Sales Marketing Cloud October 2021 Release

Salesforce October 2021


Salesforce Marketing Cloud received a fresh upgrade in October as part of Salesforce’s enhancement plans. These enhancements have been implemented to provide a better platform experience and to do your jobs as marketers simpler. Let’s explore the updates in the October release.

iOS 15 Updates

Apple unveiled a plethora of new improvements for its iOS 15 releases in the fall of 2021 during the summer of 2021. Like those in previous upgrades, some of these unique updates were meant to provide users with greater and better authority over who has access to the information. Three of them, in fact, are for Apple Mail and have a direct bearing on those of us who work in online marketing. Let’s explore these iOS 15 updates now.

What Salesforce Is Doing Against These New Changes?

Some email clients are changing their privacy policies, which may affect open rate numbers and computations. Salesforce is upgrading a number of Marketing Cloud products to adapt certain functionalities of its platform as a consequence of the changes implied by the new privacy policies.

Salesforce’s main focus is to develop technologies that will assist you in responding, acting, and succeeding in these changing contexts. Email openings have historically been used by marketers to construct automated processes, marketing engagement methods, and more since they may indicate whether a client or prospect is intrigued by your material. Email openings are likely to be a less trustworthy interaction indication as a result of the additional privacy settings offered to customers.

Over the course of the next several updates, Salesforce will make a number of changes to your Marketing Cloud services, focusing on Einstein functionalities. This will guarantee that your data, findings, and projections are as precise as possible. 

  • Rather, they’re using an engagement rate measure that combines a variety of extra signals, such as clicks, while still taking account of open rate analytics at a certain level to provide a more comprehensive view of your consumers’ content interaction. Here are the topmost improvements you can expect:
    • To calculate the most ideal send time, the algorithm now employs an engagement rate rather than just an open rate for a more sophisticated statistic that ensures greater accuracy.
    • To produce behavioral analytics and estimate future effectiveness, the Insights feature now leverages the audience engagement rather than only the open rate.
    • For more precise output statistics, click to open rates are now calculated as click through rates.
    • Rather than using an intersection between open and click rates, Salesforce will instead utilize an engagement rate for profiles. As a consequence of the privacy modifications, they’re revising the metrics computations in Engagement Scoring to improve dependability.

Impact On Marketing Cloud

The open rate, which is closely watched, will be the most evident effect of these modifications. Most marketers will no longer be able to know if their Apple Mail app customers read their messages, when they opened them, their geographical location, or which gadget they used to do so following this upgrade.

Marketing Cloud Journeys and Messages

This is an upgrade to the next-generation MobilePush SDK, which uses Mobile App Events to arrange journeys depending on user activity. It adds action hooks to enable user behavior to influence your in-app messaging, and it improves in-app message scheduling with increased display options.

The new Journey History UI allows you to view your journey metrics. With Partner Seed List Connectivity, you may also get a better understanding of subscriber retention. Contact Deletes now have a two-day suppression duration.

The new Journey History panel offers a more informative, visually appealing, and engaging experience and new possibilities. Integrated infographics and statistics, a simplified filtering interface, navigation, and more are all available.

To choreograph experiences or trigger in-app messaging depending on real-time user behavior, Marketing Cloud now offers a direct connection between your mobile app and Journey Builder. 

You can also specify your smartphone app activities on the new Journey Builder Mobile App Event Management Tab. Alternatively, you may leverage the user’s smartphone app activity to prompt the appearance of an in-app message.

Better In-App Messages

In-app messages are known to enhance productivity and customer engagement. Wouldn’t it be better if you could better control the timing and triggering action for displaying in-app messages? This is what you get with the new Salesforce Marketing Cloud October 2021 Release.

You can define different parameters for session length and user actions to trigger in-app messages for your users. Therefore, you can easily guide them and control their journey with better control.

different identities in the different channels and creating an unified profile that groups: contact data, their interactions and the metrics related to their interactions. And all this in real time.

Default Suppression Period

Before this update, clients had to wait a minimum of 14 days for suppression period for contact deletes. However, with the new update, you can set the duration between 0-2 days to delete the contacts quicker. This way, you can say goodbye to the 14-day wait period and delete contacts on the same day. 

Similarly, if you set the suppression period to 0 days, the contact deletion process will not pause automatically after the first suppression round. It will keep on functioning as desired and you can reduce the delay time for contact deletion and suppression.

Interaction Studio – Real Time 1 to 1 Personalization

interaction studio

Companies have an increasing number of communication channels whereby their current or potential customers can relate to the brand with interaction studio.

This involves many challenges and high level of complexity:

  • How to process and enrich all the information we receive from our clients from any communication channel? 
  • How to achieve a level of experience and personalization for our users individually based on all the information we have? 
  • How, given the high complexity of a digitalized world, give the appropriate response, through the appropriate channel and do it immediately?

These are the goals for which Interaction Studio of Salesforce Marketing Cloud has the answer.

Unified Customer Profile & Decisioning Engine

To process all the information regardless of the communication channel through which It

reaches us, Interaction Studio has a dashboard that provides a complete vision of the client/prospect, unifying in a single site their different identities in the different channels and creating an unified profile that groups: contact data, their interactions and the metrics related to their interactions. And all this in real time.

If to all this information, we add the platform’s artificial intelligence tool: Einstein, we will be able to provide our users with more relevant experiences according to their preferences and needs, deciding, for example, what will be our next best action, or carrying out coherent marketing campaigns through any touchpoint, with the user.

This is possible thanks to:

Einstein Recipes: that brings advanced, per-user product and content suggestions using complex algorithms and a deep understanding of user behavior. 


Einstein Decisions: automates the process of deciding who should see what content, rather than relying on the manual creation of complex rules.

decisions interaction studio

Data Sources Integration

And where do we start? First of all, it will be necessary to integrate our different data sources with the platform: Web Behaviour, Product Catalog, Content, Promotions , Email engagement, CRM, Mobile Behaviour, DMP, 3rd Party, AdTech Engagement, Call Center, LiveChat, In-Branch.

To do this, we have several possibilities available: through ETL, through real-time API calls, also through developments tools such as JS or SDK.

Data Sources Integration

Segmentations

Segmentation is one of the key components of Interaction Studio. You can filter your users and accounts based on a wide range of criteria you define, such as : Campaign, Action, Subscription, Visits, Location, Metrics, Third Party, Items.

Once a segment is created, the segment updates happen in real-time, this is one of the great advantages about using Interaction Studio, so any membership changes occur immediately, even during the same visit.

segment interaction studio

The segments can be used for a variety of purposes:

Campaign customization: directing personalized and specific messages for each segment.

Set goals/targets and make filters: segments can be used to filter campaign statistics and see how different groups react to a certain action.

Analytics, trends, and engagement: the creation of segments is also useful when analyzing trends and the level of “engagement” of each segment.

Analyze member details: with the level of detail offered by Interaction Studio it is possible to access the behavioral data of each user of specific account -> Unified Customer Profile.

Import or export segment membership: you can export the data of the segments including any defined segment rule, and it is also possible to synchronize the segments with your CRM to be able to include everything that Interaction Studio has captured about a lead, contact or account.

Campaigns & Templates

Once we have our clients identified and our data sources integrated, it will be the time to start launching segmented communication campaigns and through the appropriate channels.

For that, in Interaction Studio we have the necessary tools to create a campaign.

Selecting first:

The segment, the category and the rules to enter in it.

Then we will have to work with the communication channels deciding where we will show our personalized content: in an area of our website, through a content block in an email, using personalized messages via mobile…

In short, Interaction Studio is a powerful tool that, in addition to providing a 360ª view of users, it will be a great help to any company with a Customer Centric strategy.

Emailapocalypse: What Apple Mail Privacy Protection Means for Marketing Cloud

Mail Privacy Protection

Privacy is coming to the internet while cookies and tracking pixels are going away. Apple is leading a major change in the email marketing landscape with the introduction of Mail Privacy Protection among other new features that professionals and software providers will need to adopt.

Although these changes imply far-reaching effects for many providers, we will specifically discuss some considerations for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Let’s start from the basics…

This summer 2021, Apple announced a slew of new features that would be introduced with its iOS 15, iPad 15, and MacOS Monterey releases to come this fall 2021. As with past updates, some of these new features were designed to offer users more and better control over the access that others have to their data. In fact, 3 of them are for Apple Mail and have a specific impact on those of us that work in email marketing.

This is nothing new for Apple. Over the past few years, Apple has been tightening up on user privacy. In recent updates it introduced new features that blocked all third-party cookies and required applications to ask for users’ permission to track their activity outside of their own apps. Ultimately, this is what users want. So we can only expect this trend and similar changes to continue.

So, considering how Apple Mail takes up around 40% of email client market share, you may be very interested in knowing just what these newest features are and if they will have an impact on what you do, specifically in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

In this article we’ll look at the following: 

  1. What are these 3 features?
  2. How will they affect email marketing and Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
  3. Can you prepare for this change?
  4. How can you adapt to this change?

Three New Apple Mail Features That Will Directly Impact Email Marketing

The main feature that will impact email marketing is the Mail Privacy Protection feature. When a user opens the Apple Mail app for the first time after the fall update they will see the Mail Privacy Protection feature, asking them if they want to have their Mail activity protected or not. (It’s safe to assume that most will opt for protection.)

How does this impact marketers? As Apple says:

“Mail Privacy Protection works by hiding your IP address and loading remote content privately in the background, even when you don’t open the message. This makes it harder for senders to follow your Mail activity.”

the Mail Privacy Protection

Feature #1: “Loading remote content privately in the background” – Marketing emails, newsletters, and some email clients use an invisible tracking pixel to track whether someone has opened an email or not. But with this new feature the emails are automatically loaded, or “opened”, in the background. So for marketers’ purposes, they will show as having been opened, even if they haven’t actually been opened.

Consider that Marketing Cloud includes a tracking pixel in each email to check if and when an email is opened. This feature will thus be affected.

protect mail activity Mail Privacy Protection

Feature #2: “Hiding your IP address” – This means that senders will not be able to determine location or to link email habits to other online activity based on IP address.

Source: Apple.com

Feature #3: Hide My Email – Among the plethora of new features being released this fall for iOS15 and other OS’s is also iCloud+. This is a paid plan that offers such features as extra iCloud storage, Family Sharing, Private Relay, and Hide My Email.

Hide My Email will allow users to mask their email with a fake one. These “fake” emails are random Apple-created icloud.com addresses that provide users with the luxury of providing a type of “burner” address when they don’t want to provide their true address.

This feature will have a profound impact on email marketing since we will no longer be able to identify a specific user. In fact the number of duplications in our database will grow. It will be important to consider a proper consent management and deduplication strategy in your Marketing Cloud instance.

The below diagram gives you an idea of how Apple will implement these new features using a proxy connection between the user and the email services.

hide email

How Will These New Features Affect Email Marketing?

These changes will have a most visible impact on the heavily-monitored open rate. For most subscribers using the Apple Mail app after this update, you will no longer be able to tell if the recipients opened your emails, what time they opened, their geolocation, or which device they used to do so.

open rate Mail Privacy Protection

At first thought, the name Mail Privacy Protection might make you think that it would lead to a drop in the open rate. However, because emails will be automatically loaded “privately in the background” regardless of whether they have actually been opened or not, then rather than leading to a drop it will cause open rates to rise significantly, depending on the proportion of your subscribers that use the Apple Mail email client.

So if open rates become unreliable and geolocation is unavailable for many subscribers, that means that other aspects of email marketing will be affected. Here are some of the big ones:

  • A/B Testing by opens
  • Send time optimization
  • Re-engagement journeys and flows based on opens
  • Localized content based on opens or IP addresses
  • Monitoring deliverability and list hygiene

How to Prepare for Mail Privacy Protection

It’s important that we get a head start by taking a look at what we currently have. Here is a helpful checklist of steps you can take to get prepared.

  • Determine potential impact. Examine your audience and get an idea of what percentage of your subscribers are iOS, iPadOS or MacOS users. Even though the impact will vary based on whether they actually use the Apple Mail app or opt in to Mail Privacy Protection, it will give you a good idea of how large (or small) that segment is. Here’s a step by step guide to how you can use Marketing Cloud Reports to get an idea of these segments.
    • Click on “Reports” under the Audience Builder tab.
    • In the Report Catalog, use the Email Performance by Device report.
    • Change the view to Table View.
    • For the Rows, besides Mobile or Desktop, try adding some of the following: Device Model, Operating System Model, Operating System Name, Email Client Name.
    • For the Measures, besides the initial Opens and Clicks measures you might also try Unique Opens and Unique Clicks.
  • Clean house now, while you can. Take a look at your deliverability and list hygiene. How many unengaged subscribers do you have? It’s a good idea to focus on email deliverability while you can still use opens as a key indicator.
  • Create a reliable opens audience consisting of subscribers that are not using Apple Mail. If you wish to test opens at times in the future, this audience can be your guide.
opens audience

Source: www.t4.ai

(Apple Mail takes up on average 40% of the market. What about your audience?)

How to Adapt to Mail Privacy Protection

It goes without saying that for many in email marketing a world without reliable open rates will require significant effort to adapt. While each audience is different, here are some helpful tips to get you started.

  • Rethink what an engaged subscriber is for you. This means looking at other signs of engagement or combinations of such signs. That could be date of opt-in, unique clicks, purchases, on-site behavior, sign-ups for events and other touchpoints.
  • Establish new baseline metrics. CTR should be key, but keep an eye on other metrics that help to monitor your new engaged subscriber profile, or the opposite, such as the unsubscribe clicks.
  • For automation, set your splits and triggers to be click or time-based rather than open-based.
  • Take a long-hard look at your email UX and content. Does your design guide your readers to your CTA? Does your content motivate them to click? Is your content concise and direct? Is your email mobile-optimized? You would also do well to take a look at your subject lines and sender profile.
  • User identification. Hide my Email creates the possibility of different email addresses for the same user. So you will need to set up an appropriate deduplication and user-identification strategy.

Only More to Come

As mentioned before, privacy changes and Apple is nothing new. We can therefore expect that these changes continue, not only with Apple but that many other companies will follow in their footsteps, as is often the case. Rather than resisting, the best thing we can do is get on board ourselves and adapt to the preferences of users. Ultimately it’s a great opportunity to continually reassess and improve your approach to email marketing. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud will probably adapt to this new change. With the 5 major releases of Marketing Cloud per year we can most likely expect to see new features to address these important changes.

In the meantime, we will all continue to adapt to the changing landscape of email marketing.

At ShowerThinking we’re always glad to help you on that journey.

5 Keys to Email Marketing Health and Pharma

5 Keys to Email Marketing Health and Pharma

As the limits and bounds of technology continue to expand, one thing continues as a constant in marketing: email is king. And as we drill down into the specific fields of health and pharmaceutical marketing, things are no different. Your email marketing campaigns play a significant role in your results.

So you’ve got consistent email marketing campaigns going. Great! And you’re using new technology like Salesforce Marketing Cloud to manage those campaigns. Even better! But maybe you’re not seeing the results you were looking for.

In this article we’ll take a look at 5 keys to improving your email marketing in the Health and Pharmaceutical fields.

1. Segmentation

Segmented personalized email messages have been found to average 39% higher open rates than normal marketing emails.1 So make sure you are taking the time to personalize your emails and segment your audiences.

email list segmentation results

Source: Lyris, Inc.

Before beginning an effort to segment your emails, you first need to find out which segments you already have defined and which segments would be most useful to you. Certain segments might be a given, such as those based on specialty or geography. But there might be others that would be beneficial for you to analyze and identify.

Considering the benefits, any effort made in this area is always an excellent investment.

2. Content Is King: How is your CTA?

Attractive images and sharp design are also important when it comes to email marketing. Your Call to Action should reflect this. Users have become accustomed to receiving well-designed, eye-catching communications at every level. That means that your competition for a patient’s or healthcare provider’s attention isn’t necessarily another company within your sector, but instead Netflix.

A way to make sure that you easily keep your audience locked in is by making sure that you have a clear message. It should be immediately recognizable as soon as the reader opens your email. If you have more than one message to communicate, it might be better to divide those messages up into multiple emails over a journey.

data extension

Some email marketing platforms, like Salesforce Marketing Cloud (as seen above), offer the ability to spread out emails over journeys.

Another way to get that message across immediately is by focusing on what is communicated “above the fold.” This refers to the part of the email that the subscriber sees immediately upon opening, without scrolling.

Ask yourself: Does the content in this area truly make my readers want to continue reading (below the fold)? Does the content in this area make my subscribers want to click on a link or act on what they see there?

3. Devices and Delivery: Mobile First

We often imagine our subscribers reading our messages calmly at a desktop computer as they sip their coffee during a break, but that’s far from reality. As of March 2019, over 60% of email activity was on a mobile device.

email activity by device

Source: uplandAdestra

That means that when creating emails, we should all be thinking and designing mobile first, then looking at desktop, and not the other way around. Many mobile users also use dark mode. So make sure to take that into consideration and test accordingly.

Another thought is regarding when you send. If over half of your subscribers can receive email on their mobile devices, that means that healthcare providers (HCPs) have that same device with them outside of the office, when they’re not working. So, have you tried email campaigns on the weekends? It could be that your particular audience is more likely to engage outside of work.

4. Deliverability: Is Anyone Reading This?

How would you feel if you put all of this hard work into creating the perfect email, but then it was sent to the spam folder, or worse, blocked by the email client? I think it goes without saying that that is the last thing we want to happen. So paying attention to key factors that can affect the deliverability of our message is another key to email marketing in Health and Pharma.

How big is your email? Some email clients may simply bounce your email if it’s too large for their particular system. So it’s good to keep in mind the overall email size when designing your email. Images and GIFs can increase that size, so use them wisely. Some good best practices are as follows:

  • Keep the email body under 100 KB.
  • Don’t add attachments over 10 MB.
  • If possible, provide links to files rather than attaching them.

Mailbox providers analyze different factors to judge our mail. This results in what many call a “sending reputation.” How’s your reputation, you might wonder. There are several tools available that can help you get an idea of how you’re doing. Some of such tools are EmailOnAcid and MXToolBox.

It’s also important to examine who is showing as the sender of your email. Is it an individual person within your organization or is it a general address from your company? This can also have a direct impact on your deliverability.

5. Integrate Your Campaign into a Complete Client Experience

Have you applied all of the above points, and are looking to take your Health or Pharma email marketing campaigns to the next level? Another key is being able to integrate your email campaigns within an overall experience that spans multiple channels.

For example, you might send a follow-up email to an HCP after they have been visited by someone from the Sales team. Or you might create a campaign that encourages subscribers to sign up for a webinar. When you have a complete view of the communication cycle, then you’re able to use each channel appropriately. You can then integrate email marketing at the appropriate point and utilize it as a launching point for other channels.

integrate your campaing

Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to customize a journey to provide the experience your customers need across multiple channels.

For this very reason, email marketing platforms are evolving more and more towards marketing automation. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an excellent example of one such platform.

It is a leader in the Multi-channel Marketing field and offers the capability to perform mass-send email campaigns or to engage in more advanced marketing automation to create tailor-made multi-channel journeys.

In this article we’ve considered these 5 keys to Email Marketing in Health and Pharma:

  1. Segmentation
  2. Eye-catching and clear content
  3. Mobile-first design
  4. Deliverability
  5. Integration into User Experience

At ShowerThinking we are dedicated and certified pros when it comes to Marketing Technology. Feel free to continue browsing here on ShowerThinking.com or to reach out to us directly to see how Salesforce Marketing cloud and other technologies can help you to efficiently achieve your goals in these 5 key areas of email marketing.

Marketing Cloud June 2021 Release

Markerting Cloud Release

As part of the Salesforce improvement policies, the past 12th of June Marketing Cloud launched a new update. These improvements have arrived to have a better platform experience and to make our job as marketers easier.

The first upgrade is regarding Salesforce CDP. For those readers who don’t know what a CDP is, it’s the abbreviation for Customer Data Platform, which means a tool for unifying all customer information in one data model and simplifying the access from other platforms to make this process easier. This is not an improvement directly to Salesforce Marketing Cloud but it’s a great tool to have a better data ecosystem between Salesforce and Marketing Cloud.

Use Interaction Studio Behavioral Data in Salesforce CDP

You can now connect to an Interaction Studio account from Salesforce CDP.

If we use the new recent solution called Interaction Studio, we can now use all this data from our dataset to populate Salesforce CDP. This can be possible with the new connector in Salesforce CDP:

We just need to select a new Data Stream in CDP to choose all behavioral data from Interaction Studio and make our data more centralized.

This great tool will facilitate the flow of information between Interaction Studio and Salesforce and we will be able to nurture our campaigns and leverage the power of information in our tools.

Load Data from Salesforce CDP into Datorama

You can now load your data from Salesforce CDP into Datorama with the Salesforce CDP API connector and app.

It’s time for Datorama, now we can connect our CDP to Datorama and use all data to make awesome graphics and statistics. Datorama is a tool to make visible our information and data, so we can now make better and stronger reports. This change applies to all Datorama Editions.

Datorama is the perfect tool to translate our raw data into actionable information, so with this enhancement we will be able to have all that relevant information at a glance through graphs and useful dashboards.

Thanks to this integration, we will be able to harmonize the information stored in the CDP to make it more usable by the Datorama data model.

Load Data From Salesforce CDP into Datorama

Datorama Advanced Reports for Marketing Cloud

Better and improved reports for all your needs.

Time to report! Now from Datorama we will be able to consult and generate reports of our campaigns made with Email Studio and Journey Builder.

Thanks to the improvement that Salesforce has developed for this month of June, from Datorama we will be able to create pre-built panels to facilitate the creation of graphs and dashboards. Simply choose the campaign you have run and the results will be there, ready to make decisions and take advantage of the power of information.

In addition to this, Datorama is now able to schedule reports on a recurring way and export them to compatible files such as Excel, CSV, PDF even PowerPoint and PNG for a more visual reporting experience.

Now Datorama has more power and is a little more independent.

This upgrade is available for corporate or enterprise Marketing Cloud editions, or as a Discover add-on SKU for Pro customers.

Datorama Advanced Reports for Marketing Cloud

Einstein for Marketing Enhancements

Our beloved Einstein continues to learn and help us to be more productive with less effort.

In this release, Einstein has learned how to use Pardot, and now he will be able to help us send an email at the perfect time for each user. Salesforce has implemented in Pardot the already known Einstein Send Time Optimization, and we will take advantage of this new feature offered by Artificial Intelligence.

Einstein for Marketing Enhancements

In addition, continuing with the theme of machine learning, we will now be able to predict open rates from the point of view of the subject of an email. Einstein Copy Insights Performance Tester for Subject Lines is now available in Marketing Cloud.

Einstein for Marketing

Advertising Studio Enhancements

Snapchat:

With the latest Advertising Studio enhancements, marketers can now use their first-party data stored in Salesforce to create targeted, personalized advertising audiences for Snapchat. A new social network that can be used to interact with our customers.

Datorama:

Now we can connect Datorama with our Advertising Studio. Thanks to this development, we will be able to harmonize and visualize your results in a more graphic way. As with everything that surrounds Datorama, the advantage of adding more information to this platform is that we will be able to generate visual reports and reports that will help us to make decisions and process raw information.

Accounts as Campaign Members

Power ABM with account targeting.

We can now assign a campaign to a Salesforce account. This gives us the freedom to assign a campaign to several contacts via their Account. This makes it easier to plan our scheduling and get results. It may seem like a minor change, but it gives you a multitude of possibilities.

Accounts as Campaign Members

This has been all about the June 2021 Salesforce update.Now it’s up to us to learn how to use these enhancements and get the most out of them that we can.

Best regards!

Marketing Cloud Einstein

Marketing Cloud Einstein

Einstein, the powerful artificial intelligence tool that Salesforce has incorporated into its Marketing Cloud digital marketing platform, is going to help us answer them.

At what time am I most likely to have my contacts open my emails? 

Can I get to know my subscribers and their interactions with my brand even better?

What will be the optimal sending level for each of my subscribers? 

Can I do anything else to reduce the unsubscribe rate or my emails being reported as spam?

These are questions that any marketing manager has asked many times.

Einstein’s set of functionalities provide us with valuable knowledge of our customers both as a whole, as well as on an individual level, knowledge that we will also be able to apply effectively and quickly to create much more personalized customer experiences across all communication channels.

As we will see, some of the features of Einstein and its interactions with Journey Builder, the great “jewel in the crown” (option B – an already very complete and powerful tool) within Marketing Cloud, end up “fine-tuning” even more if possible the already excellent tool that is Journey Builder.

Let’s briefly explain the main features of Einstein available in Journey Builder:

Send Time Optimization

At what time am I most likely to have my contacts open my email?

Simple and effective. This feature of Einstein becomes a valuable help to answer the question that all of us responsible for digital communications ask ourselves every time we launch a mailing, Einstein STO allows us to add an activity in Journey Builder prior to the email activity that will decide for each contact, within the time interval that we indicate, the best time to send the email.

Einstein Send Time Optimization model:

  • Input: The model makes calculations using up to 90 days of your contacts’ engagement and behavioral data, including when messages are sent and opened.
  • Output: Each hour is assigned a score for each contact. Contacts are more likely to open a message if it’s sent during an hour with a high score.
  • Model: The model analyzes each contact’s best send hours and engagement data. Send hours that have higher open rates are likely to have higher scores. When send-hour history doesn’t provide enough information, recommendations rely on engagement data to generate analysis.

Einstein Engagement Scoring

Can I get to know my subscribers and their interaction with my brand even better?

Einstein Engagement Scoring is a predictive segmentation tool for SFMC that predicts subscriber engagement with your email campaigns over the next 14 days.

Another great feature that comes to reinforce Journey Builder allowing us to add a Scoring Split based on the engagement of our subscriber with the email or with our apps.

Einstein categorizes our subscribers into the following groups:

  • Loyalists: High open and high click engagement
  • Window Shoppers: High open and low click engagement
  • Selective Subscribers: Low open and high click engagement
  • Winback/Dormant: Low open and low click engagement

In this way we can create different branches in the journeys using the drag & drop system and therefore further customize the customer experience.

In addition, in the email channel, we can also choose to create different communication flows based on the propensity for certain actions: likelihood to open the email, to click, to convert on the web or even to remain subscribed.

Einstein-engagement-scoring

Einstein Engagement Frequency

What will be the optimal level of sends for each of my subscribers? Can I do anything else to reduce the unsubscribe rate or to keep my emails from being reported as spam?

To help us find that difficult balance point, Einstein Engagement Frequency provides an optimal range of how many emails to send over a given time period, comparing send frequency and engagement trends and getting suggestions of the optimal send rate.

This functionality will allow us to identify those subscribers who are already oversaturated and also the opposite case, those subscribers we are “under-engaging”.

The Split Frequency available in Journey Builder, which like the previous ones works through the drag & drop option, allows us to establish different routes for customers based on four categories:

  • Saturated
  • Almost Saturated
  • On Target
  • Undersaturated

Einstein Engagement Frequency model:

  • Input: The model makes calculations using the last 28 days email engagement and behavioral data, including when messages are sent and opened, and unsubscribes.
  • Output: Each contact’s engagement data is analyzed in comparison to the frequency of messages sent to them to generate a personalized engagement frequency score. Based on this score, contacts are classified as having Saturated, On Target, or Undersaturated message frequency. This data is used to inform how often you send messages.
  • Mode: The model analyzes how often each contact is sent to and how send frequency affects engagement. Engagement generally increases when send frequency increases until a contact reaches saturation. Contacts without enough send frequency data to generate a personalized engagement frequency score are treated as part of the On Target segment.

As I mentioned at the beginning, all these functions will help us to improve our subscriber’s individual experience through their direct application in Journey Builder, but they also enhance our global knowledge of our customers, since each of them has its own Dashboard.

einstein-engagement-frequency

Social Studio: More than a Social Networking Manager

Feature image Social Studio

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a trend and surely if you already work with this platform you will be curious to know a little more about the modules it has, such as Social Studio, Email Studio, Advertising Studio, etc.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what Social Studio is all about and why it’s important to take it into account when generating personalized experiences for the customer through social channels or for managing publications within the Marketing Cloud itself. If you are not yet familiar with this Digital Marketing Hub platform, we invite you to find out more about it in the following post: What is Marketing Cloud? The Salesforce Digital Marketing Hub.

What is Social Studio?

gestion redes sociales

Nowadays there are many tools to manage profiles and accounts in Social Networks simultaneously such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Metricool. This kind of tool is very useful since they allow complete management of Social Networks and also offers advanced measurement and analysis functionalities on the published contents.

However, Social Studio is one step ahead as it is more than a social network management tool. And you will surely wonder what characterizes Social Studio of this type of tool mentioned since at first glance it seems very similar. The answer to this kind of question lies in the fact that Social Studio (as a module within the Marketing Cloud) connects CRM, customer service, and marketing data to generate a personalized experience for the customer through Social Networks and strengthen the relationship with them. This means that in addition to being able to manage your profiles and Social Media accounts from the same platform, you can link all the interactions of your customers and followers with Salesforce’s CRM and customer service module data to offer them 100% customized solutions based on the data we have about them.

Social Studio features

Social studio overview

Social Studio is a very complete tool to manage all types of communications in Social Networks and therefore has a series of features that make it an ideal tool to manage any communication without having to leave the  Marketing cloud. These features are as follows:

Social studio overview

Social Studio allows you to keep track of your social network profiles in real-time and know what they are saying about your brand or your competitors through these channels. It also allows you to locate where these social conversations are happening so that it is easier to deal with them.

Social media management

Nowadays there are tools like Hootsuite that allow you to manage all your profiles in Social Networks from the same platform, and it is precisely Social Studio that allows this functionality apart from incorporating other features that make it a very powerful tool. From generating publications, programming them, responding in real-time, etc

Real-time interaction with the client

Social Studio’s connection to the Service Cloud allows the possibility of generating incident plans through social networks or simply automating and sending these communications to customer service teams. In addition, if the customer is included in our database with their social network profiles, we can keep track in the CRM of the number of times they ask the brand on Social Networks.

Calendar of contents and publications

In addition to all the above, you can have a complete follow-up of all the contents and publications pending and launched thanks to a powerful calendar. In this way, in a very visual way, it becomes very easy to organize all the publications within Social Studio.

What is Social Studio like inside?

When using Social Studio, you will see that it consists of 3 components that appear as menus or general sections:

Publish:

Social studio publish

Within this component, we find all the functions available to create, publish, or promote content at scale, in all the social accounts you need. By working on this menu we can publish content in real-time or schedule it for publication in the future, in addition to viewing such content or content already published through the Calendar (publication calendar).

It should be noted that the fundamental part of this component is the Calendar (publications calendar), and from it, you can carry out the following actions:

  • See when publications have been made, what they are about and who created them, all from the post details tab.
  • Add and review notes in the Calendar (depending on the level of permissions you have).
  • Filter the content and publications on the Calendar by Social Account and other types of filters.

Engage (interaction):

Social studio engage

This component has the functionality of being able to monitor the content already posted from Social Studio in any assigned Social Account or content not already published even if it was not from the same tool.

Therefore, through Engage you can see in real-time who is commenting, responding or sharing your posts on Social Networks and respond to those interactions or mark them to be assigned to other team members.

This menu is divided into different tabs (with a maximum of 30 tabs) which contain one or more columns (unlimited). Each column may contain one or more social accounts, although they may coexist between different columns, with for example two of the same accounts in different columns. The only peculiarity of this arrangement is that the tabs can have the same accounts but with different filtering options.

This component, apart from being very useful, offers a real-time collaboration by which you can see which colleagues are working and viewing or editing posts in order to avoid duplication.

Analyze:

Social studio analyze

This component basically serves as an analysis tool for your social channels. Within it, you can observe through dashboards and tables several metrics that will help you to understand in a more complete way the interactions within your social accounts.

When monitoring your social accounts, brands, and competitors it is very useful to use the
dashboards offered by Social Studio. These dashboards offer general performance metrics, keywords, trends, etc.

On the other hand, there are workbenches that are very useful because they allow a greater degree of customization thanks to the fact that they work with Artificial Intelligence through Einstein Vision. From these workbenches, you can observe and understand the social conversations held on Social Networks about your brand.

As the inclusion of these two elements (dashboards and workbenches) you can create reports on dashboards and posts in PDF format

Main advantages of Social Studio

Social studio ventajas

As we have seen before, the main advantage of Social Studio is being able to manage all types of communication with your clients without leaving the Marketing Cloud. This is very important since professionals in Social Networks are used to working with at least 3 or 4 different tools throughout the day, and with Social Studio while performing actions in social channels, you can go out and send a pending email in Email Studio or create a new workflow through Journey Builder, all from the same platform.

In addition, since it is integrated with Salesforce CRM, we can locate customers whose profiles we have the data on social networks and thus be able to offer personalized assistance depending on the type of customer. This way it will seem that we are always dealing with them face to face as we will have information available to know what to inform them about and how to attend to them efficiently.

All this added to the possibility of managing all your company’s social channels on the same platform and being able to analyze in real-time what they say about your brand and generate panels and reports, makes Social Studio one of the most powerful tools as far as Social Media Management is concerned.

Service Cloud connection

Finally, as we have already mentioned, there is the possibility of connecting Social Studio to the Service Cloud. As you may know, the Service Cloud is Salesforce’s cloud through which we can offer our customers personalized, intelligent, all-around customer service 24/7.

Today, many companies have real headaches when it comes to correctly identify their customers’ social network interactions and being able to respond to them in the right way, always keeping track of all the interactions made by the customer. Therefore, with the possibility of connecting Service Cloud with Social Studio, customer service processes are efficiently streamlined since from Social Studio we can derive our customers’ interactions in the form of cases to the corresponding agents in order to offer customers a totally effective service.

Although Social Studio requires quite a lot of knowledge and implementation to be able to exploit 100% of its functionalities and take advantage of all the benefits it offers, from ShowerThinking we are specialists in developing together with your company automation and marketing management programs through Marketing Cloud and Social Studio. Therefore, if you need help or training in Marketing Cloud we have the right team that can help you, so don’t hesitate to contact us!

Email Studio in Marketing Cloud: What it is and what it offers

Feature image email studio marketing cloud

As is the case with Email Studio, there is currently an infinite number of tools focused on Email Marketing, but year after year we are witnessing an evolution of these types of tools towards Digital Marketing Hubs that allow us to manage not only Email Marketing but also other types of actions such as the management of Social Networks.

Within this type of platform, there is the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, one of the Digital Marketing Hubs par excellence with a powerful Email Marketing module called Email Studio. If you still don’t know what Marketing Cloud is and would like to find out more about this platform, we invite you to read the following article to find out what Marketing Cloud is? The Salesforce Digital Marketing Hub.

Email Studio What is it?

que es email studio pequeno

It could be said that Email Studio is one of the most complete email marketing tools on the market and one of the most important modules within Marketing Cloud, as it is the module in which all types of activity with our subscribers is managed through the email channel.

In Email Studio, we can create all kinds of Emails (from scratch or through pre-defined or self-created templates), manage the uploading of contacts and subscribers, perform A/B tests on our sends, configure advanced sending options, perform reports and view metrics of our sends, etc.

Possibilities with Email Studio

Email Studio allows for an infinite number of possibilities, among which the following should be highlighted:

  • Content creation: within Email Studio we have the ability to create emails through blocks of content or pre-defined Marketing Cloud templates. The customization that can be made in emails is very extensive and can also include dynamic content that responds to parameters included in lists of subscribers or data extensions.
  • Subscriber management: the use of subscriber lists or data extensions is essential when sending emails in the Marketing Cloud. Therefore, within Email Studio there is an extensive menu in which you can see data on data extensions, subscriber lists, shared elements, profile and preference management, data filters, etc. If you already know more about this type of process, we recommend you take a look at the following article to find out when to use a Data Extension or a subscriber list in the Marketing Cloud.
  • Campaign automation: through Automation Studio you can create workflows that allow you to create automated email marketing campaigns, in addition to many other features that this module has.
  • Monitoring and optimization: Email Studio offers a range of interesting metrics and reports to track the performance of our emails. These types of reports offer metrics such as deliverability rate (delivery rate), number of bounces (with their reasons and classification), number of openings and clicks (both total and unique), CTRs, open rates, etc. It also offers an interesting visual module in which you can see the performance of users in the different clickable modules in percentages. All this data can be downloaded in PDF format to identify individually the performance of each subscriber.

In addition to all this, Email Studio is connected to the different modules/apps of the Marketing Cloud, so it can be used to make journeys through the sending of emails (in Journey Builder), it can be connected to the different lists of subscribers or data extensions (created in Contact Builder) or it can be used to make different reports and automated programs as already seen (in Automation Studio).

Take a look at the following video to see an overview of the possibilities offered by Email Studio:

Types of emails we can send with Email Studio

Through Email Studio’s Email Builder, we can create any kind of email, as there are infinite possibilities and everything can be done from scratch. But speaking of typologies when it comes to sending emails, there are three clearly defined types:

  • Transactional emails: this category includes all the emails that have to do with the transactional or purchase process of a product/service, such as purchase confirmations, emails relating to shipping notifications, product/service tracking emails, etc.
  • Promotional emails: here however we refer to any type of email related to promotions, such as newsletters, sending of promotions, events, discounts and coupons, loyalty programs, etc.
  • E-commerce emails: within this category, we can see examples of what large companies such as Amazon or Ebay do, as they send emails about recommended offers, abandoned shopping carts, order confirmations, post-purchase product assessment, etc.

Benefits of Email Studio for your company

Advantages email studio

In general, if your company uses the Marketing Cloud, it has already gained a series of advantages over companies that use other types of Marketing Automation platforms, as the Marketing Cloud is one of the most complete platforms on the market. But specifically, Email Studio, although it is a part of this great platform, offers many advantages to be highlighted once it starts to be used. Some of these advantages are:

  • Ease of use: Email Studio does not require in-depth knowledge of code when creating content, as its Drag-and-Drop interface allows the creation of emails of all types through simple or dynamic blocks (although it is always advisable to have a minimum knowledge of HTML code in case problems arise when creating content).
  • Connection with other modules and reduction of process complexity: Marketing Cloud combines different modules that complement each other, so that when working in Email Studio we can use different modules to complement our Email Marketing strategy, performing for example journeys based on user activity, automation, segmented, dynamic sending, etc.
  • Predictive Intelligence: Marketing Cloud includes the Einstein AI functionality through which companies can use their customer information to provide content based on the previous behavior of the same. This is also the case with Email Studio when offering dynamic content, A/B testing, or, for example, carrying out a journey by segmenting the sending of several emails depending on the number of user clicks.
  • Email sending security: Apart from being able to make the necessary configurations in terms of profiles and preferences for sending emails, we can segment our sendings and carry out as many test or trial sendings as we need, as well as add and delete users when sending emails based on data extensions or subscriber lists (both inclusion and exclusion).
  • Optimization of content and improvement of ROI: Through Email Studio, any sending or action we take is measurable, both generally and individually, so the greater knowledge and possibility of connection with big data tools such as Tableau or Einstein Analytics, we have greater possibility of optimizing our content and actions and impact directly on the ROI of our company.

In short, Email Studio is a module to be taken into account within the Marketing Cloud, as it is one of the most important, allowing you to carry out an infinite number of actions and allowing you to be aware of other modules thanks to its close relationship in other processes with them.

Although Email Studio requires a great deal of knowledge and implementation in order to fully exploit its functionalities and take advantage of all the benefits it offers, at ShowerThinking we specialize in developing automation and marketing management programs with your company through the Marketing Cloud. Therefore, if you need help or training in Marketing Cloud  we have the right team that can help you, so don’t hesitate to contact us!

The new Salesforce web development platform

Feature image new and Salesforce web development platform

Until recently, Salesforce had not invested in having a fundamental piece of marketing strategy, its own CMS. But that has changed with the recent launch of the Salesforce Content Management System (Salesforce CMS) – a hybrid CMS system designed to help Salesforce users create and deliver content on any channel or device.

As a result, customers with Salesforce can develop their own websites within the platform without the need for technical knowledge and with functionality similar to WordPress or Sitecore.

Salesforce CMS: simplicity above all

Salesforce cms easy

Salesforce CMS offers fascinating simplicity of use, so any user can create, manage, and deliver relevant content to their customers. This is done through the choice of content by category or by creating custom content, simply by creating the content in the application without the need for technical knowledge.

Salesforce CMS provides multilingual and translation support for companies that have pre-set branding standards and need to create content in multiple languages. It also has the functionality to develop “content collections” that can be added to different experiences without the need to create new content.

Fast and flexible

Salesforce CMS is a hybrid CMS, which means that anyone working with Salesforce can create content in a central location and then deliver it through different digital touchpoints, whether it’s a Salesforce-driven experience or another system.

If the content is to be added to an experience previously built with Salesforce, users can choose between two of Salesforce’s WYSIWYG (“what-you-see-is-what-you-get”) tools: Experience Builder and Commerce Page Designer. This way, content can be added to different channels built with Salesforce through a Drag & Drop system. In addition, both tools mentioned above are compatible with developers, so new components can also be designed through code.

Finally, through a system of “headless APIs” you can easily offer content on third-party websites, which is very useful if you do not have a website built.

Connected

Salesforce cms connect

One of Salesforce CMS’s greatest features is the ability to use data stored in Salesforce CRM or other Salesforce platforms to deliver relevant content to your customers. This makes it a very useful tool for getting to know your customers and providing them with the content they really need.

By putting the customer first, Salesforce CMS is a very good alternative for developing marketing strategies and we consider it to be the essential platform that was missing from the Marketing Cloud suite for effectively developing marketing campaigns in all areas.

At ShowerThinking we specialize in developing automation and marketing management programs with your company through Salesforce. So if you need help or training in Salesforce we have the right team that can help you, so don’t hesitate to contact us!