Why Salesforce Marketing cloud is both Smart and ‘Rebel’lious

Today’s global tech world is more about consolidation of apps than it is about proliferation of apps. Let me explain.

You receive a promotional offer from Starbucks to your inbox. They’re promoting their Halloween special – The Zombie Frappuccino. You’d want to give it a try on your way to work tomorrow.

Scenario 1: You click on the link in the email, you’re redirected to the Starbucks website. You login with your credentials, find the Zombie Frappuccino, deal with the payment gateway and place an order for pickup at 9 am tomorrow. You get an order confirmation email and the Starbucks App in your phone also logs in your order.

Scenario 2: You click on the “Try it” button in the email. You setup a time & date for pickup. You pick it up tomorrow.

Is it just me or does Scenario 2 look unbelievably easy (Even for a Zombie!)? The allure of the glow-in-the-dark Frankenstein Frappuccino notwithstanding, Scenario 2 looks amazing because of consolidation of apps.

In today’s world of $1000 phones and shrinking attention spans, All of us want our apps, our emails to do a lot more than just relay information. We’d want them to seamlessly integrate with each other. We’d want them to be smart by default. To save us time and money.

Salesforce’s recent takeover of Rebel – an interactive email service is a step in this direction. Rebel lets you convert a simple email template to a one-stop transactional email. Apart from making the interaction experience seamless and quick, this also allows your organization to maintain brand consistency across all email communication. We at our Adita Technologies office were discussing the merits of this acquisition and I wanted to relay an example of one of our recent implementations and how we would do it differently now. We had to build an email marketing automation system for one of the biggest retail firms in the country. They wanted multiple 5 step email journeys built on Marketing Cloud using data from their Salesforce CRM. We started off by understanding the different audience segments, looked at their existing data tables on Salesforce and drew a scalable architecture design for their Marketing Cloud setup. We then connected the Salesforce CRM to Marketing Cloud using a connector and setup APIs Setting up the journeys needed a little more attention from our technical team. The client wanted the emails in the journey to trigger based off of user behavior. And the user behavior was tracked in the CRM. So our tech team brainstormed and decided to use REST APIs to enable “Behavior” based triggers.

So now, each step of the journey was independent and dependent of the previous step. Let me explain.

The system would send an email in step 1, wait for a response for a preset time frame and depending on if there was a response or not, it would send the next appropriate email. Again, this wasn’t done with two different journeys but in the same journey. Our team went a step further and setup an auto populate list for non-responder. This list would then be automatically added back to a drip marketing campaign and would follow it’s own journey path again. All the respondents of the email who’ve shown interest to buy the product were randomly assigned to a sales rep who would then reach out to the lead and try to close the deal. Now with the Rebel integration, we would have tailor-made the journeys with “self-serve” emails. This way the interested customer would have gone ahead and made a purchase directly from the email (without leaving the email page). Abandoned cart & “need for extra prodding” cases would then be routed to the sales rep thereby freeing the sales rep’s time of only talking to customers who need convincing on the product’s value.

I haven’t yet touched on the possibilities of using all of the above in multi-channel attribution (more on this coming in my next blog). But imagine you have Marketing Cloud’s Email, Social, Mobile & Ad Studios integrated with Salesforce CRM. You’ve equipped your marketing teams with just about every necessary tool they could ever need. As a decision maker, you could also look at custom reports and dashboards to monitor which channel needs more attention than the other. These are exciting times for Marketing. Leverage the power of Salesforce & Marketing Cloud with Adita Technologies Quickstarts and robust implementation solutions.

Adita Technologies has been delivering IT solutions for over 10 years. It’s experience in Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and IOT give it a distinct advantage of having cross-domain expertise. Adita’s offices in the USA, Australia and India are work places for over 100 certified professionals across technologies. With significant expertise in Marketing Automation, CRM, ERP & IoT Adita does not only become your implementation partner but also your extended Marketing team.

Setup a free consulting appointment with us by sending an email to customerservice@aditatechnologies.com