Guide for navigating Google and Yahoo’s new policies in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Guide for navigating Google and Yahoo's new policies in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

The world of email marketing is changing significantly due to new policies from giants like Google and Yahoo. These policies, designed to protect people from unwanted spam and enhance email security, require marketers to adjust their strategies.

This guide explores how Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you adapt to these changes, ensuring your emails not only comply with these new rules but also continue to be effective and connect meaningfully with your audience.

Revised Sending Policies

Starting February 2024, Google and Yahoo will introduce new rules for those sending a large number of emails to @gmail and @yahoo addresses. These rules aim to strengthen mailboxes against spam and fraudulent emails. The focus is on authenticating the sender’s identity and making sure the content of emails is relevant. This means if you send a lot of emails, it’s more important than ever to use authentication methods like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Also, you should keep spam rates very low and make it easy for recipients to unsubscribe if they choose to do so.

Who Needs to Pay Attention

  • High-Volume Senders: If you send more than 5000 emails a day, you must refine your delivery methods and maintain a good IP reputation to ensure your emails are delivered successfully.
  • Senders without Authentication: Using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is no longer optional; it’s essential. Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes these easier to implement, but you need to pay attention to the setup details.
  • No Clear Unsubscribe Option: You must provide a clear and straightforward way for recipients to opt out of your emails. It’s now a requirement, aligning with both user expectations and the new emailing standards.
  • High Spam Rates: Keep your spam rate below 0.30%. Going over this can harm your IP reputation and your email delivery success, so act quickly and effectively if your rate goes too high.

Importance of Email Authentication

Validating your emails using protocols such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is crucial in validating the authenticity of your emails and optimizing deliverability.

How to Set Up Email Authentication

  1. SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Validates and confirms that emails sent from your domain are actually coming from a server that’s allowed to send them.
    • Setup in Salesforce Marketing Cloud: If you’re using the Sender Authentication Package and your domain is linked to the servers of Marketing Cloud, then your SPF is already set up. If not, you need to add SPF records. These records give permission to Marketing Cloud to send emails from your domain. You do this by adding the line include:cust-spf.exacttarget.com to your domain’s SPF record in the DNS settings. This step is vital to make sure your emails are delivered properly and don’t end up in the spam folder. More detalied information in Help And Training Community.
  2. DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): Adds a digital signature to your emails, which recipients can check to confirm the email is genuine and that it really came from you.
    • Setup in Salesforce Marketing Cloud: f you’re using the Sender Authentication Package, your DKIM is already up and running. If you’re not using it, you need to create DKIM keys in Marketing Cloud and then add the public key from these to your domain’s DNS records. Doing this strengthens the trustworthiness and security of your emails.
  3. DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance): Combines SPF and DKIM, adding an additional layer of authentication and giving you insights into any issues with authentication.
    • Setup in Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Setting up DMARC involves creating a DNS record that specifies how emails that fail SPF and DKIM checks should be handled. This helps protect your brand from email fraud and improves the likelihood of your emails being delivered successfully.

Implementing and checking that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are set up correctly does more than just improve how often your emails are successfully delivered. It also makes sure that your email marketing strategies are up-to-date with the newest standards for security and privacy. Tools like Aboutmy.email provide specific insights for each email you send. This is particularly helpful if you’ve got a Sender Authentication Package (SAP) from Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It makes it easier to meet the new email sending rules set by Google and Yahoo.

Good Practice

Simplified Unsubscribe Process, One-Click Unsubscribe in SFMC

Making it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe is crucial, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) has a streamlined process for this. It automatically includes an unsubscribe feature in its emails, which aligns with the best practices for allowing users to opt-out. In addition, the inclusion of an Unsubscribe Link or consent management option in the body of the email is necessary for the user experience and ensures that users can easily manage their email preferences, reinforcing a user-centric approach to email communication.

To ensure the SFMC Preference Center is operational, especially the One-Click Unsubscribe option, you should:

  1. Check the Email Code: Look at the original version of your email. If you see the tag List-Unsubscribe=One-Click, it means the One-Click Unsubscribe feature is integrated properly, making it easy for users to opt-out.
Email mostrar. List Unsubscribe
List Unsubscribe
  1. Use AMPscript in SFMC: When you’re creating an email in Marketing Cloud, add the AMPscript code %%unsub_center_url%%. This links directly to the default preference page of Marketing Cloud, making the unsubscribe process clear and in compliance with regulations.
Subscription Center New Policies

In addition, it should be noted that Google applies algorithms that analyze users’ interactions with the emails they receive, so its email service proposes the option to unsubscribe from newsletters and promotions based on the subscriber’s interaction with these emails. If a user receives many marketing emails from a company and never interacts with them, the Gmail application will proactively start suggesting to unsubscribe to help optimize their inbox.

Example of the google unsubscribe button in the inbox of emails:

From name. new policies

Managing Your Audience and Keeping Your List Clean

Regularly cleaning your subscriber list to remove addresses that cause bounced emails is essential. Setting up a consent process helps keep your list up-to-date. Using Data Cloud for sophisticated data management lets you segment and personalize your audience on a large scale, using AI and machine learning to streamline your campaigns. This is a key practice for fine-tuning your audience engagement.

Monitoring and Adapting Your Strategy

It’s vital to monitor your campaign’s bounce rates using the analytic tools in Marketing Cloud. By closely examining the tracking and reports in Report Analytics, you can identify issues early and adjust your strategies to improve your metrics. Pay special attention to Blocked Bounces, as they’re a key indicator of potential issues. Tools like PostMaster Tool also provide extra insights and help you maintain a good IP reputation.

Content Personalization

Creating relevant, personalized content is critical to today’s digital marketing strategy. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides tools that allow you to craft messages that reflect the specific needs and preferences of each subscriber. Personalization, in this context, becomes an essential strategy to increase audience engagement. The platform also offers advanced capabilities for segmentation and A/B testing, allowing you to continuously adapt and refine your messages based on a detailed analysis of user behavior.

In conclusion, Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps to align the new policies of these important email services, and follow the new regulations that as we are seeing are leading to a comprehensive protection of the user. For this reason it is vital to adapt to these new changes so that the impact on our email marketing strategies is minimal. Also keep in mind that these changes are going to be more and more frequent. Anticipating future trends and being prepared to face the coming challenges will better position us to seize the opportunities in the new era of email marketing.

Note: Always check the official Salesforce Marketing Cloud documentation before implementing any changes to ensure your methods are up-to-date and compliant with current standards.

Discover the Potential of Rep Suggestions Triggered from Marketing Cloud

Veeva Suggestons

CRM suggestions enable customer-specific information and recommend actions to reps. In this post we are going to break down this Veeva functionality piece by piece, diving deeper into how to use them strategically from Marketing Cloud and truly empower your Sales teams.

Widget Suggestion

What you need to know about Veeva suggestions

Once activated, reps can receive timely, actionable insights on their iPad. It’s all about guiding to the next interaction with the relevant HCP using their preferred channel and optimal key message. Let’s browse through the suggestions as they appear in Veeva’s CRM interface.

Suggestion Pannel

Each suggestion is linked to a specific action, such as scheduling a call or sending an email. Reps can directly take action from the Suggestion panel or dismiss the recommendation.

Send an Email From a Suggestion: Users can send approved emails directly from suggestions. It’s possible to keep track of the email activity.

Schedule a Call From a Suggestion: Reps can schedule calls directly from suggestions. It’s possible to keep track of whether users execute the suggestions.

Mark as Complete: When a suggestion is marked as completed, it’s removed from the user interface.

Dismiss: Suggestions can be dismissed using the Dismiss button. Feedback on suggestions can also be captured. Veeva provides the ability to define and assign surveys to suggestions. New surveys can be created or edited in the CRM before the suggestion is activated.

Feedback captured on suggestions

Key Suggestion Components

Title: Title of the suggestion

Reason: Reason for the suggestion to the representatives

Priority: The suggestion can be configured as low, normal or high priority. 

Expiration date: A suggestion can be assigned an expiration date value.

Suggestion survey: Veeva CRM can be used to generate feedback on suggestions.

A Data-Driven Strategy for Smarter Suggestions

Suggestions are based on data and predictive models. A data-driven strategy is key to leveraging what is learned to enhance next best actions. HCP information is sometimes siloed, so knowing and building a repository with all the knowledge in one place is more relevant than ever.

What happens if we don’t have the right technology and data strategy in place? The rep may start to distrust these recommendations and eventually stop using the system. Suggestions should empower the field force, helping the sales team to focus on the relevant targets and priority activities.

Reps are not expected to be data analysts, suggestions can enable them to easily extract digital insights. Suggestions need to bring confidence to reps, providing them with information, evidence and insight so that they can take back control and achieve the long-awaited HCP-centric view.

Why Marketing Cloud Can Create Empowering and Trusted Suggestions

Field force activities are no longer the core of HCP interactions. For this reason, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can play an important role in bridging part of the gap that Pharma companies have between Sales and Marketing. Suggestions can provide much more awareness of what the Marketing team is doing in other types of communications and others channels. From a marketing perspective, suggestions represent an opportunity to create actionable Sales insights through existing or predictive digital data.

Uses Cases

For example, it could be valuable to launch some always-on flows triggering suggestions. An attractive one can be if an HCP opted-out from digital communications. It’s an opportunity for the rep to schedule a call in order to understand and collect channel/content preferences.

We can also use webinar registrations as a trigger for suggestions. Just after the event, the rep can send an Approved Email with extended information regarding the event. There’s even the possibility to alert if the HCP expresses a low/high satisfaction on a webinar due to a specific reason.

We can also recommend an interaction after a web registration, or if we register a relevant email engagement in a period of time or interest throughout the cycle for a particular key message.

What is really exciting is Marketing Cloud’s ability to measure campaigns by adding as a stage whether the sales call was actually recorded, the results of the Approved Email or simply the reason why the rep rejected the recommendation. We can gather all the data together in Marketing Cloud, close the funnel and fully understand the results of a campaign.

The examples presented are isolated use cases. Where the tool really comes into its own is when considering suggestions in order to implement an omnichannel strategy with well-defined and measurable objectives. By combining Sales and Marketing data, we can ensure that a rep’s next move is going to be authentic and meaningful to each customer segment and aligned to the brand’s global strategy.

What is Data Cloud?

What is Data Cloud?

An unified vision of the information

Data cloud

Data Cloud is a key technology for the management and efficient analysis of large volumes of data. Some years ago, the main problem companies faced was obtaining information about their clients and their interactions. Nowadays, the issue lies in correctly managing all the information gathered from different platforms, which is also stored in different places. This situation prevents a more in-depth and effective analysis of clients’ activity.

With all this information in storage, the focus shifts into unification and harmonization processes. How can we manage all this data about clients under a single image, on a single platform?

Salesforce Data Cloud – previously known as Customer Data Platform, or CDP for short– has revolutionized information management and personalization of the communications sent to the client.

On a single platform, under the same umbrella, it concentrates all the data from our clients and provides a single enriched image that allows us to impact them with the greatest possible personalization.

What is exactly Data Cloud?

But… What is Data Cloud? Well, it is a huge data platform built into Salesforce. It ingests data from different platforms and unifies it following a series of rules –known as match rules–. Thanks to that, you are able to have a complete image of your customer: Interactions in the different platforms, engagement, visits…

In addition to this, Data Cloud allows the creation of complex segments through an easy and intuitive drag and drop interface. This gives the user the opportunity to create audiences not only by mixing information from all the data sources required, but also without requiring technical skills. In fact, Data Cloud’s intended target are marketers.

 

How Data cloud Works

What other benefits can I obtain from Data Cloud?

Apart from the magic of the unification and the availability of creating segments, Data Cloud provides other benefits that should be highlighted.

Export the information to other platforms

In the same way it can receive data from any data source, after creating an audience, it can be sent back to another platform; its consolidated data can be used where needed. For instance, it can be used to create a campaign in Salesforce Marketing Cloud through a journey based on the clients of a Data Extension which will be automatically created when sending the segment from Data Cloud.

Additionally, another interesting option is to send the audience to a specific analytics tool that could help discover new insights or enrich an engagement analysis.

Create Calculated Insights to enrich your segments

Calculated Insights Builder

One of the main tabs found in Data Cloud’s menu is named ‘Calculated Insights’. These are calculated metrics which, thanks to the development of complex formulas and queries, provide numerical insights about anything imaginable.

For example, you can build a CI to know the number of times a customer has visited your web during the past month. Or maybe you could calculate the open rate of the customer to enrich your segmentations by including only those with a high or medium open rate.

As you can see, the possibilities are endless, so, are you ready to let your imagination fly?

Data Cloud has brought us a new world of enriched and unified data to create any segment and analyze it with better results. If you are thinking about driving your company’s data to the next level, you should keep Data Cloud in mind.

Accreditation in Marketing Cloud Personalization: Guide to Success

Accreditation in Marketing Cloud Personalization: Guide to Success

As in any cloud, we have our certifications or accreditations and in this case Personalization has an accreditation available. For this reason we will have the exam and training in the Partner Learning Camp portal that we will use as a guide to train and finally get the accreditation.

Let's prepare the accreditation!

As a good Marketer, you will know all the possibilities that Personalization offers us, but if you haven’t read it already, you can read our article about what it is and all the possibilities that Personalization offers us.

This tool, integrated in Marketing Cloud, is based on personalizing the user’s browsing experience, using the knowledge we have of the user. For all this to work like a well-oiled engine, we must learn how to use the tool. As always Salesforce offers us a training that will help us to learn and obtain the necessary knowledge to take advantage of the potential of this tool.

What should I know?

In the Marketing Cloud Personalization accreditation exam we will have 75 minutes to answer 50 multiple choice questions and we must get at least 70% of the questions right. Below we give you the clues so that you know the importance of each section with respect to the total, in addition we add some hints to go a little deeper.

Solution Overview 16%

General knowledge. Like any tool, we must have some basic and generic knowledge about what it is used for and its potential, and be able to provide a good solution to our needs.

Setup & Administration 6%

The foundation. We must learn how to install and manage the tool so that the client has all the needs in terms of permissions and security. Although the tool does not have many options on this aspect, these are the basics so that it has a good initial foundation.

Data Integration 14%

The power of information. Here we must know how we can feed the tool with the information it needs to personalize the content. From how to integrate it with the CRM or third party tools, to how to load information from a CSV. This part is important so that the user’s information is not exclusively from browsing behavior and we have other types of information that give us an advantage when personalizing content (name, country, email…).

Sitemap 18%

Stores the behavior. In order for the tool to obtain the navigation data, we must configure the Sitemap. This is a script that can be executed in the user’s browser and will send the information to Personalization. It is basic and vital to be able to run campaigns and experiences on the web depending on the behavior of the surfer. To take full advantage we must have some knowledge of Javascript and the library itself that we load from Personalization.

Segmentation 18%

Divide and conquer. When you have all the users and all the information correctly stored, the next step will be to divide the audience into segments so that we can create and leverage campaigns for a certain number of users. We must know how to properly segment people based on their attributes, their behavior, their metadata…

Einstein Capabilities 10%

Einstein always helps. Here we must know how to use Artificial Intelligence to our advantage and know how to predict the next best action, visualize the best experience or optimize the dynamization of content. We must know what ingredients we need to successfully execute a recipe to get a more accurate end result.

Activation 18%

Ready to go. We must know how to face the moment of putting all the above points into production without rushing. We must give importance to those small quality details that make a Personalization integration shine.

Tips & Tricks

We will now give some tips on how to get to know the tool and how to solve problems.

1 - Use reliable sources

Being an official Salesforce accreditation… Who better to train you than Salesforce themselves?

We all know about the amount of blogs and forums where we can find information (in many cases very useful), but to get an official recognition, we must get the information directly from the source, without intermediaries. With the Partner Learning Camp we have an excellent study guide with links, pdfs, and more.

2 – Always better with practice

If you have the possibility, get to work. There is no better experience than doing things yourself. Of course, it’s not all about practice, theory too. But when you can put the acquired knowledge into practice, learning is optimal.

3 - Support yourself in the community

In the gigantic world of Salesforce, there will always be someone willing to answer a question or give you a hand. There are several channels through which you can ask questions and get them solved. Forums, Slack, Official Support…

4 - Expand your searches

When searching for a term, a problem (or anything related) in a search engine, don’t just search as Personalization. Search also with their old names, Interaction Studio or even Evergage. Keep in mind that the results you find will be old publications and do not have to be valid. That’s why you should prioritize the first tip again.

We hope this information has been helpful and you feel more prepared for your Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization journey. I wish you the best of luck and success in your accreditation.