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Emailapocalypse: What Apple Mail Privacy Protection Means for Marketing Cloud

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:

What are these 3 features?
How will they affect email marketing and Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Can you prepare for this change?
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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Source: https://www.marketingtracer.com/seo/above-the-fold

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.

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.

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:

Segmentation
Eye-catching and clear content
Mobile-first design
Deliverability
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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

Marketing Cloud or Pardot: Main differences and which to choose

Marketing Cloud or Pardot, what is each platform? Both have many things in common, as they are Marketing Automation platforms and belong to Salesforce. The two tools share many functionalities in common, such as email automation, lead nurturing, social media marketing, CRM integration, etc. However, these two Salesforce tools are not the same, and if you’re already working with Salesforce CRM you’ll want to know which one is ideal for expanding your business into the world of marketing automation.

In this post, we will cover the main differences between the two tools and discover what makes each tool unique. In addition, we will help you decide which one is the best option for your type of business. If you are not yet familiar with these Marketing Automation platforms, find out more about them in Is Pardot the best Marketing Automation tool for B2B? and What is Marketing Cloud? Salesforce’s Digital Marketing Hub.

Marketing Cloud or Pardot What is the difference?

Marketing Cloud or Pardot are two Marketing Automation platforms with quite a few differences. Each platform addresses a different market niche and covers different needs in many cases. The main difference is the following:

Marketing Cloud is oriented to B2C business while Pardot is positioned as a B2B platform.

Regardless of the orientation of your business, there are some notable differences when it comes to deciding which tool to choose between Cloud Marketing or Pardot. Some of them are:

There is a big difference in terms of the sales cycle and its impact on database management. Pardot targets smaller databases of up to 500,000 contacts, although these databases are usually made up of fewer contacts each contact has a higher sales volume. On the contrary, Marketing Cloud can be directed to databases of more than 500.000 contacts, but in this case, there is a higher number of contacts and each contact has a lower sales volume.
Pardot is mainly an email marketing platform while Marketing Cloud has other functionalities besides email marketing such as Advertising Studio or Mobile Studio.
Pardot allows a greater alignment of the marketing and sales teams in B2B businesses with a detailed segmentation that favors the establishment of lead nurturing programs.
Marketing Cloud is excellent for “one to one” communications through different communication channels.
Finally, one of the main differences is the integration of the tool with others. Pardot is aimed at users who prefer a pure integration with the Salesforce Sales Cloud, while Marketing Cloud requires more complex integration with Salesforce or other CRM.

Despite these main differences, neither one platform competes with the other, nor is it better or worse. However, each one has an ideal audience and therefore the use cases are quite different. The same applies to the B2B or B2C orientation of these tools, as there is no universal rule that dictates that B2B-oriented companies can benefit from the Marketing Cloud or Pardot. Rather, depending on the company, the digital channels it uses to carry out marketing actions, the size of its database, and what needs to be achieved with the automation tool, Marketing Cloud or Pardot may be appropriate.

Marketing Cloud – Mobile Studio y Social Studio

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is made up of several modules that one by one cover a particular area of digital marketing This is why we have the following modules:

Email Studio: email marketing platform own Marketing Cloud. It is one of the most powerful platforms on the market and allows you to manage the creation, planning, and sending of emails to large databases from your own IP.
Mobile Studio: allows you to connect with customers through SMS, push notifications, and chat applications. It also incorporates the necessary technology to carry out Geofencing or proximity marketing actions.
Social Studio: connects CRM, customer service, and marketing data to generate personalized experiences and communications through social channels. It offers Social Listening and Social Media Management functionalities in order to manage publications through the Marketing Cloud.
Advertising Studio: allows the generation of campaigns and omnichannel customer journeys by working with the CRM databases with the most powerful digital channels on the market (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and Youtube).
Journey Builder: this module is where the communication flows with the client are created and programmed. Journey Builder uses all the Marketing Cloud modules and could be said to act as the nucleus or brain of Cloud Marketing to offer the best possible customer experience.

The main difference between Marketing Cloud and Pardot is the inclusion of the Mobile Studio and Social Studio modules, which are more relevant in the work of B2C companies, allowing the sending of one-to-one communications in several channels. Social Media Marketing is mainly enhanced by the inclusion of these two modules, which is essential for multinational companies that target end-users through Social Networks.

If you are curious to find out more about Marketing Cloud, visit the following post: What is Marketing Cloud?

Pardot – Ideal for Lead Management and Nurturing in the medium term

Mainly if your company has a long sales cycle, you close business through a Sales team (contrary to what happens in retail or e-commerce), or simply your products or services have a high price and your database is mainly focused on potential customers, Pardot should be your Marketing Automation solution.

When we enter Pardot this may seem like another part of the Marketing Cloud, but in reality it is not. Regardless of the main menus, the fundamental difference that we find with respect to Marketing Cloud is that Pardot is an excellent tool to enhance lead nurturing.

But why is Pardot ideal for Lead Nurturing? This is because Pardot although it has great similarities in the part of email automation with Marketing Cloud, it also has a functionality that allows users to create highly personalized drip marketing campaigns that use the users’ behavior on the web and their different actions to set triggers that help lead nurturing and perform programmed actions automatically.

On the other hand, supporting this main statement, Pardot has a lead assignment system through intelligent scoring and grading. This means that every time a score is added to our leads through different scoring rules, we can program and perform different automated actions through triggers. We can also set up automatic notifications when leads are active on our website, a feature not available in the Marketing Cloud.

If you are curious to discover more about Pardot, please visit the following post in which we explain in-depth the main features and functionalities of Pardot: Is Pardot the best Marketing Automation tool for B2B?

Other aspects to take into account when choosing Marketing Cloud or Pardot

Despite the different characteristics and functionalities of each tool, if you are a more advanced user and have a wide knowledge of Marketing Automation, you will be interested in knowing more about what it allows and what it does not allow, Marketing Cloud or Pardot. As aspects to take into account, we can find the following:

Landing Pages

Landing pages are essential when you want to collect information to attract new leads to the marketing and sales function.

Both Marketing Cloud and Pardot allow the creation of landing pages through different templates (Pardot offers fewer options of templates). If we look at terms like the landing page being optimized for other devices, in Marketing Cloud we are sure that they are optimized for mobile. On the other hand, Pardot requires you to create and maintain your landing pages with your own CSS style so that they are optimized for mobile. Another aspect to take into account is the possibility of programming the landing pages to save and publish since Marketing Cloud allows you to save and program the publication of your landing pages at a future date but Pardot does not allow this functionality. Something useful if you are waiting to include some documents, whitepaper, or link in the last moments. Likewise, on both platforms, we can hide the landing pages from the search engines so that they are not indexed until they are ready to be published.

Lead Nurturing

If your main focus is Lead Nurturing, as we mentioned before Pardot is the ideal platform. This is because it is able to increase the speed of the sales cycle by 30% according to the Salesforce Customer Relationship study.

Instead, the Marketing Cloud focuses on offering a range of related marketing activities that provide significant engagement with customers but do not support the sales cycle and that are less conducive to lead nurturing.

Email Campaigns

Email Marketing campaigns are fundamental in both Marketing Cloud and Pardot and one could say that it is the basis of communications in both platforms. Both platforms are really intuitive and you won’t need to have any knowledge of HTML when it comes to email layout (although it’s always advisable to have previous knowledge to help you build your emails correctly).

However, the main difference between Marketing Cloud and Pardot in this section comes from the preview of emails. Marketing Cloud offers a desktop and mobile view when creating your campaigns, while Pardot requires extra time to render and offer a preview of the email as it uses Litmus to offer this preview on various devices.

Overall, the Marketing Cloud offers greater flexibility when creating your email campaigns by allowing you to use all of the content that resides in Salesforce to create and customize elements such as email subject, sender name, etc.

Social Sharing

As for Social Sharing, Pardot offers limited functions such as sharing basic posts on Social Networks such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, while Marketing Cloud makes use of its Social Studio module to be able to do social listening, connect with users and launch updates through the different Social Networks in a more complete way. So we could say that Marketing Cloud acts as a real Social Media Manager while Pardot stays as a simple tool to update content on Social Networks.

Extensive Integration with Salesforce

In terms of ease of integration with Salesforce, Pardot is miles ahead of the Marketing Cloud, as its seamless integration with the Sales Cloud shows all data correctly synchronized between Salesforce CRM and Pardot, avoiding duplicate data. In addition, when creating emails, forms, or landing pages with Pardot, records previously used in Salesforce can be used in Pardot to create custom fields.

In short, when to use Marketing Cloud or Pardot?

As we have said before, it is not possible to know for sure when to use the Marketing Cloud or Pardot, but there are use cases and frequently asked questions that are easy to answer as the answer is quite clear. Some of these questions are:

Does your business have a B2C business orientation? → Use Marketing Cloud.
Does your business have a B2B business orientation? → Use Pardot.
Is your business e-commerce driven? → Uses Marketing Cloud.
Is your sales process highly influenced by sales representatives? → Use Pardot.

These questions are fairly obvious, but they are usually the first questions asked by people making the decision to include a Marketing Automation platform in their business or not.
If we go into more detail, we can see some frequent use cases that are immediately associated with Marketing Cloud or Pardot. Therefore, we have the following use cases:

A company needs to extract and integrate data from various external sources such as SAP or Oracle for example. → In this case it is convenient to use the Marketing Cloud due to its flexibility and complex integration with other external tools.
A company needs to integrate a communication strategy based on the combined sending of SMS, push notifications and emails. → In this case it is most convenient to use Marketing Cloud, in particular we will benefit from the possibilities offered by the platform through the Mobile Studio module, explained above.
A company decides to integrate its native advertising platform with the Marketing Automation platform. → In this case, the Marketing Cloud is the ideal platform, since with its Advertising Studio module it is capable of generating campaigns through various digital channels.
A company established in several countries and with several business units decides to implement a Marketing Automation tool to help automate the marketing processes →. In this case we have a tie between Marketing Cloud and Pardot, since when working with several business units and countries, we can work through several folders or with several profiles. It is worth mentioning that Marketing Cloud starts with an advantage in this section, allowing us to align different folders belonging to business units or countries with different lists of subscribers, data extensions, and databases, making management easier.
A company that previously worked with Salesforce CRM and that identified its sales processes through opportunities decided to implement a Marketing Automation platform to speed up communication with its potential clients, among other things. → In this case it is convenient to use Pardot as it offers more possibilities with respect to Lead Nurturing programs and its Lead Management functionalities are more complete.

Obviously, this is not a universal theory, and cases arise where, for example, even if a company whose business system is purely B2B, it prefers to use the Marketing Cloud due to the services it offers in terms of Social Media Marketing and more complex and extensive configuration possibilities. Another case may be that of having a CRM platform other than Salesforce and needing to carry out a complex integration with one of these two Marketing Automation platforms, in which case the most favorable option would be Marketing Cloud again.

Regardless of the case your business is going through, the most important thing when choosing Marketing Cloud or Pardot is to contact professionals specialized in those platforms. At ShowerThinking we are specialists in developing, together with your company, programs for the automation of marketing campaigns. If you need help or training in Cloud Marketing or Pardot we have the right team that can help you, so don’t hesitate to contact us!

Social Studio: More than a Social Networking Manager

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?

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 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:

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):

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:

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

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?

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

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!

Test A/B in Email Studio: Steps and considerations

As we know, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is made up of several modules that cover different areas of Digital Marketing for B2B and B2C. Sending emails that generate a positive impact on our clients’ subscribers represents a fundamental area in Email Marketing strategies. Therefore, Marketing Cloud covers this aspect with tools such as Email Studio and in particular the A/B tests.

The A/B tests allow you to send two initial “test” versions of the same email using Email Studio in Marketing Cloud to two different groups of subscribers from the same data extension or list.

These tests can vary in terms of, for example, the subject, the preheader, the body of the email, the versions of the email or the creatives. Finally you can send the version that has given the best results to all the remaining subscribers of the data extension or list.

If you’re not yet familiar with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and would like an overview of what it offers, we invite you to read the following article to find out What is the Marketing Cloud? The Salesforce Digital Marketing Hub.

How do A/B tests work?

First of all, we must take into account that the system will randomly select which subscribers will receive both tests, allowing you to use the same set of subscribers for future A/B tests and to send the winning version, which has given the best results to the rest of your subscribers automatically when it is determined which one it is.

Although the A/B tests are part of the testing process, you will be sending the emails to actual subscribers, so you must guarantee the quality of both versions. Use the A/B test before sending the final version to the rest of your subscribers, always after you have obtained the test results.

In this way, Marketing Cloud will send both versions of our email to the test recipients, who may represent, for example, 20% of the total. That is, version “A” would receive 10% and version “B” would receive another 10%. Once we know which version has had the best results, it will be sent to the other subscribers automatically. If you prefer, you can also send it manually. Following the example, it would be the remaining 80%.

If you prefer to send the email manually, you can analyze these results and send the other subscribers the version that best suits your requirements.

Steps for setting up an A/B test

Setting up an A/B test in the Marketing Cloud is not only extremely useful, but also simple.

The first step is to define the objectives of the test. As we have just seen, three of the most common objectives are to determine the highest opening rate, the click rate and the interaction rate. Next, identify your subscribers to perform the A/B Test. You can select from a list of subscribers, a group, a data extension or a data filter. You can now configure the A/B Test in Email Studio:

1. Enter Email Studio. Click on A/B Testing and then Create A/B Test.

2. Assign a name to your test and add a description if you wish.

3. Determine your type of test:

Depending on our preferences, we can test within the following fields: Subject, email version, email content, sender’s name, date/time of sending and preheader.
If you want to test specific email content areas, make sure you have added a Test A/B content block to the email.

4. Choose the recipients of the test:

Select the lists of subscribers, groups, data extensions.

Click on Select
It determines its distribution. This is the number of subscribers you are actually sending the test to. You can manually enter the percentage or the number of subscribers you want to include.

5. Establish the criteria of the email with best results. You can choose between:

Highest single open rate (total number of emails opened by single recipients divided by the number of emails delivered in the campaign).
Highest Click Through Rate (CTR) (percentage of recipients who have clicked on any link in your email).

6. Specifies the duration after which the system will determine the email that has given the best results.

7. When running an A/B test on the subject of an email select whether you want the line from the subject that has given the best results to be saved again in the original email.

8. Schedule the implementation of the A/B test

Select a start time: immediately, scheduled or schedule later.
Select how to send the email that has given the best results: automatically or manually.

9. Configure sending options

Select a shipping option
Click on Finish
Click on Confirm

Following these simple steps you will have created an A/B Test in Marketing Cloud ready to be executed or programmed, and with it you will be able to measure the different versions of your email or content within your email.

Conclusions

We are convinced that with this guide you will be able to successfully set up and run your A/B tests in Email Studio de Marketing Cloud and use them to optimize your future email campaigns with the highest degree of satisfaction and engagement. Testing these variables on a regular basis will allow you to track the results of your email and see which version has the highest single open rate or the highest single click rate. In addition, by performing Test A/B you will be able to discover patterns that work well in your emails and discard patterns that don’t usually give satisfactory results in future emails.

For all these reasons, A/B tests are a powerful module within Email Studio since they allow you to optimize your email marketing campaigns to deliver more specific and relevant messages to your subscribers. By automating the testing process, you will save time and resources. Performing a correct use of A/B tests is a task that requires care and experience, and at ShowerThinking we are specialists in developing together with your company automation and management programs for Email Marketing through the Marketing Cloud.

Therefore, if you need help or training in Marketing Cloud , our team of professionals will advise you on everything you need. Do not hesitate to contact us!

CloudPages in Marketing Cloud

As we all know, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is made up of several modules that cover different areas of Digital Marketing for B2C. The creation of Landing Pages and microsites is a fundamental area in content creation strategies and Cloud Marketing covers this aspect with CloudPages.

CloudPages is a feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud that allows you to create and publish marketing content for your company, with special emphasis on landing pages and microsites.

After creating the content, you can optimize and customize it for different mobile, social media, and web experiences. You can publish it on the spot or schedule it for later and analyze what you have published to measure its performance in each channel.

If you’re not yet familiar with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and would like to learn more about the platform’s capabilities, please read the following article to find out What the Cloud Marketing Cloud is all about. The Salesforce Digital Marketing Hub.

CloudPages: Channels and creation

CloudPages supports publishing to these channels:

Landing Pages
MobilePush
Microsites

To ensure that we send emails to our subscribers based on their preferences, we need to create a Landing Page with a form that includes specific fields through which we can obtain this information from the clients.
Creating Landing Pages with CloudPages and Content Builder is a fairly simple process considering the powerful content editor that Marketing Cloud has.

On the other hand, Marketing Cloud recommends the use of an exclusive domain for emailing activities and managing auto-response emails. The configuration of the domain for use with Marketing Cloud requires several DNS entries to work properly.

Main features of CloudPages

The main features of CloudPages allow the creation, editing and publication of content to be streamlined so that it is easy for digital marketers to manage it. Therefore, we highlight the following features:

A single functionality and a single process for creating usable content across multiple channels.
Edit by organizing content using gears.
Drag & Drop interface to create blocks of content
Ability to edit HTML code and include elements such as code snippets.
Data obtained from the Smart Capture block is automatically saved in lists and data extensions.
Adds default versions of content to different content blocks in order to speed up the process of creating CloudPages.
Design and preview content in the format your customers will see.
CloudPages has permissions through which we can give editing and publishing permission to different users within the Marketing Cloud.

This way, we will have the contacts from each form stored in different Marketing Cloud extensions with Salesforce’s unique identifiers, so we can immediately impact users and have all the information in Salesforce’s CRM automatically, without the need for queries to retrieve the information.

CloudPages applications in our business

Through the use of CloudPages, we may also create a personalized preference center for our customers, where they can select their preferences regarding our products, decide when they want to receive emails or modify their personal information.
Another clear example of the CloudPages application would be a subscription page for our website, where users can have their own username and password.

AmpScript

A CloudPage can contain AmpScript content. This proprietary scripting language of Cloud Marketing can be integrated as advanced dynamic content into emails and SMS as well as CloudPages.

AmpScript is very useful for extending the functionality of our website. In addition, this programming language allows, for example, to insert, update or delete data and to use automations. Other of its multiple uses are:

Create surveys
Measure your customers’ satisfaction with NPS (Net Promoter Score)
Pre-fill data
Update data in Salesforce
Generate Lead Management processes

CloudPages vs Landing Pages

CloudPages are, after all, landing pages hosted on the Marketing Cloud and used within the Salesforce ecosystem. However, they have several differences from a landing page that can be created in an external CMS such as WordPress, Drupal or Magento.

Thus, it is necessary to establish the differences and advantages that the use of CloudPages has over the use of landing pages.

CloudPages

They are created within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and can be used within the Salesforce ecosystem.
They enable centralized content creation and marketing and communications strategy within the different channels offered by Salesforce
With Content Builder, creating and editing these landing pages is simple and intuitive. No prior knowledge of HTML, CSS, or other programming languages is required.
Dynamic content can be inserted according to the attributes of our clients, thanks to AMPscript.
CloudPages allow for easy integration with all Salesforce environment apps, with much greater possibilities for extracting and harmonizing content and data.
They can be used dynamically to include content in Email Marketing or MobilePush campaigns within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Landing Pages

They can be created through any CMS (Content Management System).
If you use any Salesforce app (Salesforce CRM for example), it’s more difficult to centralize marketing and communication efforts through landing pages.
Depending on the CMS used, the creation and edition of landing pages can be simple or extremely complicated, having to know programming languages or not.
They do not allow for the inclusion of dynamic content based on the attributes of our subscribers or clients because they cannot be edited with AMPscript language
Depending on the CMS used, extracting and harmonizing the results achieved through a landing page can be complicated due to integration with apps from Salesforce or other companies.
Their use within Email Marketing or MobilePush campaigns is more reduced than that of CloudPages as they are not exclusive components of Cloud Marketing.

Conclusions

In short, the use of CloudPages is a very important option if we use Cloud Marketing and we want to see our Communication and Marketing efforts bear fruit. To conclude, we can point out that this Marketing Cloud module also has an option to adjust SEO parameters and its own analytics area where you can see data such as

Views
Clicks if you have any clickable element (button, etc.)
Sending Smart Captures
Integration with data processing and interpretation tools such as Datorama or Tableau

For all these reasons, CloudPages is a powerful module within the Marketing Cloud as it allows you to create content that complements your email marketing strategies and content, helping to centralize all communication efforts within the Marketing Cloud and can be complemented with other Salesforce apps such as Salesforce CRM.

Therefore, the correct use of CloudPages is a task that requires care and experience, but from ShowerThinking we are specialists in developing together with your company automation and marketing management programs through Marketing Cloud. Therefore, if you need help or training in Cloud Marketing, we have the right team that can help you, so do not hesitate to contact us!

Evergage joins the Salesforce family

Salesforce recently announced the full acquisition of Evergage, a major move that is not yet known but involves a large number of stakeholders and aims to enhance the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

What is Evergage?

Evergage is a cloud-based software company that hosts user data to collect, analyze, and respond to user behavior on its websites and apps in real time. Therefore, this company founded in 2010 by Karl Wirth and Greg Hinkle, has been positioned as a company specializing in real-time personalization and customer data platform (CDP).

Evergage’s mission throughout these 10 years has always been to personalize the world, joining forces with large multinational companies such as: Autodesk, Carhartt, CenterState Bank, Citrix, Publishers Clearing House, Zumiez and many more. These alliances have provided real-time data-driven experiences across all channels, including web, email, mobile, adtech, social, call-center, in-store and in-branch.

What will this acquisition by Salesforce mean?

The acquisition of Evergage by Salesforce is a major move that delivers Evergage’s multi-channel customization and machine learning capabilities to complement Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s data and audience segmentation modules. This gives companies using the Marketing Cloud the ability to deliver more relevant experiences across all user interactions throughout the customer journey.

This move by Salesforce may have its main focus on enhancing Interaction Studio’s capabilities at the level of Web-level event listening. We also look forward to seeing the changes this acquisition will bring in a future Salesforce Marketing Cloud upgrade.

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