The role of marketers is continually evolving. This is especially true for those working within the Salesforce ecosystem. With the advent of advanced technologies, products, and functionalities to support — all while sticking to data-driven strategies — marketers are expected to adapt and expand their skill sets to stay competitive and relevant in the industry. 

One significant shift that I see for Marketing Cloud Engagement professionals is the need to add Data Cloud and Flows into their skill repertoire. 

In this blog post, we’ll explore why Marketing Cloud Engagement professionals should upgrade their skills to include Data Cloud and Flows, along with practical steps to start this learning journey.

Why upgrade your Marketing Cloud Engagement skills?

1. It’s the future for the Mothership

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re likely very aware of how much rapid growth and development Salesforce has invested in its Data Cloud product — not only are the release cycles happening much more frequently than other products. This in turn unlocks new features and integration points with other products in the ecosystem, and there’s also a version of Data Cloud being offered at $0 for Sales and Service Cloud customers and just recently announced for Marketing Cloud Customers too. 

If that’s not a sign, I’ll give you one more reason: Data Cloud is the data foundation and Flows power automation for Salesforce’s new product, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is built on Einstein 1, which has been the pipe dream for many of us Marketing Cloud Engagement fans who have dealt with wonky UX, and clunky integrations over the years. Reading between the lines, cough cough SAFE Harbor cough cough sometime in the future (likely a few years), there will be a single marketing automation application that current Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Engagement users will want to use.

So now that I’ve convinced you (hopefully) of the WHY — let’s dive into how these tools/features can help you as a marketer.

2. Become a better marketer by offering better customer experiences  

Enhanced Targeting and Personalization

Data Cloud can enable you to take your target and personalization efforts even further when using Data Cloud with Marketing Cloud Engagement through segmentation and activation. 

Data is the lifeblood of modern marketing. By incorporating a solid understanding and foundation of data models and the Data Cloud platform into your skill set, you’ll be able to visioncast and architect how to leverage vast repositories of consumer data, enabling you to create more targeted and personalized marketing campaigns and customer experiences. 

Understanding how to leverage data effectively within Data Cloud allows you to segment your audiences more precisely, tailor your messaging, and deliver content that resonates with individual preferences and behaviors in Marketing Cloud Engagement and beyond. (you also might want to read up on Consent Management)

Seamless Automation and Optimization

For those who have no clue about Flows (no I’m not talking about the Progressive Lady), let’s give you a breakdown:  Flows allow you to build complex business automation using clicks instead of code. For Salesforce admins, Flows are your best friends because they allow you to be able to handle the majority of complex business requirements without the help of a Salesforce developer.

Flows are not currently a feature/functionality in Marketing Cloud Engagement however it accomplishes many of the same needs you’d use Automation Studio and Journey Builder for. While the need and exposure for flows in your immediate feature might be limited, getting familiar and a basic foundation will allow you to go further faster in the future.

3. Gain a Competitive Edge and Future-Proofing

Marketers who embrace emerging technologies and methodologies gain a significant advantage in a competitive landscape. By upgrading your skills to include Data Cloud and Flows, you position yourself as a forward-thinking marketer capable of leveraging cutting-edge tools to drive results. Moreover, as the marketing landscape continues to evolve, proficiency in these areas ensures that you remain adaptable and prepared for future developments in the industry.

How to start your learning journey

1. Make time for training and education

For many practitioners, finding or making the time for training and education can be hard. As the old adage goes, “Investing in yourself is the best investment you will ever make.” So, invest!  As your reward for reading through this entire article, we’ll provide you with our recommended learning path to begin upskilling in these areas.

Begin by seeking out training programs and educational resources focused on Data Cloud and Flows. Many online platforms offer courses and certifications specifically tailored to marketers looking to expand their skill sets in these areas. Look for reputable sources such as industry-leading tech companies, online learning platforms, or professional associations.

2. Be realistic

Just like most things — be realistic with your goals. As they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Getting a shiny new certification might be the goal for some but doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right goal for you. Set learning goals that make sense for your current role, day-to-day responsibilities, and where you want to go in your career.

3. Look for hands-on practice and experimentation

Theory is essential, but practical experience is equally crucial. Take advantage of sandbox environments or trial versions of Data Cloud and Flows functionality. (Unlike Marketing Cloud Engagement — these do exist!) 

From experimenting with building automated workflows, setting up data streams, mapping data, and creating segments to exploring data analytics tools, and analyzing results, hands-on experience will deepen your understanding and proficiency in these areas.

4. Collaborate and Network

Engage with peers and industry professionals who are already proficient in Data Cloud and Flows. Join online communities, attend webinars, and participate in networking events to exchange knowledge, seek advice, and learn from others’ experiences. Collaborating with experts in the field can provide valuable insights and accelerate your learning process.

Conclusion

As marketing continues to evolve in the digital age, we see Data Cloud and Flows becoming increasingly vital for success. By upgrading your skills in these areas, you can unlock new opportunities for not only yourself but also for ultimately driving better results for your organization. Start your learning journey today:

Data Cloud Learning Path

• Administer Data Cloud  (Trail)
• Build Data Strategy for Data Cloud (Trail)
• Enhance Data in Data Cloud  (Trail)
• Explore Data Cloud (Trail)
• Model Data in Data Cloud (Trail)
• Create a Data Stream In Data Cloud (Project)
• Prepare for your Salesforce Data Cloud Consultant Credential (Trail Mix)
• Data Cloud Quick Start Guide (Trail Mix)
•  Salesforce Data Cloud Product (Video)

Flows Learning Path

• Salesforce Flows (Workshop)
• Build Flows with Flow Builder (Trail)
• Automate Your Business Processes with Salesforce Flow (Trail)
  • Build a Simple Flow (Project)
• Flow Elements and Resources Specialist (Superbadge)
• Screen Flow Specialist (Superbadge)
• Screenless Flow Specialist (Superbadge)
• Flow Management Specialist (Superbadge)

Original article: Evolving Your Skills as a Marketing Cloud Engagement Practitioner

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Evolving Your Skills as a Marketing Cloud Engagement Practitioner appeared first on The Spot.

The beginning of the year is an ideal time to have a reset on your Marketing Cloud contact strategy. That way, you can get your Marketing Cloud contacts in order, have an org cleanup, and create a future-proof strategy that will ensure those contacts within your org are serving a purpose (and you stay within your Marketing Cloud contact limit).

So where do you begin when it comes to developing a Marketing Cloud contact strategy? 

A Marketing Cloud contact is an individual added to any contact database within your Marketing Cloud instance. So, your Marketing Cloud contact strategy is the process you’ll create to make the most of your marketing efforts by focusing on promising contacts and letting go of contacts that aren’t helping your team reach its goals.

Step 1. Find out how many Marketing Cloud contacts you have purchased.

Every Marketing Cloud contract will have a contact limit. You can expect communication from your Salesforce Account Executive if you breach this limit, which can result in you needing to pay for more contacts. So it’s important to know what you’re working with. 

Refer to your Marketing Cloud contract to find how many contacts your license includes, or reach out to your Salesforce Account Executive to find out. 

Step 2. Find out how many contacts you currently have in Marketing Cloud.

Once you know the number of contacts you have purchased, you’ll want to find out how many contacts you currently have in Marketing Cloud. This will help you identify if a review or a cleanup is needed. 

Follow these steps to find out how many contacts you have in Marketing Cloud:

1. Go to Contact Builder > ‘All Contacts’ tab
2. From there, click ‘All Contacts’ for the total number to show up.

Alternatively, you can run a report that will show you how many contacts you have from each audience, such as Sales and Service Cloud leads, and contacts, per channel.

Keep your Marketing Cloud contact numbers handy

At this point you should have two numbers:

1. The number of contacts you are contracted to
2. The number of contacts currently in Marketing Cloud 

Review your Marketing Cloud contacts

The next step is to review your contacts. Think about:

• What they are doing
• Who they are
• If they should even be in Marketing Cloud (after all each contact comes at a cost)

From there, decide which ones you can remove from your org. 

Ask Yourself: Do all your contacts provide value to your business?

If you’re not sure how to make that decision, then check out this blog post where Sarah Smith explores the reasons why deleting your marketing contacts regularly is a good thing when you delete the right ones.

Step 3. Review Marketing Cloud contacts and complete your cleanup tasks.

A key part of a good contact strategy is ensuring you only have the contacts that are needed in Marketing Cloud. As part of your contact strategy, it’s important to evaluate your current contacts and perhaps have a clean-out. 

Check for Duplicate Records

One of the biggest reasons Marketing Cloud users go over their contacts limit is due to duplicate records. 

First, identify how many duplicates you have using SQL queries in Automation Studio. 

1. Identify how many duplicate records you have by following the instructions in this trailhead: Evaluate Your Contacts Unit 
2. Delete your duplicates – follow this Salesforce help article: Contact Delete Best Practices in Contact Builder

Bonus Duplicate Contact Tips

Identify the source of the duplicates: 

• Do you import contacts directly into Marketing Cloud?
  • This can sometimes cause an issue, particularly if you are also syncing records from Salesforce
  • You’ll end up with the “Salesforce version synced down” + the Marketing Cloud version you imported!  
• Review your Salesforce lead-sync approach
  • Syncing both leads and contacts can often cause duplicates in Marketing Cloud when a lead is converted into a contact, particularly if you’re using Salesforce Record ID as the unique identifier
  • Your lead record will have a lead ID and this lead will sync with a Marketing Cloud contact but when you convert that lead it will have a different ID, a contact ID thus creating a duplicate record in Marketing Cloud 
  • It is however best practice to use the Salesforce ID as  the unique identifier rather than email 
• Review your Salesforce records 
  • Are there duplicates here? If so then this could be causing duplicates in Marketing Cloud as well 
• Do you import records into Salesforce (manually or via a third party)? 
  • This could cause duplicate records in Salesforce and therefore Marketing Cloud

Review contacts that do not have an assigned channel address

Assigned channels are things like email, mobile, ad studio, and any channel within Marketing Cloud that uses your contacts to target. If you have contacts that do not have a channel address, then these are likely to be a good candidate for removal. These types of contacts often get into Marketing Cloud because of the Marketing Cloud Connector [Keep reading to implement a solution that minimizes the “wrong” records being synced into Marketing Cloud from Salesforce!]

Identify if your contacts do not have an “assigned channel.” Why? If they don’t have an assigned channel then you haven’t “used them” in your marketing campaigns:

1. In Marketing Cloud, navigate to Automation Studio.
2. Click the Activities tab, then click Create Activity.
3. Select Data Extract and click Next.
4. Add a name, external key value, and a file naming pattern. The file naming pattern value doesn’t actually affect anything, because all results go into a Contacts Without Channels data extension in the root folder of the account.

Remove contacts that are not right for your business

If you have been letting everyone into your Marketing Cloud org, then chances are some folks just shouldn’t be there (for example, competitors or spam submissions). As part of your contact strategy, it’s important to define the purpose of Marketing Cloud for your business. If it’s only to engage with leads and customers, then you could remove staff, partner, and competitor contacts.

Use SQL and Automation Studio to identify any contacts that do not meet your criteria (for example, if they do not have a “client” or “lead status” or if they have your business email address). Add these contacts into a non-sendable data extension and then delete them. 

Step 4. Implement the right processes to keep a clean Marketing Cloud contact database moving forward.

Below are some suggestions to help when creating your Marketing Cloud contact strategy so it’s an easy lift for your team and you avoid over-limit surprises.

Think about the ways Marketing Cloud fits into your overall business goals

Start with the right foundation. Evaluate the ways your marketing and business goals align with your team’s use of Marketing Cloud.

Who are your audience personas? And who are you connecting with through Marketing Cloud? Your list may include:

• Leads
• Customers
• Partners

Putting this on paper may help you prioritize your contact usage and determine the ‘nice to haves’ versus the ‘need to haves.’

Determine how you’ll segment your Marketing Cloud contacts

From there, create segments for each group of contacts:

• Those who are highly engaged and likely to purchase
• Those who may need a little more encouragement 
• Those at the start of their journey who need a lot more nurturing 

You can follow Cara Weese’s blog post Audience Segmentation Strategies for Salesforce Marketers for guidance on segmenting your contacts in Marketing Cloud.

Once you have your segments, create a Content Strategy for each. Then, you can develop messaging strategies for each of your audience segments.

Control how Marketing Cloud syncs contacts with Salesforce

This one is for Marketing Cloud Connect users. If you use Marketing Cloud Connect with Salesforce, create a ‘Sync to Marketing Cloud’ field in Salesforce.

• Develop a list of criteria for who should be in Marketing Cloud. For example, everyone should at least have an email address or mobile number, and everyone should be mailable and be opted into emails and/or texts.
• Use a Salesforce flow to check the Sync to Marketing Cloud field
• Select the field in Marketing Cloud as the sync criteria. 

You can also use a single unique identifier, such as Salesforce ID, to match Marketing Cloud records to Salesforce records. 

Other contact strategy tips

• Create contact count reports and build a process to ensure your team is monitoring them regularly. This can be as simple as setting a monthly calendar reminder to check the contact report.
• Build a process in Automation Studio via a script to remove contacts. This avoids manual deletion in the future.

Future-Proof Your Marketing Cloud Contact Strategy 

Remember, there’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to creating a Contact Strategy, it needs to be specific to your business and your goals. However, there are steps you can follow to create a future-proof plan that will ensure all your contacts serve a purpose in Marketing Cloud:

• Know your limits.
• Keep your data clean.
• Implement automation to manage your contacts.
• Review and reiterate continuously — your plan needs to grow as your business does!

Need help with creating a contact strategy for your marketing automation platform? Get in touch with the team at Sercante to get the ball rolling.

Original article: 4 Steps to Create a Marketing Cloud Contact Strategy

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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Marketing Cloud Engagement is a great tool and it offers a wide range of functionality and various capabilities. But, as with all software, there are always limitations that leave you wanting more. That’s where Marketing Cloud extensions become essential.

Thanks to the strong Salesforce ecosystem, the openness of the platform, and the love it receives from its customers, users, and enthusiasts, there are so many extensions, apps, and add-ons that can help enhance your Marketing Cloud experience.

Listed below are some of my favorites from my seven years of working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).

Top Marketing Cloud Extensions

SFMC Companion

This Chrome Extension is a fond favorite of mine and it is particularly useful for those “busy” Marketing Cloud accounts and for anyone who spends hours down rabbit holes trying to understand whether a particular Data Extension is still being used, or is even still relevant.

SFMC Companion offers a useful search functionality that allows you to look for any asset or object using a free-text search field. Furthermore, whilst on any SFMC asset or object, the ‘Inspect’ tool will show all components referencing or using that particular asset or object.

Thanks to SFMC Companion there is no longer a need to have several tabs open simultaneously just to understand whether a Data Extension can be deleted. 

Evergage Launcher

This might technically be cheating as it’s practically a necessity for implementing Marketing Cloud Personalization but I’ve always enjoyed using it.

This extension helps identify whether the Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP) SDK has been added to the website, so you no longer need to pester your IT team, and it is also where you can launch the Visual Editor. 

The Visual Editor is by far the easiest way to build your JS Sitemap, which is a huge part of any MCP implementation. Users also have the ability to see their work whilst on the page – this comes in handy when creating personalization campaigns, another feature accessible via the Evergage Launcher. 

Salesforce Inspector

Whilst this is not specifically related to SFMC, it is worth installing. Most SFMC accounts use Salesforce CRM data (it’s very rare not to have Marketing Cloud Connect).

Therefore, with such a reliance on Core Salesforce data, this extension can save you a lot of time. If you quickly need to check the API field names or the field type, or even example values, Salesforce Inspector is your tool.

Furthermore, Salesforce Inspector lets you easily import and export data which is incredibly useful if you need to prepare test data for UAT.

Top Marketing Cloud Apps

It’s worth mentioning that for the following section, I’ve loosely used the term “Apps” as it covers everything from App Exchange products to Mobile Apps.

Query Studio

Perhaps one of Marketing Cloud’s best-kept secrets, but Query Studio is an incredibly useful app to add to your SFMC instance. If you’ve ever wanted to test your SQL skills without having to create an automation, then this might be for you.

Query Studio allows you to quickly build queries in the Marketing Cloud without needing to create and configure an automation. Once you’re happy with your selection, Query Studio can use your query to create Data Extensions automatically.

Marketing Cloud Mobile App

Ever needed to quickly track email performance or to check that you definitely paused that Journey, but you don’t have access to your laptop? The Marketing Cloud Mobile App might just be able to help.

However, whilst it’s useful to have instant access to your SFMC account with just your phone, it is worth pointing out that there are some SFMC features that are not available in the mobile App, so don’t throw away the laptop just yet.

You can find the app in both the Google Play Store and Apple Store.

SiteCore

Technically two for the price of one as there is both a Web CMS app and a DAM app but they’ll both help bolster your SFMC instance with the world-leading CMS. Although, it is probably worth pointing out that these apps are far from cheap.

If, however, you’re lucky enough to have one of these licenses, you can drag-and-drop approved SiteCore assets directly from the SFMC Email Editor. Alternatively, you can send contact data and behavior back to your Sitecore Experience Database to close the loop on asset performance.

DESelect Segment

Full disclosure, I’ve never had the pleasure of working with this particular app but I had to include it as it solves, what I think, is one of the biggest issues SFMC clients face when procuring SFMC… segmentation. DESelect brings drag-and-drop segmentation to Marketing Cloud and reduces the need for marketing teams to have SQL knowledge.

Again, it’s worth pointing out that whilst there is a free version available you will have to pay to increase usage, users and features (i.e., saturation control and deduplication). However, depending on your team’s skillset this app could well be worth considering.

Bonus Content

If the technical skills aren’t your team’s forte and AMPscript is constantly causing you trouble, check out ampscript.io, a useful tool that helps validate AMPscript code and highlights any AMPscript that may result in potential syntax errors.

Get more details about AMPscript in this blog post from Kayla Border.

Top Marketing Cloud Add-Ons

SalesWings

Ever needed Lead Scoring in SFMC? Say hello to SalesWings! This add-on is easy to install and is a highly cost-effective way of plugging the SFMC Lead Scoring hole.

SalesWings tracks website activity and couples it with data from CRM before scoring and grading customers using a flexible scoring model. SalesWings data can be shared with Salesforce CRM as well as used in future SFMC segmentation.

Litmus

If you’re lucky enough to have both a Litmus and SFMC account, then you should definitely consider integrating the two. Yes, SFMC allows you to preview emails, but with an integrated Litmus account, you get so much more.

With an integrated account you can sync emails from the Litmus builder to SFMC or build in SFMC and test as you go. You can test dynamic content and individual personalization with the integrated email previews and, perhaps most impressively, share email performance with Litmus to create a single view of performance.

Use Marketing Cloud extensions to make the most of the platform

Going back to my previous comment, all software products have their limitations, but it is Salesforce’s ecosystem that has encouraged enthusiasts to build upon its offerings which, as shown above, has led to some innovative solutions that could give your SFMC instance that much-needed capability boost.

So if you’ve been contemplating if the grass is greener on the other side it could be worth exploring the depths of the Salesforce Community — chances are there is already a solution to your problem out there.

Original article: Must-Have Salesforce Marketing Cloud Extensions, Apps, and Add-Ons

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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As a marketing administrator within Salesforce, it is essential to understand your audiences and create a winning audience segmentation strategy. Without segmenting your audience, you will target the same group of people each time. That can lead to increasing opt-outs, spam, and a direct impact on your sending reputation. 

The goal of sending mass emails is to target the right audience so you provide value to the people who are likely to interact with your brand. And that’s exactly what audience segmentation accomplishes. 

Use these strategies to segment your audience so you can deliver the right marketing messages to the right groups of people every time — no matter if you’re a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement user.

Audience Segmentation Strategies for Marketers Who Use Salesforce

Whether you are a Marketing Cloud Engagement (A.K.A. SFMC) Administrator or an Account Engagement (Pardot) Administrator, fundamental principles apply across the board when it comes to audience segmentation. 

Below are tactics you can use within Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement. 

Who is actively engaging with your brand?

Use web tracking, social, and ads to learn how visitors interact with your brand. You can compile a group of individuals to target based on clicks, form completions, and pages visited. 

For example, if you have a visitor who clicks an ad on social media and is taken to your website, where they download the content that you promised them with your ad, you can make the assumption that the visitor is interested in that product.

What preferences do your customers share?

Let’s say you are sending an invitation for an upcoming webinar. Segment your target audience based on previous ad clicks, webinar attendees, or downloaded resources. By building an audience list based on shared preferences, you will see an increase in webinar registrations and attendance.  

For example, look at the specific campaigns you’ve launched in the past. Think about how you can categorize the products or services that were the main focus. Maybe you had a marketing campaign to drive awareness about a product that would result in a one-time and low-cost purchase. And you had another campaign advertising a product that requires a high-cost ongoing purchase. The people who engaged with the high-cost product but didn’t necessarily purchase the item may be good candidates for a segmentation list that includes people with bigger budgets to potentially spend.

Who are you actively targeting to attain as a new customer?

If you could create a map of ideal customers, what attributes would they share? Is it a specific set of companies? Perhaps, it’s a specific product or service you can provide them? 

Decide on those attributes and build your segmentation strategy and buyer personas. Target this audience and help sales close the deals on your ideal customer.

Which individuals have expressly subscribed to what topics?

Take advantage of your Email Preference Center. You can create targeted campaigns that run on an ongoing basis and continue to nurture your target audience based on their expressed interests. 

Ensure that your Email Preference Center offers a variety of targets, including product interests and types of communication. For example, the Sercante Email Preference Center allows email subscribers to sign up for only emails related to the services that interest them, like Salesforce consulting, integrations, or training.

Suppress individuals based on a subset of criteria

Counterintuitive to who you want to target with your email marketing, who do you want to ignore? Considering who you don’t want to receive a message from is as important as who should receive it. There will likely be a default suppression list, including competitors, employees, spam, etc., but you may also want to create specific one-off suppression lists too, such as email frequency or inactive customers.

Account Engagement (Pardot) Audience Segmentation Best Practices

Now that you have a few ideas on strategy, let’s talk about building segmentation within Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) . Let’s review the list creation options and the different ways to add Prospects. Keep in mind, there may be times when you use multiple list types for a single send.

Static Prospect Lists

Static lists are controlled by you, the administrator. You set the rules and criteria for who joins and comes off the list. There are several ways to add to a static list, both manual and automated. 

Imports

The most common way for building a static list is via prospect imports. When importing, you have the option to import via CRM ID or Email. If the list has existing prospects, you want to import via CRM ID. If they are brand new prospects, use the import via email option. 

Within the import wizard, you will be given the option to add to a list via an existing list or by creating a new list. Once complete, review the import report for the total number of prospects created or updated.

Table Actions

Adding a subset of prospects that already exist within Pardot can be done via Table Actions. 

To add a subset using Table Actions, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to your prospect table.
2. Set your filters, such as view and creation time frame.
3. Check the boxes of those you want to add to the static list. 
4. Use the table action at the bottom of the table and “Add to List.”

Public Lists

Public Lists can be created as dynamic or static, but most default to static and are controlled by the Email Preference Center. These lists are subscribed to directly by the Prospect. Individual Prospects are able to subscribe and unsubscribe as they see fit based on their preferences.

Completion Actions

The “Add to List” completion action exists on most Pardot assets, including forms, form handlers, files, custom redirects, emails, and page actions. Completion Actions include both standard and conditional and allow you to set specific parameters when adding to a list. 

Automation Rules

An automation rule is criteria-based. You can set multiple criteria pertaining to a Prospect by using “Match All” and/or “Match Any” statements. Based on this criteria, you then set an action, such as “Add to list,” which will populate a static list. 

The good thing about using an automation rule to populate your static lists is that they are retroactive, so they will collect past and present matches and take action on them.

Dynamic Prospect Lists

Similar to automation rules, dynamic lists are criteria-based. Unlike static lists, these are outside of your control. 

Once you set the criteria, the list will automatically add or remove prospects based on that criteria. These lists cannot be manually manipulated.

Campaign Membership

While there are several settings and criteria you can use to create dynamic lists, one of the most popular strategies is to build lists based upon campaign membership. This is especially beneficial when collaborating with sales teams. 

If your sales team is adding Leads and Contacts to Salesforce Campaigns, perhaps based on a recent trade show, you can build a dynamic list in Pardot based on that campaign membership.

Marketing Cloud Engagement Segmentation Best Practices

Lastly, let’s look at how to best create segments in Marketing Cloud Engagement. Subscriber data can come from many different sources into Marketing Cloud and can be stored in two ways: 

1. Lists
2. Data Extensions

Lists

A List is a collection of your subscribers. Lists are best used when you have a small dataset (500,000 or fewer subscribers) that you need to manage quickly and efficiently. 

Lists share a format with your All Subscribers table and typically include Email Address, Subscriber Key, Status and any profile attributes you have created in your account. 

Creating a List

To create a List:

1. Navigate to the Subscribers tab within Email Studio.
2. Within the My Lists folder structure, you can click ‘Create’ at the top right of the page to create a new List, assigning a name, external key, description, and placing the list in any folder you have created. 

Once the list is created, it can be populated by manual or automated import.

Groups

A Group is a filtered list. Creating a Group allows you to build a subset of subscribers from a list based on rules or by splitting list subscribers by count or percentage of the total list being filtered.  

The rules used to build a Group can be saved as a Data Filter, which can be used to automate the process to refresh membership in your group.

Creating a Group

To create a Group:

1. Navigate to the Subscribers tab within Email Studio. 
2. Within the My Groups folder structure, you can click ‘Create’ at the top right of the page to create a new group. 
3. Select whether the group you are creating is a Filtered Group or Random Group, then select the source List. 

• When creating a Filtered Group, drag any attributes or measures from the left side panel to the canvas and define the filter criteria. 
• To create a Random Group, after selecting Random Group and your source list, click ‘Add Group’ to add as many random splits as needed to get the desired number of random segments.

4. Once your filters or splits have been properly configured, click ‘Save & Build’ to create and populate your groups. 

Once created, unless automated using a data filter, Groups need to be refreshed manually to be up-to-date.

Data Extensions

Data Extensions are more complex than lists and offer greater flexibility in managing contact data. While lists can only contain Subscriber information, Data Extensions are more flexible and can contain relational data. 

Data Extensions data can be filtered in a similar fashion to Groups, and can also be combined with or filtered by data in other Data Extensions using SQL activities in Automation Studio.

Creating a Data Extension

Follow these steps to create a data extension:

1. On the Subscribers tab in Email Studio, select a folder within the Data Extensions folder and then click ‘Create’ at the top right. 
2. Here, you select which type of Data Extension you want to create. Standard Data Extensions require you to define the fields of your Data Extension. 
3. After defining the name and data retention policy for your data extension, you must define the fields in the table, choosing from several data types, including Text, Date, Number, and Boolean. You can also set the length and default value for each field. 
4. Once you have defined all fields needed in your Data Extension, click ‘Create’ to finalize your Data Extension. 

This Data Extension can now be populated by manual or automated file imports, API calls, SQL Query activities, or AMPScript.

Filtered and Random data extensions function in much the same way as Groups. Filtered Data Extensions require selection of a source Data Extension, then definition of any filter criteria. Random Data Extensions will produce a number of data extensions of randomly split rows based on the number of splits defined in the setup.

Go forth and segment your audience like a Salesforce marketing pro

Marketing Cloud offers multiple routes to implementing segmentation and audience targeting, regardless of platform. By taking into consideration your audience personas, incorporating key email marketing segmentation strategies, and applying the correct segmentation tools, you will be able to spread brand awareness swiftly.
Have any cool stories of marketing segmentation success? Tell us in the comments. Or reach out to the team at Sercante to get help with your audience segmentation strategy.

Original article: Audience Segmentation Strategies for Salesforce Marketers

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Audience Segmentation Strategies for Salesforce Marketers appeared first on The Spot.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio) is a fantastic platform to add to your marketing toolset. But starting a Marketing Cloud implementation can be daunting, especially when it is as complex as Personalization. 

The following sections of this article will detail the implementation approaches available, provide indicative timelines and outline example use cases. However, if  you’re wanting to understand a little more about what the tool can offer, you can check out my last article – Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio): A Beginner’s Guide. 

SFMC Personalization Implementation Methods

With any platform like SFMC Personalization, which promises Real-Time Personalization and AI Recommendations, it’s easy to get carried away with what it can offer. However, the key takeaway from this article is that you should focus on what you and your company can achieve, which is particularly important given the tricky interdependencies you’ll face when implementing Personalization.

In a nutshell, the approaches vary from minimal viable product (MVP), where the goal is to implement a baseline as quickly as possible and then build upon it in future iterations, all the way to future-state implementation (FSI), where you depend on use cases to drive large-scale transformation. There is also a halfway house approach of implementing an As-Is, for those who may sit between the two methods above. 

Marketing Cloud Personalization Discovery Questions

Thankfully, understanding which method may suit your needs can be easily identified by answering a few simple discovery questions — as laid out by Salesforce in their Implementation of Marketing Cloud Personalization Trailhead. 

These helpful questions allow you to ascertain which method will best suit your needs, including: 

• How often does your company change its website? 
• Do you have easy access to developer resources? 
• Are you migrating from an existing tool? 
• Do other platforms need to be integrated? 

What you’ll find is: 

1. MVP is great for companies making constant changes to their website, have easy access to developers, and are not migrating from an existing personalization platform. In other words, it’s a viable method for those who are perhaps new to real-time personalization. 
2. As-Is is great for companies that don’t have immediate access to developers, are looking to migrate from one tool to another and have a few live personalization campaigns ready to migrate. 
3. FSI is the preferred option for companies that less frequently change their website, have limited access to developers, are looking to integrate Personalization with multiple clouds (Marketing, Sales or Service), and have external data sources that need to be integrated. 

Marketing Cloud Personalization Implementation Roadmap

Obviously, the implementation roadmap will vary depending on the scope of your project and the implementation approach you’ve decided to use. However, there are some key milestones that will occur in all implementations, as shown in the diagram below, which is based on a typical net-new Personalization implementation with 2-3 use cases. 

Roadmap Diagram

From the diagram above, the two key milestones I’d pay the most attention to are the Use Case Discovery and the Blueprint Development. 

Regardless of the implementation method, defining a handful of clear and precise use cases before beginning the build is key to ensuring success. As mentioned, it’s easy to get caught up with the wide range of functionality Personalization offers. That’s why understanding the desired outcome is the most effective way of running a successful implementation and ensuring your company gets the most out of the platform. I’ll go on to share a few examples of good use cases later on. 

The blueprint document goes hand-in-hand with the sitemap — which is debatably the most crucial part of Personalization. The blueprint helps define which page categories exist, which triggers exist on those pages, what data can be scraped and where it can be scraped from (i.e. DOM vs Data-Layer) for each visit. 

Thankfully, to aid with your implementation, the Salesforce Partner Portal can provide a useful template that helps capture all of the information necessary to create your sitemap, and for implementing Personalization. The template covers everything from page types and content zones to events and attributes, and most importantly, where they can be found on your website to make it easier for the developers building the sitemap.  

Use Cases

Without sounding like a broken record, use cases can make or break a Personalization implementation. During my first implementation of Personalization, the goal I was given was to deliver Real-Time Web Personalization aka Personalization. 

There were no clear KPIs, the website was static and there was nothing to encourage returning visitors, and it made any experiences based on previous visits practically void. The end result was that our very expensive personalization engine sat on the shelf until we revisited the drawing board. 

Defining Your Use Cases

In order to avoid making my mistake, don’t be afraid to get granular with your use cases. Once established, it’s easier to build on top of existing use cases with future iterations. So really think about the following aspects when defining your use cases:

1. Objective – What is it you’re trying to achieve with your personalization? Is it to increase the value per order? Or perhaps to encourage more users to download your app?
2. KPIs – How are you going to measure the success of your personalization? Is it based on the number of successful completions? What percentage increase in order value would be considered successful? 
3. Approach – Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, you then need to consider the approach. Is it based on visitors from a particular source (Rule-Based) or is it based on trending products (Recipe-based)?
4. Measurement Approach – There’s no point in creating a personalized experience if there is no control to measure success. Consider what an adequate sample might look like and how long the campaign might last. 
5. Channels – Is this going to be a web- or mobile-led campaign? 

There’s no right or wrong answer for use cases and it completely depends on your company’s objectives. But for a typical net-new implementation, 2-3 concise use cases similar to the ones below is a good starting point. 

Use Case Definition Example

Once you’ve defined your use cases, keep referring back to them throughout the implementation and when developing your blueprint. The use cases will help keep your implementation focused on the end goal, and help your developers build a sitemap that will be fit for purpose. 

Planning is Key to a Successful SFMC Personalization Implementation

As you’ve probably gathered by now, successfully implementing Personalization is closely linked with planning. Defining clear and concise use cases as well as developing an accurate and detailed blueprint, both of which are milestones during the Discovery Phase, are imperative for a smooth implementation. This is true regardless of your chosen implementation method.  

As final food for thought, don’t forget to consider your implementation team. Being the tool that it is, Personalization implementations often begin in the marketing department as it’s the marketers who want real-time personalization capabilities. However, even large marketing teams with wide-ranging skill sets will not be able to deliver Personalization alone. 

The Personalization Sitemap will require JavaScript developers. Building ETLs will require support from data architects. CRM integration will require CRM administrators. And creating experiences, although there are ready-made templates, may also require HTML and CSS experts. So, consider including wider teams early on in the implementation. 

Not only will this help to ensure that those resources are available to support and understand the ask, but it may also help to define use cases that are more relevant and that are also technically viable.

Need help filling the gaps on your team through your Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization implementation? Reach out to team Sercante to get their experts on the case.

Original article: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio): Implementation Methods

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio): Implementation Methods appeared first on The Spot.

Lead nurturing programs play a critical role in the sales process. That’s because nurtured leads have a shorter sales cycle and generate more sales-ready leads at a significantly lower cost. Luckily for you, the Marketing Cloud platform has extensive capabilities to create a sophisticated, multi-channel, automated lead nurturing program.

Here are five tips to take your lead nurture program to the next level utilizing the best of breed marketing automation capabilities in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Tip 1: Put lead scoring and grading to work

With Marketing Cloud, you have lots of options for lead scoring. 

This is especially true with the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) platform. The lead scoring and grading that comes out of the box has endless capability and flexibility.

Check out this blog post for a deeper dive into lead scoring and grading in Pardot.

But we’re going to focus on lead scoring and grading in Marketing Cloud Engagement here.

Marketing Cloud Engagement (SFMC) Users

If your Marketing Cloud setup doesn’t use the Account Engagement platform, there are other third-party resources that can provide both lead and account ranking scoring.

Third-party lead scoring and grading tools

SalesWings provides an easy to install, cost effective solution to deliver real-time lead scoring based on web activity and other factors. Once installed you can visually see a predictive score of Hot, Warm or Cold based on a wide variety of criteria right in the platform.

And don’t forget to consider account-based ranking as well. Utilizing platforms like Demandbase you can take the lead ranking to the next level by understanding how that account or company converts. For example, Demandbase can provide key stats like number of engaged people, sales touches all bubbling up to a tier ranking to help add additional color to your ranking system.

Tip 2: Use CASE function to simplify rankings

This one is for Marketing Cloud Engagement (SFMC) users. If you have multiple scoring variables like a lead and account ranking, utilize the CASE SQL function in your automation to consolidate rankings into one simple rank.

The multiple scoring variables could be generated from third-party platforms like Saleswings/Demandbase or internally through a custom lead/account scoring process.

Take this example below on how you could approach taking the two rankings and determining one combined ranking of Hot, Warm and Cold.

To execute this in Marketing Cloud Engagement Automation Studio, use the CASE function to do the IF/THEN (or in this case WHEN/THEN) to populate the “Lead_Ranking_Simple” field in the Journey data extension with the combined ranking.

If you are not comfortable with SQL check out the DESelect application where you can quickly and easily create this custom relationship without having any SQL knowledge.

 Source: DeSelect

Tip 3: Focus on essential lead nurture journey functionality

There are three essential activities or areas of functionality in Journey Builder: 

1. The entry event
2. The decision split
3. Object activity

Focusing on these areas will have the greatest impact on the overall performance and scalability of your automation solutions. 

The Entry Event

Here’s a typical lead nurture journey in Marketing Cloud Engagement where you can see these activities in action. Let’s take a closer look at the most important of these three activities, the Entry Event.

The Entry Event functionality determines the list of contacts  who will enter the Journey. It’s the start of any journey and determines the capability of all functions that follow. A poorly set up entry event will limit functionality and cause problems down the road so spend your time to ensure a proper set up.

Let’s take a look at the two most populated entry event types: 

1. Data Extension
2. Salesforce Data Entry Event

Data Extension Entry Event is the most commonly used version. In this variation typically a SQL query based automation is running behind the scenes pulling in leads from synchronized data extensions based on a variety of filter criteria across multiple objects.

Advantages

The advantage to using a Data Extension Entry Event is the flexibility and complete customization of the subscriber segments to be pulled into the journey.

Disadvantages

The disadvantage is you are limited by the minimum 15-minute sync timeframe of records from the Salesforce CRM environment. So the fastest you’ll be able to enter in a subscriber based on Salesforce data is once every 15 minutes. Another small disadvantage is this entry event requires your team to be comfortable with SQL and it creates a separate marketing automation asset to support.

Another popular option is the Salesforce Data Entry Event which pulls in any object that has a contact, lead or user to be used as a subscriber for sending.

Advantages

Advantages of this entry event is that it’s pretty close to real time (1-2 minutes). As soon as a lead is created or updated based on the criteria designated, the subscriber will enter the journey. This option is also easier to support as it eliminates the need for the automation solution working in the background.

Disadvantages to this event is that you are limited by the filter settings in this entry event setup. If your filtering criteria involves multiple fields across multiple objects a SQL based automation fed entry event might be the better path.

Tip 4: One-to-one content personalization

Here are three ways to deliver a 1-to-1 customization of your journey content utilizing Content Builder functionality and simple ampscript and HTML coding.

First method – Personalization of subscriber values

In each email send you can populate an unlimited number of data about your subscriber in data extensions. To leverage those data points in the content simply add %% before and after the data point. 

For example to render the first name in the subject line:

Enter in %%FirstName%% right in the subject line block:

Or if you’re not sure what the exact data point is called or the exact format you can use click on the Personalization Icon in your editor toolbar.

Second Method – Dynamic Content Blocks

Utilize out-of-the-box functionality in Content Builder to vary entire sections of content in an email using Dynamic Content Blocks.

In this example, the focus of the email content changes based on the product selected by each lead indicated on the lead record. 

The end user will see custom content in the email:

In Content Builder, first create separate content blocks for each product featuring a photo and copy points. Then drag over a dynamic content block onto your email canvas.

And follow the steps to (1) select a default content to appear and (2) content variations based on the data coming from the lead object. In this case, if the “Product__c” field contains “401K” or “Credit Card Processing,” then the content will change.

Third Method – Custom links

Utilize ampscript and HTML to create custom links that add value to the recipient.

In this example, we’re creating a hot lead notification that will be sent to the owner of the lead. We’re populating this email with all the relevant data points in the data extension using the %% functionality mentioned above. We also have custom links so that when the lead owner clicks on the link it will take them right into the Salesforce CRM environment.

To execute this type of functionality utilize ampscript inside of the email content in the following approach:

1. Set your Lead ID variable based on the field value in the send data extension.
2. Use the CONCAT function to pull in the remaining part of the standard Salesforce lead record url.
3. The first part of the Lead url.
4. The variable set above.
5. The last part of the Lead url.

And then to make the link clickable utilize a standard A Tag in HTML combined with the RedirectTo ampscript function.

Tip 5: Notify sales of hot leads in multiple ways ways

Marketing Cloud Engagement has a variety of options to creatively notify sales right in the Salesforce CRM platform through tasks and or sending highly personalized “Hot Lead” emails as mentioned above. 

Let’s walk through utilizing the Object Activity in Journey Builder to either create or update records in the Salesforce CRM environment, in this example creating custom tasks.

Select the Object Activity and select the task

(1) Select “Task” in the search and (2) select Task. You’ll want to “Create New” task.

Then (1) Fill in all required fields and utilize the data binding functionality to personalized fields where necessary.

For a higher complexity of field personalization (2) utilize what is called “data binding” in the Journey Builder UI to personalize each task and pull in the lead rank score.

To grab these “data bindings” for any variable to personalize follow these steps:

Step 1. Create your subject line defining the variables that will be brought in to personalize: “Attention!, you have a HOT Rank lead for Company: XYZ”

Step 2. In a separate document like in Notepad, create a template for the subject line identifying each of the variables needed to populate in your variable code.

Step 3. Select the Subject field in the Task.

Step 4. To create the handle bar “data binding” code for the lead score variable (1) Select the Journey Data dropdown, (2) Select the variable and (3) the handle bar code will appear in the subject.

Step 5. Copy the code and paste it into your notepad. Repeat the process for the Company and any other variable to be personalized. 

The syntax in the Notepad should look like the following:

Step 6. Copy this line of code and paste it into the Subject Line space and Save.

When you generate a task it should look something like this:

Step 7. Paste this syntax into the Subject field to populate a custom 1-to-1 subject that will help the Sales team cut through the clutter in all their tasks. 

Here’s an example of documentation on “data bindings” in this blog article from Rafal Wolsztyniak titled SFMC Tips and Tricks Challenge. You’ll need to scroll through the article as it covers a variety of tips. 

Start Nurturing Leads Like a Salesforce Pro

Hopefully this article has given you a few tips on how to take your lead nurture programs to the next level in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement platform.

There are limitless possibilities in this platform, and we’re all eager to learn and improve our programs. Please share any discoveries you find as you explore ways to build successful automation solutions for nurturing sales leads.

Original article: 5 Next-Level Tips for Your Lead Nurture Program

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post 5 Next-Level Tips for Your Lead Nurture Program appeared first on The Spot.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard of Interaction Studio — or Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (SFMCP) as it is now called. But if you’re similar to me, none of the buzzwords that are thrown around help to paint the picture of what SFMCP actually does.  

In this blog, I’ll be demystifying this intriguing product and detailing the features and functionality, and where possible I’ll be calling out any “gotchas” that have personally caught me out, so you can avoid them. 

What is SFMC Personalization (Interaction Studio)? 

So, let me start with the easy part… What is it? Simply put, SFMCP is a real-time personalization engine. By integrating it with your website(s) and mobile app(s), you can track visitors as they interact with your digital content. 

Every page, article and product they view, click on, rate or add to cart is providing SFMCP with the data it requires to build a unique customer profile for every visitor — whether they are known or unknown. 

In other words, it allows you to dig deeper and truly understand what keeps bringing each visitor back, and when coupled with data provided by a CRM or data warehouse it is capable of delivering a hyper-personalized experience at scale and in real-time.

What does SFMCP do? 

Although accessed via Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), that’s where the similarities between SFMC and SFMCP come to an end. Having been procured rather than built by Salesforce, it has a very different look and feel. 

SFMCP is broken down into the following:

• Reports
• Channels & Campaigns
• Audiences
• Catalog
• Machine Learning
• Gears
• Settings

Reports

By default, all users land on the Dashboard (as shown below) which provides a high-level view of revenue, visits, orders, average order value per visit and conversion rate. It also provides details on how your campaigns are performing through metrics such as impressions, new vs. returning visitors and item actions (purchased, viewed, added to cart, etc.), all of which are filterable by date ranges. 

However, to dig a little deeper, SFMCP also provides a range of Activity, Results and Visit reports that can help understand how your personalization efforts drive success.

Activity Reports

• Recent Visits: Stream view of all the visits occurring over the defined period
• Event Stream: Stream view of all the events occurring over the defined period
• Cohorts: Groupings of users by predefined criteria such as first time visiting, first time performing an action or specific statuses 
• Actions: Linear graph showing key Sitemap actions specified that can be filtered by segments or keywords 
• Modules: Volume of visitor actions, views/clicks that have been grouped together as Modules 
• Paths: A page-by-page view of the paths visitors take when interacting with your site  
• Funnels: Using Modules, create an optimal funnel for your visitors and monitor the completion of the desired sequential actions
• Day / Time: View visits, visit length, revenue, revenue per visit and bounces by day of the week and time of day 

Results Reports

• Revenue: User, order and revenue statistics in a grid matrix and filterable by platform, engagement, visit status, and more
• Purchase Funnel: Using segments, compare how your audiences perform against all visitors when viewing products, adding to a cart and purchasing
• Goal Completions: Side-by-side comparison of your configured goals and filterable by device type, browser type, user state and more
• Goal Comparisons: A view of the goal completions and completion rate over time for created goals  

Visitor Reports

• Behavior: Shows visits, engagement, logins and purchases over a given time frame
• Technology: Includes information such as browser, device, and operating system commonly used by visitors
• Referring Sources: Useful report to show how visitors access your site as well as the referring sources driving the most revenue

Channels & Campaigns

In short, it’s the marketer’s space to build campaigns and whilst it is often the most talked about, web is not the only channel SFMCP can support, it also offers mobile and email, as well as triggered and JS server-side campaigns. 

Using web campaigns, SFMCP users can create real-time personalization experiences aimed at targeting visitors who meet certain criteria. Server-side campaigns give users the ability to get more creative but will require a greater skill set. 

Triggered campaigns and email campaigns tie into the wider SFMC platform if you’re lucky enough to have it, by triggering Journeys or by providing Open-Time Content to include in your SFMC sends. 

Through mobile campaigns, SFMCP can incorporate mobile as an additional channel by including a personalised experience on both Android and iOS. 

And finally, a Third-Party section allows SFMCP to bring in data from systems such as Marketo, Act-On, LinkedIn Ads, etc. and even create custom products when and where required. 

Audiences

As it sounds, Audiences are where users create visitor segments. Segments are a large part of SFMCP and go beyond simple segmentation. In SFMCP, segments can be used to display AI recommendations to a selection of visitors based on your pre-defined criteria.  But they can also be used to create goals by setting the actions you wish visitors to perform (i.e., order a minimum of $xxx). 

The number of visitors who meet the criteria directly relates to your goal’s success. Furthermore, any segment created can also be added as a filter to ensure certain visitors are excluded from recommendations and personalised content (i.e., exclude visitors from the US for UK-specific campaigns). 

The audience section is also where you can see all users in your SFMCP account, whether imported via feeds or tracked through the SFMCP Sitemap. However, it is important to note, that visitors captured via the sitemap will be anonymous (created using a randomly generated profile ID) until they perform an action (i.e., create account, checkout, etc.) that provides SFMCP with a chosen identifier such as an email address or username. 

Catalog 

The Catalog section is where you begin to add business context and it will require plenty of planning. SFMCP offers standard catalog objects such as Products, Categories, Blogs and Articles but also provides the opportunity to create custom objects to support your particular business needs. The objects can then, where required, be related to each other with varying cardinalities that will provide SFMCP with the information needed to understand visitor interactions.  

For example, when a visitor clicks on a specific pair of trainers it will increase that visitor’s affinity towards that particular product, but it will also create an affinity to the categories of running and shoes. In turn, products in the same categories can then be suggested through recommendations and promotions.

Note: An important callout here is to distinguish which method will be used for consuming data: ETL or Sitemap. Passing the same attributes, such as stock, through both methods can cause issues in SFMCP. I’d recommend leveraging the ETLs where possible and using SFMCP’s Sitemap for passing IDs and activity types to avoid data discrepancy issues. 

Machine Learning

If you’re like me, this is where the fun begins. The machine learning section is all about recipes and decisions. The Machine Learning piece can be broken down into two main capabilities, Recipes and Decisions,

Recipes 

As the name suggests, by mixing ingredients SFMCP can create unique content or product recommendations for each customer. 

Ingredients make up the basis of Einstein’s machine learning-powered algorithms. Elements such as co-browse, trending or smart bundle (to name a few)  will show recommendations based on what other visitors have browsed, what’s currently trending or what products other visitors have bought together respectively. It’s important to note that these recipes can even include offline activity that is imported via ETL feeds. 

Decisions

Rather than manually creating and testing the recipes yourself, why not let AI do the hard work for you? This is where decisions come into play. Decisions use visitor data to predict and display the right promotion based on the chance of completion and the highest business value. 

Einstein automates the process of deciding who should see what content by evaluating each promotion viewed, whether or not the session is a returning visitor, device type and much more.

Gears and Feeds

Gears are extensions for the platform that can be added based on your specific needs, although most will be enabled by default. The most important gear, in my opinion, is the Flicker Defender which, when implemented correctly, stops SFMCP sitemap from flickering on page load. 

Feeds, on the other hand, are SFMCP’s Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). SFMCP has a specific feed and format for each standard object, custom object and related catalog object which you can use to ingest data to support your catalog setup. Sharing data with SFMCP provides the information it needs to turn anonymous clicks into insightful data that can be used to make informed decisions that ultimately impact the bottom line and revenue. 

Further Considerations Before Jumping Into SFMC Personalization

Before jumping straight in and procuring SFMCP, it’s worth evaluating the following considerations: 

1. Tech Gap & Skillset – Make no mistake, this is a complex tool and deserves respect. Whilst a lot of features can be handled via point and click, to get the most out of the tool it can require the support of Web Developers and Data Scientists. It’s also worth pointing out that the Sitemap, which is a large proportion of the tool, is all JavaScript and may require ongoing support. 

2. Personalization Requirements – As its name suggests, SFMCP is well suited to real-time personalization. But if your requirements are undemanding and single channel, it might be worth considering alternatives such as SFMC Web and Email Recommendations. However, if your requirements are omnichannel in nature and supported by a complex catalogue of data, SFMCP might be the right tool for you. 

Once you’ve made the decision to procure SFMCP, the final consideration you should take into account is the implementation approach itself — you should begin reviewing your short-term gains vs long-term strategic objectives. 

Keep it Going

If you’d like to learn more about Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio), check out this blog post. Or reach out to the team at Sercante if you need help.

Original article: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio): A Beginner’s Guide

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio): A Beginner’s Guide appeared first on The Spot.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement has so many complex ways to create personalized experiences for the audiences the platform touches.

And if you haven’t gathered from the title, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio… RIP Interaction Studio) is a great way to level up your personalization game. This is for the pros who have long since mastered things like personalization strings, dynamic content, and even AMPscript in the platform.

However, as with many Marketing Cloud features, Marketing Cloud Personalization offers so much flexibility and configurability that it can be challenging to know just where and how to begin.  

Three Marketing Cloud Personalization Use Case Examples

Perhaps the best way to get started is to understand some industry-specific use cases for when Marketing Cloud Personalization web and mobile personalized campaigns can be strategically leveraged to create a customized, unified, and value-driven experience for your customers at every stage of the life cycle. 

Use Case #1: Serve targeted educational content for prospective customers in the finance industry

A financial advisory company knows that potential new customers frequently conduct more research in the earliest stages of the buying lifecycle. Fortunately, the company maintains a finance blog on their site that features thought leadership from their advisors for just this very purpose.

When a new customer first comes to the company’s site, they may see an assortment of featured blog posts on the home page. Some posts on mutual fund investments capture their interest, so they click into them. They may then use the navigation menu or site search to investigate further.

Tracking content engagement

Meanwhile, Marketing Cloud Personalization tracks their site activity, such as which blog posts and product pages they spend more time on. They use this information to build a  profile of customer preferences and affinities. Then, surface content in which the customer has indicated an interest using this customer profile information.

Showing profile-specific content

The next time the customer navigates to the home page or the blog landing page, they see featured posts on best tips to diversify their funds and an explainer of what investment objectives, risks, charges, and expenses they should be aware of when selecting a mutual fund. The customer clicks into the posts and successfully becomes further engaged with the company’s website.

Use Case #2: Enrich a student’s higher education on-campus experience.

With tuition more expensive than ever and the pool of college students ever shrinking, a regional college knows that one of the strongest differentiators they can offer their students is a rewarding college experience that isn’t just confined to the classroom.

Showing targeted reminders in the college online portal

When a student subscribes to a college campus group’s mailing list, Marketing Cloud Personalization tracks that activity. The tool displays reminders of upcoming meetings hosted by that group on the home page of the student’s online portal account. 

And, Marketing Cloud Personalization highlights a promotion for an upcoming lecture hosted by a notable product designer when the student browses the college’s events calendar. That’s because the system knows the student once took an elective on product design.

After class, the student stops by a local art gallery that features art from fellow college students. Marketing Cloud Personalization notes the geolocation and time spent within the store. It uses that information to display a 15% discount code for the gallery in an infobar banner ad within the college’s mobile app. The student also sees an ad for the store when they get the monthly campus newsletter they subscribed to.

Enhancing the overall student experience

By being served content that is tailored to the student’s own personal and educational interests, the student is more connected with their campus and, as a result, their satisfaction with their college experience increases.

Use Case #3: Onboard new app users with well-timed contextual tips and cross-sell to existing customers in the same place, at the same time.

New users logging into a company’s app for the first time may need initial guidance on how to use the app to encourage adoption. But there also needs to be a balance between providing timely instruction and not being obstructive. 

Marketing Cloud Personalization first designates which users are logging into their accounts for the first time and those who have already been using the app extensively into two audiences.

Automate first-time user adoption

When a first-time user logs onto the app, they receive a pop-up window offering them a brief tutorial on how to use the app, with the option to entirely skip or end the tutorial at any time. The tutorial displays step-by-step contextual pop-ups at different places on the screen to demonstrate the app’s functionality and features. The tutorial finishes by pointing out to the user where they can access the support center for future assistance. If the user skipped the tutorial or exited out of it early, Marketing Cloud Personalization can note this.

Ensure continued use over time

Marketing Cloud Personalization can then monitor these new users for a defined period of time to evaluate whether they are using the app, and place them on a journey within Journey Builder to issue reminders and feature highlights. Once a user becomes comfortable in using the app, they can be moved from the first-time user audience and into other segments for further targeted marketing.

Create deeper connections over time

For the audience of existing users, Marketing Cloud Personalization can display inline banner promotions for other products they may be interested in or useful tips on how to use the product that they bought based on their actions, how long they’ve been a customer, and their personal attributes, all within the app, on the company website, and in marketing emails and text messages.

While targeting two different audience segments, Marketing Cloud Personalization can display content not only based on customer activity, but also at strategic moments and through different statuses, such as whether they’re a first-time user or not. Customers, in turn, not only receive personalized content, but content that is served to them at the time they would benefit from it the most.

Three Things to Prepare Before SFMC Personalization Implementation

The above examples are hardly an exhaustive list of all the ways in which companies can engage potential, new, and existing customers with Marketing Cloud Personalization. But no matter the industry or use case, there are also three things you should do to set your company up for success long before you implement.

Step 1. Align Internal Teams

You need to align your internal teams. The lift for setting up Marketing Cloud Personalization is quite a bit heavier than many of Marketing Cloud’s other tools. Depending on your business needs, the tool will require more resources of varying specializations. 

• You’ll need web development resources for deploying the necessary code to your website and apps (and the more frequently your site changes, the greater the demand on your web development team). 
• Your marketing and graphic design teams will need to create all the variations of content and assets that could be displayed to your audiences. 
• It is also highly recommended that you invest in UX Design resources as well, because…
  

Step 2. Know Your Audience

You need to know your customers. Not only should you identify all potential customer personas, but you should also map the journeys each persona could have across your website or app, whether it’s a first-time visitor browsing your site or a long-standing customer who wants to change the billing information associated with their account. 

Identify customer interaction points

This process involves identifying every point of customer interaction, including areas where your customer is likely to experience frustration and reward (there’s a reason, after all, that Marketing Cloud Personalization is called a Real-Time Interaction Management platform). 

A good UX designer will conduct research and testing to accurately paint a full picture of how customers use your website or app. From there, you will be able to create a strategy for how Marketing Cloud Personalization will display the right messages in the right ways at the right time to deliver the highest value for your customers.

Step 3. Create Content Beforehand

You must frontload your content. Of course, with all that pre-planning and journey mapping means you’ll actually have to create the content you’ll be using for every personalized path your strategy involves. 

Determine content categories and tags

You will also need to make sure your content is properly categorized and tagged for the audiences and customer interaction points with which they’ll be associated, and this is even more crucial. 

For example, you want to feature other recommended products (let’s say, a moisture-resistant jacket, water bottle, and thermal socks) that are related to the product that a customer is viewing on your website (hiking boots). 

You’ll need to decide on the content tags that determine what other related products to display (hiking, moisture resistance, outdoors) and for what type of audience segment attributes (new and returning customers, hikers, outdoor enthusiasts, beginner to intermediate experience, ages 20-45).

Completing Marketing Cloud Personalization implementation pre-work is totally worth it

While the amount of pre-work required to leverage Marketing Cloud Personalization can seem daunting all on its own, it’s important to remember that a hyper-personalization system requires a hyper-detailed amount of content to feed into it. 

And all that work is likely to pay significant dividends in the end. According to a McKinsey & Company report, over three-quarters of consumers report that personalized communications are a key factor in brand considerations and increase the likelihood of repurchase. 

When implemented (and maintained) correctly with the right personalization strategy in place, Marketing Cloud Personalization can give your company a powerful tool to sharpen your communications and truly engage with the full breadth and depth of your customers.

Ready to learn more about Marketing Cloud?

Sign up for our six-week virtual Salesforce Marketing Cloud Admin Bootcamp.

More Resources on Marketing Cloud Personalization:

• Discover Interaction Studio Trail on Trailhead
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio – Getting Started – MCLearningCamp (YouTube)
• Salesforce Interaction Studio Knowledge base

Original article: Marketing Cloud Personalization: 3 Use Cases and Implementation Tips

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Marketing Cloud Personalization: 3 Use Cases and Implementation Tips appeared first on The Spot.

It’s a Salesforce Marketing Cloud basics 3-parter, y’all. In this three-part series, we’ll uncover the fundamental skills you should master when you’re getting started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (SFMC). 

You’ll learn how SFMC allows you to easily connect with potential customers, nurture their interests, and convert that interest into sales. In Part 1, we review all the ways SFMC can help you connect with potential customers.

Connect with Potential Customers via SFMC

The word ‘connect’ can mean different things to different people. There’s connecting from a business lens perspective, which is where we’re making connections with prospects on different channels as well as connecting those various channels for a customer across a user journey, like Journey Builder from a platform perspective.

Connecting From a Business Lens

When we think about it from a pure business lens, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement allows us to connect with existing customers but can also help make a connection with prospective customers and leads via form capture. 

Lead acquisition and generation is a top initiative for all marketers and a critical component of the Engagement platform. Over the years, the lead capture functionality has really evolved and is now pretty easy for a non-technical person to implement. 

There are two main features of SFMC for lead acquisition and capture: 

• Lead Capture
• Smart Capture

Lead Capture

Lead Capture is actually an app, available on the Salesforce AppExchange (click here to view the listing).

The app is free to use. It enables you to collect leads from Facebook and Google and have them enter directly into Engagement. 

This lead capture app and functionality allows you to collect lead data from your paid ads, which is awesome by itself. But more importantly, you’re able to capture first-party data, which is the future when a cookieless world finally arrives. This first-party data in turn can be used to help nurture your prospects and drive transactions. 

Lastly, highlights of the app include: 

• Capture is real-time via a secure connection (not like we would expect anything less)
• Leads captured can get added directly to a lead nurture journey and therefore can create more targeted intent-based content
• You can do both via a simple and intuitive user flow

Smart Capture

Smart Capture is another tool, this one native in Email Studio, that you can use to create lead capture forms that you can then include on your landing pages. 

When a lead completes the form on the landing page and clicks the Submit button, the Smart Capture form automatically adds the information to a subscriber list, data extension, or outside data source such as an integrated CRM system like Sales Cloud. Smart Capture forms are super easy to use within a much better UI, unlike the previous form functionality.

 Some common use cases for Smart Capture forms include:

• Generate leads from people who sign up to receive a newsletter or attend an event.
• Create tasks in Salesforce to follow up with leads.
• Send automated emails to people who complete the form.
• Send email messages through Salesforce CRM.

Connecting from a Channel Perspective

When we think of the concept of Connect from a channel perspective, Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to connect with prospects and customers through a variety of channels. 

These channels include: 

• Email
• SMS Messaging
• Paid advertising
• Direct mail

And while with Engagement you have access to all these channels, email still remains the workhorse. 

Email

I’d like to focus on an underutilized feature of Email Studio that can help you better connect with prospects and clients: Interactive Email Content Block as well as Mobile Studio.

Interactive Email Content Block

If you are a long-time user of the system or industry, you will remember that this tool was an acquisition — formally known as Rebelmail. But, I digress. 

The Interactive Email Form block in Marketing Cloud Content Builder allows marketers to receive subscriber information like profile data, product reviews, and sales leads directly from an embedded form in an email. Allowing subscribers to submit forms without ever leaving their inbox helps increase customer engagement and gives marketers more data to use for segmentation.

There are several templates available to solve these use cases: 

• The Empty Form Template allows you to start from scratch and create any type of form you want.
• The Reviews Template allows subscribers to complete product reviews or other feedback surveys.
• The Progressive Profile Template collects or updates subscriber preferences and demographic data, such as name, birthday, product preferences, and interests.
• The Case Form Template allows subscribers to create or update a support case via Journey builder. 
• And finally, the Lead Form Template captures or updates subscriber information from your leads.

Yes, I’ll say it again — users can respond to forms, reviews, and update cases right from their inbox!

Mobile Studio

And yes, while Email is the bread and butter of SFMC Engagement, Mobile Studio is another great way to connect with your customers and prospects. 

So, what do we mean by Mobile Studio? Well, at first thought most people automatically think Mobile Studio equals SMS. But, that’s really not true. (I, too, am guilty of using both these terms synonymously!) 

There are three main offerings under this studio: 

• MobileConnect
• MobilePush
• GroupConnect

MobileConnect is where you can create, send and receive and track SMS and MMS text messages (this is what comes to mind for most folks). Typically these messages are transactional in nature to alert subscribers as well as allow marketers to automatically respond to incoming messages based on established keywords.

MobilePush as the name suggests allows you to send notifications to encourage the use of your app. A few examples to consider based upon industry include:

• Flash sale from your favorite retailer that has an app to make purchasing on mobile a breeze
• A strategically sent time of day message before dinner time from your favorite food delivery app provider
• Time-based notification 24 hours before your flight letting you know you can check in on your airline carrier of choice
• Proximity-based notification using beacon technology for in-store coupons at your local nationwide pharmacy

GroupConnect allows you to send messages via the LINE messaging app and Facebook Messenger via messaging API. (this offering is not as widely used as the others, but is still valuable — especially for those based in Asia – history of LINE)

(There’s also WhatsApp Chat Messaging. But that’s not truly considered part of Mobile Studio and is positioned as more of an add-on to Marketing Cloud.)

Connecting from a Platform Perspective

 And finally, from a platform perspective, through Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement, specifically Journey Builder you can connect all your communications across varying channels to reach customers with the right message at the right time.

Journey Builder 101

Journey Builder is a campaign planning tool in SFMC Engagement that allows you to design and automate campaigns that guide customers through their journey with your brand. You can begin with a blank canvas or an existing template and select various activities based on how you want to communicate with your audience. These activities can range from types of messages (by channel), decisions, updates, or a combination of these elements and are grouped in the builder panel as the following categories:

• Messages
• Advertising
• Flow Control
• Customer Updates
• Sales & Service Cloud 
• Custom

The possibilities of journeys you can create are quite endless. Take a look…

Messages

Messages supported in Journey Builder include email, SMS, LINE message, push notifications, inbox message, in-app message, as well as WhatsApp. 

If you’re just getting started, we recommend starting simple with email. When you drag and drop the email message activity you will notice it is grayed out — this is because you need to finish configuring this activity. You have the option to select an existing email (we recommend this), or you can create from within Journey Builder from scratch. 

You’ll also notice you can update the name of the email or really any activity by hovering over the text and clicking the pencil icon.

Advertising

There are currently only two activities under the Advertising section:

• Ad Audience
• Campaign

Ad Audience allows you to create an advertising Audience for any activated channel (Pinterest, Facebook, and so on) in Journey Builder. A common use case would be for targeting new customers who haven’t engaged with an email — perhaps a paid ad will be better suited for driving engagement. Don’t forget, you’ll need to navigate to the activated channel for further targeting and to complete the ad campaign setup.

Whereas the Ad Campaign activity will allow you to create a Facebook Ad Campaign directly in Journey Builder. This can be helpful if you have a new simple Facebook campaign you want to test out or one that isn’t already set up. 

You configure the creative elements of your advertisement and set campaign specifications, including total and daily advertising spend settings, within Journey Builder. You can also set a Retention Period for campaign members to prevent oversaturating their social media feeds with your advertisement.

When you activate the journey, it creates an advertising campaign, too. As the journey continues, customers populate the advertising campaign and see your advertisement.

Two important things to call out: 

1. Customers who exit journeys aren’t automatically removed from that Advertising Audience, so it’s important to add in a suppression step to avoid retargeting the same customers. 

2. You can edit the campaign outside of Journey Builder, but not all changes will be reflected in that running journey.

These activities allow marketing teams to easily build cross-channel journeys that extend the reach of email campaigns.

Flow Control

Flow Control activities are by far the most numerous — with 15 to be exact options for ‘controlling’ the flow of your journey from splits and joins to wait by/until how your journey flows is up to the marketer’s discretion!

But builders beware, Flows can get quite complex if you’re not careful. Thankfully the Validate function, which didn’t always exist, helps identify when you’re missing a Join or have a ‘dead end path of sorts’ occurring.

Typically for those just starting out, Decision Split and Engagement Split are good ones to include in your journey. 

Did you know that using an Engagement Split to resend an email with an updated subject link to those that didn’t Open can result in tremendous payoff and engagement lift? 

Check out these stats:

• 54.7% increase in the overall email reach
• CTR is 51.1% greater than your first email
• An email (with a different subject line) resent a week later has 30% more openings
• Additional email open rates of 11%

Source: https://encharge.io/resending-emails-for-better-results/

To learn more about other flow actions stay tuned for Part 2 of 3 of this Series: Nurturing your Prospects & Customers

Customer Update

Customer Update Activities include:

• Salesforce Personalization Activity
• Update Contact

The Salesforce Personalization Activity will only appear for those customers that have purchased Personalization (formerly known as Interaction Studio). This activity allows you to pass data from Journey Builder to Marketing Cloud Personalization during the course of a customer journey. You can include custom action names that indicate the journey or journey step. After you share the data with Personalization, you can use it to personalize the experience your customers have with your website or mobile app based on recent journey interactions. 

This integration allows you to tie all your customers’ experiences together — from the website as mentioned to calling your call center, or entering a loyalty number on point of sales. 

A few use cases to consider are: 

1. A retail customer recently purchased a snow jacket for the upcoming winter season. The Personalization activity could suggest matching a hat and gloves to complete the look based on the color and age/gender category of the snow jacket purchased. 
2. A banking customer applies for a home mortgage. The personalization activity could suggest a credit card with 0% interest for 12 months to help with the moving expenses associated with a new home purchase.

Update Contact, as it sounds, allows you to update a contact to a specific attribute of a selected data extension. 

Some common use cases for use of this function in a journey include: 

1. Updating Customer Tier based upon a previous activity or perhaps based upon the length of time as a customer. For example, as an airline loyalty customer — after reaching x miles you update their status to ‘gold’.
2. Updating the date field using current time to timestamp for the most recent visit to a doctor’s offer perhaps so you can remind them of the next visit.

Lastly, Sales & Service Cloud activities require integration with Sales and/or Service Clouds to be able to leverage. Here’s a quick rundown of what each specific activity entails: 

Common use cases include: 

• Create a lead when a Marketing Cloud contact enters a journey.
• Update a lead based on engagement within a journey.
• Create a CRM contact record when a Marketing Cloud contact reaches the activity.
• Update a CRM contact record with Marketing Cloud contact data.
• Update a custom object based on engagement within a journey.
• Create a task when another object, such as a lead or contact, enters a journey.
• Associate a case or task to an account.
• Update a task based on a contact or lead’s response in a journey.
• Update a person or business account.

Summary

As you can see, Marketing Cloud allows marketers to connect with potential customers in many different ways — from acquisition and driving engagement on various channels to uniting communications across a customer journey. My hope is your one takeaway is: it’s a pretty powerful tool that can meet the unique needs of any organization, regardless of size, vertical, or industry.

To keep it going, check out this quick reference that explains the basics things to know about each tool within SFMC Engagement.

Next up…

Part 2 of 3: Nurturing your Prospects and Customers. While you’ve got a sneak peek of what Journey Builder can do from our 101 section, we’ll discuss more of the how-tos: from concept to execution.

Original article: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Basics: Connect with Potential Customers

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Salesforce Marketing Cloud Basics: Connect with Potential Customers appeared first on The Spot.

If you haven’t registered to join us for MarDreamin’ 2022, November 2-4, then consider this your formal invitation. This 3-day, virtual conference is focused on all things marketing on the Salesforce platform.

Join us from anywhere for sessions, workshops, keynotes, and more to educate and inspire sales and marketing professionals. It doesn’t matter where you are on your Salesforce marketing journey, we have something for everyone. 

Go ahead, we’ll be here when you get back. Register for MarDreamin’ now.

Ready? Great! Now that you’ve done that, let’s talk about your upcoming MarDreamin’ experience. 

We’ve curated this collection of sessions for Salesforce Marketing Cloud professionals. Marketing Cloud has a suite of robust capabilities, each with its own specific features and nuances. Whether you’re a seasoned admin, skilled developer, or just dipping your toes into Marketing Cloud, we’ve got you covered. 

Marketing Cloud Agenda for MarDreamin’ 2022

Below is an agenda for Marketing Cloud admins that you can catch at MarDreamin’ 2022.

Note: We’ve listed these sessions in chronological order. You can get details about the event and see the full schedule at MarDreamin.com. 

Day 1: Wednesday, November 2 

Unleash the Power of Marketing Cloud Connect | 10:35 a.m. – 11 a.m. EST

With customers expecting highly personalized content on the channel of their choice, our data is becoming more important than ever. That’s where the Marketing Cloud Connect tool comes in. 

Using the native integration between Marketing Cloud and Salesforce CRM means you can utilize the robust CRM data to enrich your marketing strategy. 

You’ll gain insights from:

• Audience segmentation
• Journey Builder
• CRM Analytics
• And more

You can even use the connector to send Marketing Cloud content out from other Salesforce clouds. This allows your teams to access your branded content and benefit from these personalized touchpoints from whichever platform they are working on.

Presenter: Vicki Moritz-Henry

Considerations for Marketing to a Global Customer Base at Scale | 11:05 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. EST

We know customers crave and expect personalized communications wherever they are. However, language, culture, and privacy laws are key considerations global organizations have to consider in their marketing strategy.

In this session, hear firsthand how Lucid Motors has been able to provide these personalized experiences to its customers and prospects at scale while remaining compliant with local laws and expectations.

Key topics covered:

• Email preferences center and consent management (unsubscribes)
• Building email templates for localization
• Global email production processes and governance

Presenter: Kirsten Schlau

Intro to BLDR: An Open-Source Workflow for Salesforce Marketing Cloud | 11:55 a.m. – 12:35 p.m. EST

Time spent using the standard Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) workflow of in-browser code editors or copy/paste from your favorite integrated development environment (IDE) can be less than enjoyable. 

For example, if (when) your browser crashes or refreshes… When you go to use that handy stored code snippet and it’s not there… When you make an update, and you get the dreaded 500 error… We’ve all been there.

Implementing BLDR in your everyday workflow can be seamless and bring your SFMC workflow — where you are comfortable — into your code editor. Not only that, it saves you time by allowing you to update assets in SFMC without leaving your editor. It also adds peace of mind thanks to the ability to use any GIT provider for version control.

If you are even a little bit familiar with using GIT in the command line, BLDR will feel as natural as can be. And if you’re not, its straightforward commands are easy to navigate and learn.

BLDR is an open-sourced workflow tool built for SFMC. Visit bldr.basetime.io for more information.

Presenter: Tony Zupancic

A Beginner’s Guide To Administering Marketing Cloud Engagement | 1:40 p.m. – 2:20 p.m. EST 

This session is for anyone new to the world of Marketing Cloud administration. You will learn about the foundational components of administering and managing a Marketing Cloud Engagement environment.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Users
• Business Units
• Security
• Process Automations
• FTP Data

You will walk away with knowledge to effectively manage your Marketing Cloud Engagement org.

Presenters: Chris Zullo and Kirsten Schlau

Create A Great Welcome Email Journey In Marketing Cloud | 2:25 p.m. – 2:50 p.m. EST 

The Marketing Cloud welcome email journey is considered one of the best ways to get new people engaged with your brand through email marketing.

It’s often where the brand starts the relationship with prospects in hopes that they’ll continue to interact. When you create a great welcome journey, you put your best foot forward so prospects eventually become loyal customers.

This session will provide essential tips to improve and maximize your current welcome email campaign in Journey Builder. And if you don’t have a welcome journey yet, you can start planning one.

Presenter: Fernando Rubino Pereira

Day 2: Thursday, November 3

Secrets to Securing Marketing Cloud Engagement in a Hybrid Work Environment | 10:20 a.m. – 10:45 a.m. EST 

Two big takeaways from the pandemic era are that workers can be productive when working from home and that the vast majority expect to continue to work remotely (at least partially).

While there are plenty of benefits associated with a hybrid work environment, security is not typically thought of as one of them.

In this session we’ll discuss the security capabilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and how they can be used to secure your environment — no matter where your team is working from.

Check out Mike Morris’ blog post on the topic here.

Presenter: Mike Morris

Expanding Cross-Channel Marketing With Mobile Connect | 10:50 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. EST 

Evaluating different marketing channels and interested in mobile messaging? We’ll cover Marketing Cloud’s MobileConnect, key considerations, preparation for the lengthy enablement process, and ways to incorporate SMS into your marketing plan.

Presenter: Ashley Anger

Supercharge Your Marketing Newsletter With Einstein Frequency And Einstein Scoring | 11:20 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. EST 

Want to better understand how Salesforce Einstein features can improve newsletters you send via Marketing Cloud? Here’s a real use case in which, using Einstein Scoring and Einstein Frequency features, we saw a drastic improvement in newsletter engagement metrics thanks to added personalization options.

This session covers:

• What Einstein contributes in Marketing Cloud and how to use it, both at the Dashboard level and at the Journey level
• A use case from a very saturated client who saw their engagement significantly improve after implementing these features
• An explanation into how identifying which contacts to impact by mail and by push lead to the increased engagement (opens from 14% to 42% and clicks from 0.5 to 1.1)

Join us to see a real use case firsthand, learn how the tool works, and increase your strategic marketing capacity.

Presenter: Alvar Diez

Unify Your Teams With The Marketing Cloud Connector | 1:05 p.m. – 1:30 p.m. EST 

Did you know that the Marketing Cloud Connector can be used to unify your sales, service, and marketing teams? With the connector, you can combine the power of the Salesforce CRM and Marketing Cloud Journey Builder to:

• Allow your sales and service teams to trigger journeys via data changes in the Salesforce CRM.
• Create and update records in the Sales and Service Cloud so your teams know what interactions a customer has experienced.
• Send team emails, create tasks, and even open or close cases to enhance communication and productivity.

Journey Builder plays a powerful role in Marketing Cloud. Through the connector, all teams at your company or organization can benefit from its use! Through this presentation, learn how to take advantage of the integration and review simple journeys you can build to get started.

Presenter: Sheala Vast-Binder

Alice in Email PreferenceLand: Falling Down The Rabbit Hole | 1:35 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. EST 

At first glance, a conversation about an email preference center seems simple and straightforward. But all too often, hidden complexities emerge.

Instead of shouting “off with their heads!,” this email preference center session will equip you to make the best decisions for your organization.

We’ll walk through the different types of preference centers. Then, we’ll showcase good examples of how to do it right. We’ll finish with common options for Preference Centers within Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

• The out-of-the-box preference center

• A custom CloudPage

• External preference center

Then we’ll have a live demo where we dig into some of the code behind the scenes of a custom CloudPage preference center, where we’ll present best practices to store and organize both your code and your subscriber preferences. We’ll show you how to make your CloudPage dynamic allowing you to change and update your preferences — without having to change your code. And, finally, we’ll share highly commented code samples as part of the presentation for attendees to use on their own.

Presenters: Aaron Beatty and Stephen Roper

Leveraging Marketing Cloud Engagement To Produce Positive Customer-Driven Outcomes | 2:50 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. 

Learn tips and tricks from our panel of trailblazers on how to maximize your investment in Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE). In this session we will also explore ways to improve your use of MCE, discuss use-cases for becoming more efficient and hear from first-hand experiences what skills are needed to thrive in your role managing MCE. 

Presenters: Kirsten Schlau, Zachary Norman, Victor Alberto Jiménez Pantoja, and Genna Matson

Day 3: Friday, November 4

Embrace a first-party data strategy for Sales and Marketing | 10:20 a.m. – 10:45 a.m. EST 

Third-party cookies are being phased out by most web browsers in the next year, and marketers must adapt to a new environment. In the new normal, using first-party data can become a true competitive advantage.
Natasha and Jaime will show you how to build a first-party tracking cookie strategy across your whole tech stack, relying on Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud and MuleSoft as a foundation. We will present engagement strategies for mobile using event data, and show valuable examples of ROI strategies you can take to the boardroom.

Presenters: Jamie Lopez and Natasha Wetten

Enhance Your Customer Experience with Interactive Content | 11:10 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. EST 

Customer engagement is one of the most used KPIs. How as Marketers, can we make customer engagement easier and more fun for our audiences? By using interactive content within your email messages to allow customers to engage with your brand without leaving their inbox. Sign up to learn about the Marketing Cloud interactive content features (Interactive Email and AMP for Email), when to use them, and how to better engage with your customers.

Presenter: Andrew Kazmierczak

Marketing Cloud Journey Builder: Design And Build Custom Journeys | 12:00 p.m. – 12:40 p.m. EST

Get a hands-on walkthrough to start designing and building live working journeys for your business or organization. We’ll dive into several Journey Builder use cases before building B2B and B2C Journeys in Marketing Cloud that are integrated with Salesforce CRM.

Learn how to:

• Build a multi-injection point, lead-nurturing journey to support sales
• Build a B2C multi-touch, segmented journey to onboard new consumers
• Handle multiple entry event paths including leads/contacts directly from Salesforce
• CRM and query-based automation fed
• Build custom and highly personalized email and cloud page content to support each journey
• Understand best practices, latest features, functionality available in Journey Builder, Audience Studio and Content Builder

Presenter: Tim Ziter

How To Deploy Data For Success, Scale And Customer Experience | 12:45 p.m. – 1:10 p.m. EST 

Learn the tools, techniques and strategies to make your Salesforce Marketing Cloud data more effective, efficient and easy to use. At the same time, you’ll maximize your efforts, make the most of your data, and delight customers.

Presenter: Jason Cort

Email for Everyone: Creating Accessible Digital Marketing Assets | 1:15 p.m. – 1:40 p.m. EST

Regardless of your marketing role — whether you are a director, an admin, a consultant, a graphic designer — you need to be conscious of ADA guidelines and ensure everyone is able to view and enjoy your digital marketing efforts.

In this session, I will share with you the top resources and items to check off your to-do list when enacting the ADA guidelines in your digital marketing to achieve email accessibility.

Check out Cara Weese’s blog post on the topic here.

Presenters: Katy Hege and Cara Weese

How To Audit Subscriber Activity For Marketing Cloud Journey Builder | 1:45 p.m. – 2:10 p.m. EST

Marketing Cloud Journey Builder’s reporting interface gives users the ability to view high-level statistics on journey performance and the overall volume of subscribers to reach each activity. However, the ability to gain a granular view of the specific step that subscribers are currently at within each journey is limited from the Journey Builder interface. This lack of visibility poses issues from both a reporting and auditing/troubleshooting standpoint.

In this session, we will show you a method of setting up journeys and querying data views that allows marketers to keep track of the steps that subscribers have completed within a Journey, all within a single Data Extension.

Presenters: Austin Kirby and Claudia Hoops 

Get ready for the only 3-day virtual conference that’s all about Pardot & Marketing Cloud

There’s still time to register! Get to it and tell your friends to grab their MarDreamin’ tickets so they can catch these sessions. There’s something for every Salesforce marketer.

Pro Tip: You can get more from your MarDreamin’ experience through pre-conference training workshops. These virtual courses take place November 1, which is the day before the big conference event. 

Check out the Marketing Cloud Engagement Fundamentals workshop to learn how Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) allows you to easily connect with potential customers, nurture their interests, and convert that interest into sales.

Contact the team at Sercante to learn more about MarDreamin’ or anything else your heart desires.

Original article: The Salesforce Marketing Cloud User’s Guide to MarDreamin’ 2022

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post The Salesforce Marketing Cloud User’s Guide to MarDreamin’ 2022 appeared first on The Spot.