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.

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

Marketing Cloud Personalization

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

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

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

Marketing Cloud Personalization. ShowerThinking

But what exactly is Marketing Cloud Personalization?

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

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

Personalization Marketing Cloud

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

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

Marketing Cloud Personalization

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

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

Example of Personalization:

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

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

E-commerce ShowerThinking

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

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

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

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

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