers new insights in your data. Check what behaviors are increasing their actions, purchasing, engagement, or unsubscribing.

Marketing Cloud Connect

Marketing Cloud Connect combines Engagement’s digital marketing power with Salesforce tools, like segmentation, data management, and campaign management for Marketing Cloud Engagement. This helps craft uniform customer relationships with personalized, more data-driven conversations and the caliber to automate the customer journey.

With this SFMC product, you can access robust Engagement tools directly within the Service or Sales Cloud. While engaging your customers in relevant discussions, you can ensure a consistent messaging and branding experience and drive more leads.

Marketing Cloud Connect features are accessible in Salesforce Classic. So, those who work with Lightning Experience are automatically redirected to Salesforce Classic by clicking the Marketing Cloud Connect tabs.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)

With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (former Pardot), you can automate marketing and sales tasks to assist your team pace up the sales cycle. With smart lead nurturing, you can close more deals with dynamic content, send personal messages with real-time alerts, connect with your customers immediately, and know about your prospect’s activity with a detailed view.

This product arrives with robust marketing tools that help users fill their sales funnel with top-quality leads. With the landing pages, you can drive more engagement, while paid and organic search will let your brand come to notice. Besides, events and webinars can also be helpful in boosting customer engagement.

At last, you can track the impact of your marketing on revenue, check your sales funnel health, point out the improvement areas, understand how your prospects are engaging, and share all your key insights to make data-driven decisions on marketing programs.

Marketing Cloud Advertising (Advertising Studio)

Earlier known as Advertising Studio, Marketing Cloud Advertising helps engage and advertise customers and prospects. The product is best for coordinating campaigns with mobile, social, customer service, and sales efforts and improving email marketing objectives with advertising.

Users can engage with existing customers using Marketing Cloud Advertising, find new ones with similarities, and re-engage inactive users across digital advertising within the customer journey.

Using Marketing Cloud Advertising, you can:

• Create ad campaigns using Journey Builder in your customer journeys.
• Activate your CRM data for targeting.
• Link your Google and Facebook advertising leads in real-time with Marketing Cloud data extensions or Sales Cloud with Lead Capture.

The key functionalities of Marketing Cloud Advertising are:

1. Advertising Campaigns

Use the customer data you accumulated from varied sources, like mobile push, SMS interactions, email engagement, and purchases on your website, to securely reach lookalike audiences and customers across Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc. Besides, this tool can help you manage ad campaigns, making the best out of accumulated data in Salesforce.

2. Audience Segmentation

With this tool of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you divide your ad group performance data by audience name or category. This way, you can keep track of your group performance.

3. Ad Tracking And Reporting

With this tool, you can track your ad campaign and emerge with a performance report. Next, you can decide what changes you can make to improve the ads that are not performing as expected.

Marketing Cloud Einstein

You can increase customer engagement and your team productivity with marketing AI that’s built into your platform. Also, it helps guide customers through their personalized journeys with automation fueled by Einstein.

Let’s aim at the key functionalities of Marketing Cloud Einstein:

1. Activate Deeper Customer Insights

Segment customers faster, build, train, and deploy custom models easily, and expand the reach of campaigns to audiences holding higher potential to resonate.

2. Automate Smart Journeys

Build, test, and optimize personalized campaign variations, create on-brand copy and visual content, and identify real-time campaign anomalies, giving actionable insights.

3. Scale Lead Generation and Account-Based Marketing

Automatically analyze marketing data with AI scoring, identify ideal accounts based on historical data, and Evaluate the impact of events, channels, and sales team activities on the pipeline.

4. Personalize Real-Time Moments

Convert customers by merging real-time data, automation, and AI decisions to turn app or web browsing into robust offers. Find customer interests, affinities, and preferences and combine them with business goals to deliver personalized offers.

5. Optimize Spend, Planning, & Performance

Automate data unification, management, and KPI standardization on one tool to provide actionable insights to optimize campaign offers, creatives, and audience and optimize spend speed.

Audience Builder

Salesforce retired Audience Studio in Feb ’24, but you should have basic knowledge of Audience Builder. Dynamically, Audience Builder builds targeted audiences from the contacts saved in your account, considering stored attributes and behavioral values. Further, these audiences can be used to exclude or target contacts from activities in Marketing Cloud Engagement. With Audience Builder, you can divide your customers into any marketing cloud engagement organization in many ways.

How Does Salesforce Marketing Cloud Help Businesses in Marketing?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps businesses in varied aspects. Here, we will describe each to let you understand better.

1. Personalization

With Marketing Cloud, you can give a personal touch to emails, messages, and offers customized to the customer’s purchase history and preferences. This tailored service leads to the creation of robust connections and elevates engagement.

2. Marketing Automation

Manual and repetitive jobs demand so much time and effort that you might indulge in other valuable business jobs. SFMC automates workflows, such as social media scheduling, sending emails, and targeting campaigns based on customer preferences and behavior.

3. Orchestration Customer Journey

Customers interact with brands in different ways. Marketing Clouds let you map personalized customer journeys. This way, you can send targeted messages at the exact touchpoints, seamlessly taking them to the sales funnel.

4. Email Marketing

Email is one of the robust marketing tools. Marketing Cloud emerges with advanced features for email designing, automated email sequences, and A/B testing of content and subject lines to maximize email marketing impact.

5. Cross-Channel Analytics

Earlier, we used to work in marketing silos, but with Marketing Cloud, you can get a unified view of customer interactions across multiple channels. So forth, you can analyze performance and optimize campaigns to catch up with better results.

6. Customer Segmentation

Customers have different tastes and preferences; you can’t treat them equally. This platform facilitates segmenting your audience based on behavior, interests, and demographics. This allows you to aim at specific groups with customized messages that go perfectly with their needs.

7. Marketing Intelligence

Data is invaluable. Marketing cloud helps to accumulate and analyze customer data, offering valuable insights into customer preferences, campaign performance, and market trends. This strengthens data-driven marketing decisions for increased ROI.

8. Improved Customer Engagement

Marketing Cloud arrives with the tools to create personalized and targeted customer experiences. This drives deeper engagement, elevates brand loyalty, drives customer satisfaction, and increases sales.

Benefits Of Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud

With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, users can automate their marketing processes and handle customer relationships more efficiently. Also, they can create customer profiles and track how customers interact with their company across channels like social media, web interactions, and email.

Besides, SFMC offers various advantages to users. Let’s check out more below:

1. Automate Marketing Process

With this platform, you can make your marketing process seamless and efficiently manage customer relationships. Besides, it helps create customer profiles and track how your customers interact with the brand across various channels, including social media, email, and web interactions. You can use it to build automated sales campaigns, track their effectiveness, and reach prospects.

2. Pace Up Lead Generation

You can generate leads quickly with Salesforce Marketing Cloud through social media posts, email campaigns, or website concerns. Also, it facilitates aiming at potential customers based on their interests or behavior to increase the probability of lead conversion.

3. Evaluate Your Marketing Efforts Impact

With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, users can measure the impact of their marketing efforts through leads generated, activation rates, and revenue gained per customer. Also, they can notice its influence on your customer loyalty and brand reputation.

4. Integrate with Other Popular Marketing Automation Tools

This platform lets you integrate your business with other marketing automation tools, like HubSpot Sales CRM or Adobe Marketing Cloud. So forth, you can perform better and more efficiently in marketing campaign management.

5. Anywhere Access Your Data

As you can access SFMC from any device, you can acknowledge it as the best opportunity to manage your campaigns from everywhere. Besides, it helps in customer data management, which will also become easy for other companies you operate.

6. Save on Marketing Costs

With an automated marketing process, you can save on the associated costs that you can use to achieve other essential business objectives.

7. Stand Uniquely in The Crowd

When everything goes as expected with this marketing cloud, you will stay competitive with your automated marketing process, more converted leads, and improved ROI.

8. Easy Data Sharing with Other Departments

With SFMC, you can share your data with other departments at your firm., which enhances coordination between your marketing and other business areas. This data includes leads generated by social media posts, email campaigns, and customer engagement data and profiles.

9. Create Custom Reports and Dashboards

You can comprehensively view your marketing efforts by creating custom reports and dashboards. Besides, this platform monitors the performance of marketing campaigns and customer interaction. This way, you can evaluate more effective channels among the rest to reach new customers better.

10. Match the Pace of Advanced Trends

With this platform, you will stay updated with the latest and advanced marketing trends to adapt your strategy quickly. Consequently, you can reach your customers better with the right message at the right time.

So, these advantages of SFMC help build highly personalized and highly marketing campaigns based on customer data and behavior.

Challenges Solved By Salesforce Marketing Cloud

With every venture, there are some challenges that we need to confront.

Below, we have discussed the top 5 challenges your business may confront leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

1. Fragmented Customer Data

Customer data is usually scattered across varied applications, systems, and storage locations. This makes it hard for users to integrate, analyze, and manage data effectively.

Here arrives the Salesforce Marketing Cloud that merges customer data from varied sources, like social media, CRM, and websites, into a unified customer view. This diminishes data silos and facilitates more personalized and targeted marketing efforts.

2. Campaign Inefficiency

Handling campaigns across varied channels manually can be complex and error-prone, which may lead to campaign inefficiency.

Here arrives the Salesforce marketing cloud that provides automation tools for social media scheduling, journey building, and email marketing that streamline campaign execution.

3. Limited Personalization

Generic marketing messages usually fail to give the expected results.

Here comes Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a savior with its personalized features that facilitate customized content, CTAs, and offers based on individual customer behavior and preferences, leading to increased conversions and engagement.

4. Attribution Difficulty

Tracking the impact of marketing campaigns can be hard as they are mostly created for a long timeframe and can also use multiple channels. Marketing Cloud offers analytics dashboards and reporting tools that help gauge campaign performance across varied channels and understand driving results.

5. Omnichannel Disconnect

Customers want consistent messaging across every touchpoint. Marketing Cloud facilitates marketers to manage and provide personalized messages across multiple channels (mobile, social media, email) for a flawless customer experience.

Steps To Connect Salesforce Marketing Cloud With Salesforce or Third-Party Sites

Using the Marketing Cloud API user credentials, the Sales or Service Cloud admin connects the Sales or Service Cloud account with the Marketing Cloud Engagement account. This task completes the account-level connection for Marketing Cloud Connect.

Steps to Connect

• In Sales or Service Cloud > go to the Marketing Cloud tab.
• Click “Show Advanced Settings.”
• Enable “Tenant-Specific OAuth Endpoints.”

This step removes your Marketing Cloud Connector Settings. So, before enablement, you should record your settings while reintegrating.

• Enter the Marketing Cloud API user credentials.
• To connect the accounts, click “Connect.”

You can complete the setup by managing Marketing Cloud Connect settings and testing the connection.

Who Uses the Salesforce Marketing Cloud – Real-Time Case Studies

Let’s explore the top companies that are succeeding with Salesforce:

1. Vineyard Vines – A Clothing and Accessories Retail

CIO & SVP of Operations: Karen Beebe

Need: With a goal of a 360-degree view for customers and data access for every member of a team; this brand decided to opt for SFMC. They were looking to get a unified view of the data at a spot to make business processes faster. 

Data’s important, but we’re using it in places that are not accessible and, in today’s digital transformation, it needs to be there for everyone.

Karen Beebe

Solution: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a CRM system, helps accumulate information for legacy systems and places it on a single screen. This eases the team to manage projects and share data from and to anywhere. 

It’s not just giving technology for technology’s sake. It was about making it easier, making their lives better.

KAREN BEEBE, CIO and SVP of Operations at vineyard vines.

2. Aldo – An International Footwear Chain 

CEO of Aldo: Patrik Frisk

Need: Provide a personalized experience to their in-store or online customers. The intent was to make it more fun, easier, and faster for customers to shop with Aldo. 

For us to communicate and to translate our core values of love, integrity, and respect with the customer, we need to be able to do that across not just channels, but also all forms of communication, whether it’s social media, online, or in a person-to-person relationship.

said Patrik Frisk, CEO of Aldo

Solution: With predictive intelligence, Aldo has become capable of recommending a second pair of shoes holding a similar style. Besides, Aldo’s emails let them get connected to individual customer preferences. This let them catch up with a 131% boost in email conversion compared to the last year. Picking Marketing Cloud for the company, Aldo has increased its ROI by $100 million over four years. 

For Aldo, that meant that we needed to really think long and hard about how we stayed competitive,” Frisk said. “It wasn’t just about collecting data. It was about personalizing that data. … And that’s what Salesforce has enabled us to do.

3. Mattel – A Global Toy Company

Vice President and head of Mattel: Carlson Choi

Need: Drive deep digital engagement and connect with consumers, and guiding them on their journeys across the brand globally, from any device. 

“For 70 years, parents have trusted Mattel to create safe, engaging play experiences for children and families.

said Carlson Choi

Solution: The SFMC offered its digital marketers useful tools, like Journey Builder, that help create unique brand experiences and service customers while they move between channels, brands, and products. 

“Today, we’re harnessing that experience to create an equally safe and engaging digital ecosystem for our consumers. Using Salesforce is key to this process, helping us map a digital journey for parents and children based on how they engage with Mattel’s apps, digital content, and toys.”

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Price Overview

You can boost customer engagement by implementing marketing solutions that suit your business. Using such solutions, you can collect customer data and create a unified view to pace marketing processes and enable personalized interactions.

Data, Personalization, And Analytics Products

Customer Loyalty Solution

How Salesforce Consulting Company Helps?

A Salesforce Consulting Company, like Emizentech, provides solutions and supports you every step of the way, ensuring you get the most out of our offerings.

With a decade of experience serving all-sized businesses worldwide, Emizentech is honing its skills and expertise in delivering expected and high-standard projects. Considering Salesforce, we are an emerging Salesforce consulting company that giants usually pick to meet their Salesforce implementation and integration requirements.

Our Salesforce implementation consultants can help your business track customer interactions and data seamlessly. This way, you can easily and efficiently manage leads, opportunities, contacts, and cases. Moreover, we will assist you in automating your sales and marketing processes to catch up with improved sales.

Key Highlights of Emizentech

• Certified Salesforce Developers
• Agile Methodology / Transparency
• Intuitive User Experience
• Multi-Cloud Salesforce Expertise
• 360-Degree Salesforce Services
• Center of Excellence
• Extensive Service Portfolio
• Dedicated Team Of Salesforce Experts
• Complete Support Throughout The Implementation Lifecycle

Conclusion

Knowing the significant benefits, products to consider, steps to connect, and more in this comprehensive guide to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you might have understood how powerful it is to manage marketing campaigns and track the progress.

Connect with a Salesforce consulting company, like Emizentech, to sync your business data into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and avail every benefit to take your business to a level ahead.

Frequently Asked Questions FAQs