Engagement Scoring: Enhance your strategy with Marketing Cloud Personalization

Engagement Scoring: Enhance your strategy with Marketing Cloud Personalization

Personalized experiences are crucial in today’s digital era. In our previous post, we introduced you to the world of Personalization, and in this one, we encourage you to get certified. Now, we want to delve into Engagement Scoring, a key tool within Marketing Cloud Personalization.

What is Engagement Scoring?

Engagement Scoring is an index within Marketing Cloud Personalization that measures the level of visitor engagement and results as a numerical score. This score is calculated nightly, averaging the various interactions users have with the pages tracked by the tool.

What is Engagement Scoring. Marketing Cloud Personalization

How does it work?

Depending on the configuration we establish, Personalization assigns equal or different weights to the actions performed by each user across the digital channels tracked by the tool. Actions may include clicks on links, video views, content downloads, purchases, time spent on the website, among others.

For instance, if our company’s goals place more value on making a purchase than viewing a video, we would assign more weight to users who have made a purchase and less or none to those who have only viewed multimedia content. Note that this configuration is set at the Dataset level and will affect all users and campaigns.

We need to set the criteria for the tool to follow for scoring analysis in the tool’s Settings. Once configured, Personalization will collect real-time data on all user interactions and continuously update user profiles.

How to Configure It?

Configuration. Engagement Scoring

1. Business Cycle

Business Cycle. Marketing Cloud Personalization

Start with the business cycle, which determines the number of days Personalization will use for analysis. For example, setting it to 7 days means the tool will analyze data from that period and then generate the metrics. Note that it uses calendar days and has a maximum of 90 days.

2. Visits

Configure the weight of page visits, including how much to weigh the duration of these visits and whether user actions during these visits will impact engagement. If not configured, it will keep the automatic (default) settings.

Visits. Marketing Cloud Personalization

3. Actions

Beyond setting a global weight for any action, you can specify the importance of different actions. You can assign up to 10 different actions.

Actions. Marketing Cloud Personalization

3.1 KPIs

Based on actions occurring during the visitor lifetime, not within the business cycle. For example, you can set MCP to consider users engaged if they perform more than 50 actions, regardless of how long it takes. Reaching 50 actions will meet the engagement goal.

KPIs. Marketing Cloud Personalization

3.2 Segments

Add segments based on desired criteria to further refine the engagement analysis.

Segments Personalization. Engagement Scoring.

How is Engagement Scoring calculated?

Personalization calculates the score by averaging the different weights established earlier and updates it automatically. The resulting score can be used to segment campaigns.

Engagement Scoring. Marketing Cloud Personalization

What are the benefits?

This functionality allows for more precise segmentation and helps fine-tune campaigns based on these segments. By more effectively understanding how users interact, you can optimize experience personalization, enhancing the relevance and effectiveness of campaigns created in Personalization.

In conclusion, Engagement Scoring in Marketing Cloud Personalization is a powerful feature that enables companies to measure and optimize user engagement effectively, improving campaign personalization and increasing customer retention.

Now that you know how it works, why not go ahead and set it up today?

Marketing Cloud Personalization, Interaction Studio, or Evergage – But what exactly are they?

Marketing Cloud Personalization

Undoubtedly, one of the most critical terms in modern marketing is personalization. There’s no marketing campaign without personalization, and we achieve this through Marketing Cloud Personalization. By tailoring each interaction with our users to the maximum extent, we make it more effective and strengthen our company’s connection with both existing and potential customers. We utilize the data we collect to gain more insights and provide a better consumer experience. The goal is to deeply understand our customers to deliver the best possible experience.

To do this, we need data because they are what drives the world. They help us comprehend what has happened in the past, what is happening in the present and enable us to act accordingly in the future, whether it’s near or distant. However, they are of no use if they are scattered across various platforms because it complicates the analysis task for creating personalized campaigns.

You may have heard of Interaction Studio before Marketing Cloud Personalization, as it recently underwent a name change to better reflect its amazing capabilities: personalization.

Marketing Cloud Personalization. ShowerThinking

But what exactly is Marketing Cloud Personalization?

It’s a tool found within Marketing Cloud itself, allowing us to enhance the experience this powerful program provides to our company even further.

It offers the opportunity to design and implement one or multiple marketing campaigns from a single tool.

Personalization Marketing Cloud

Since it operates with first-party data, we achieve spectacular and impressive data quality. This allows us to set up campaigns on various platforms, such as web pages, emails, SMS, and more. By doing this, we customize the user experience in real-time, making it unique.

Furthermore, any company looking to add unique value to its operational data can use this tool, designed for that purpose. With two versions (Growth and Premium), users can choose the edition that best fits their business model.

Marketing Cloud Personalization

Marketing Cloud Personalization is packed with features that make the marketing campaigns it creates more comprehensive.

  • First, we can obtain data by syncing with several platforms Marketing Cloud Personalization offers. (for example, Salesforce or Selligent). : “This method ensures users in our CRM are integrated into the tool, starting campaign creation for them.
SalesforceCRM Integration
  • Think of Einstein as if it were a recipe. It allows us to personalize the campaign even further through Recipes, Ingredients, and Boosters to make predictions about potential products/items that might interest our customers based on their activity.
  • In addition to this, we have the Guardian, a functionality that continuously monitors the metrics of your website or app and uses that data to identify potential issues.
  • Indeed, Marketing Cloud Personalization is designed to be used as a profiling tool, providing personalization within it, but don’t let that be the limit! We can export our data to Marketing Cloud to use in email or SMS marketing campaigns.
  • How will we test the two types of campaigns? A/B testing analyzes two campaign performances. Success measured with control group.
  • Create surveys for a complete experience. Use results for segmentation.

Example of Personalization:

To better understand the complexity of Marketing Cloud Personalization campaigns, here’s an example:

Imagine our e-commerce selling diverse foods: perishables, international, various sizes.

E-commerce ShowerThinking

Only registered users can make purchases on our e-commerce platform, so we should synchronize them with our CRM (in this case, Salesforce).

After having all this in place, we’ll proceed to create our campaigns. Based on certain attributes that we need to segment, we’ll have a better-distributed audience, and we’ll create three campaigns:

  1. People coming from Data Cloud interested in products originating from the U.S. will see a banner with information about allergens.
  2. Anyone coming from Spain will encounter a pop-up in the middle of the campaign informing them that their orders will include a bonus bottle of olive oil just for buying from there.
  3. Anyone who visits 3 or more pages for the first time will see a pop-up asking them to rate their experience. This information will be exported to Journey Builder to target them with new offers a week later.
    With this approach, we can have three different campaigns directed at market segments, each with its unique characteristics.

With this approach, we can have three different campaigns directed at market segments, each with its unique characteristics.

So, are you ready to dive into Marketing Cloud Personalization?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Admin Certification

Porrada blog SFMC

Following on from the post about Salesforce Certifications and along the lines of Marketing Cloud Email Specialist, I’d like to explain a bit more about what the Marketing Cloud Admin exam is all about. This post is written as a guide to help those people who are interested in obtaining this certification and to give details and tips about it.

Who can take the exam?

It is a certification oriented to people who are interested in the configuration of Marketing Cloud products. It is also required in order to obtain the Marketing Cloud Consultant certification. According to Salesforce’s recommendation, it is advisable for those who decide to take this exam to have 3 to 6 months of experience in Marketing Cloud administration and previous experience in Digital Marketing.

As this is a more technical profile, whoever wants to get this profile must be familiar with the data structure, configuration and have agility and ability to solve problems that may arise in the account. They must be able to navigate the tool.

By becoming certified you will become a profile that is currently highly demanded, with the ability to create personalized experiences for each business/user. You will open up new opportunities to help others.

Salesforce recommends you to study using the modules specifically created for this exam, in which all the certification topics are covered. If you are brand new to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud world, I’d recommend you to start with the Trailheads which they offer. The estimated time is approximately 25-35 hours but if you already have experience with other certifications or with Salesforce Marketing Cloud itself you will probably be able to complete them in less time.

Certification SFMC

However, it is not the only place where you can study. There are other tools such as Udemy, Salesforce Ben, doing practice exams, and most of all with Salesforce Help articles which which you will be able to find complementary information to the Trailheads.

About the exam

In this section of the article I will detail the structure of the exam:

  • Content: 60 questions that score + 5 questions that do not score*

These 5 unscored questions are used to evaluate the general level of the candidates taking the exams. They will serve as a guide for the annual updates of the certifications.

  • Time: 105 min
  • Passing score: 67%
  • Location: you can either do the exam online or in a specialized facility
  • Language: English
  • Pre-requirements: None
  • Cost: USD 200, plus applicable fees/ taxes
    • Retaking costs: USD 100, plus applicable fees/ taxes*

Take into account that at these costs you might have to add applicable fees or taxes according to local laws.

Topics

  • Digital marketing proficiency: 13%
  • Subscriber data management: 18%
  • Setup: 38%
  • Channel management: 16%
  • Maintenance: 15%

Digital marketing proficiency

Subscriber data management

  • The ability to comprehend and manage the contact models in different situations (Contact Builder,RMM,Data Designer)
  • Understand perfectly the concepts of preference y profile center

Setup

Channel management

Maintenance

  • Know how to navigate through the different products desenvolverte por los diferentes productos de Marketing Cloud, reports, data extracts, etc.

Tips

Important before starting: you should ensure that all the information you have or will be using is completely uppdated, The certifications are continuously being updated. Let me walk you through on how to prepare:

  • Follow the Trailhead modules for preparation
  • Read articles from the Salesforce Help where you can can find additional information that can help you understand many of the issues or cases that may arise in the exam questions.
  • I’d also recommend you to check out the AMPscript guide

The questions are similar to those from other Salesforce Marketing Cloud exams. As a matter of fact, many questions are based on real situations which test your knowledge and technical problem-solving abilities with the tool.

It is very important to understand that to be able to pass this exam successfully, you cannot simply memorize the topics, as you need to be able to apply what you’ve learned, understanding all the terminology, and apply them in the relevant cases.

Real exam experience

In my case, I decided to certify myself as it is a prerequisite to obtain the Marketing Cloud Consultant certification. It took me about 2 to 3 months to prepare myself for this exam with the help of Trailheads, Salesforce Help Articles and a lot of patience.

It wasn’t my first certification so I already knew the dynamics and the type of exam I was going to face. The process that I usually follow is:

  • First of all I search and complete the Salesforce Trailhead which prepares you for the exam, always making a small summary of the most important items which will later on help me when I am doing the first mock tests and I can consult on them in case of doubts
  • As a second step, I write down keywords with their definitions that appear in the mock tests that don’t appear in the Trailheads. In this way it is much easier and quicker to consult future doubts.
  • Finally: tests, tests, tests. This is what will most help you understand the possible cases which may be raised in the exam.

I would recommend you to go to an examination facility to conduct the test if you can, as if you do it at home or somewhere else, you will have ensure that you comply and follow the technical requirements to conduct the online proctored exam and this might distract you preparing for the exam.

The most important thing, if you have the opportunity, is to practice with the tool itself when you’re studying because it will make it easier to comprehend and remember better than only reading about it.

Don’t worry if you don’t pass on your first try. It is a lot of content and it is very important to get yourself well familiarized with all the questions and topics before attempting the exam, but I encourage you to try again!