Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful digital marketing platform that enables businesses to create, automate, and manage personalised marketing campaigns across multiple channels. It provides a suite of tools and functionalities designed to help marketers engage with customers at every stage of the customer journey. It can be used for:
- Email marketing
- Content creation and management
- SMS
- Mobile notifications (including in-app notifications)
- Campaign automation
- Omni channel co-ordination
- Targeted online advertising
- Intuitive website tracking with the power to tailor webpages to different audiences
- Prospect segmentation
- Data management
What do you get with Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud consists of two types of modules: ‘studios’ and ‘builders’. Studios coordinate content and channels, and builders manage data and automation.
Marketing Cloud’s studios cover a multitude of channels, such as Email, Mobile, Socials and Advertising. These, combined with Salesforce’s Journey Builder, can be mapped together and automated to create tailored meaningful customer experiences. Marketing Cloud allows you to take advantage of real-time engagement and rich analytics – all in one platform, and automate these targeted paths to achieve an integrated marketing front. For example, an abandoned cart may trigger a ‘something missing’ email or an SMS offer on the unpurchased product.
Marketing Cloud also allows you to cultivate your brand visually, adding assets and defining templates. All of this, coupled with the platform’s rich analytics, means that Marketing teams can easily track customer behaviour, preferences and interactions. By understanding the actions your customers are performing on your website, Marketing Cloud even has the capability to modify messaging to tailor the experience to the kind of products and services that are of interest to a specific customer profile.
Adding an extra layer of personalisation and automation, Marketing Cloud Einstein offers the latest collection of AI-enabled features. Optimise send time, score prospects on their engagement and receive intelligent content recommendations – it’s all possible! And when you combine Marketing Cloud with your existing Salesforce suite, you open a whole new wealth of opportunities. Aggregate every data point about an individual customer across multiple platforms, provide controlled access to your marketing collateral to franchisees and partners, and create loyalty programmes, including tiered memberships or points per purchase.
Account Engagement (Pardot) and Marketing Cloud
Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot) is primarily used for purchases where there are long sales cycles and multiple decision-makers, whereas Marketing Cloud is best suited to transactional purchases across multiple marketing channels. Marketing Cloud is also more of an apt choice for seasoned marketers who conduct multiple activities across channels, whereas Pardot can be seen as more straightforward out-of-the-box with a little assistance from a knowledgeable Salesforce Admin or Consultant.
Account Engagement is often pitched as a B2B Marketing solution and Marketing Cloud is predominantly viewed as business-to-consumer. Although Pardot became Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in 2022, the two products are quite distinct and separate in both licensing and technical architecture. Whilst they share many standard features, they have different purposes which can serve different types of organisations.
To learn more about what Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Account Engagement could do to boost your sales pipeline, give us a call on 0117 230 2390 or email hello@performa-it.co.uk.