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If you are in the marketing domain, you know the importance of smart and personalized marketing strategies in today’s digital-first world. Marketing teams often use a cloud platform to achieve such a result-driven strategy. One of the most popular platforms nowadays is Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which offers incredible AI capabilities. 

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features make personalized marketing much more accessible so businesses can continue connecting with their customers. Mastering these features can set you apart in the market and help you reach a wider audience, all while simplifying your daily tasks.

In this blog, we’ll delve into the Marketing Cloud features and benefits you must know about. But first, let’s understand what is Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Key Takeaways

  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a comprehensive digital marketing platform integrated with Salesforce CRM.  
  • It enables marketers to optimize campaigns across multiple channels, creating seamless customer journeys and improving engagement.  
  • Journey Builder maps customer journeys across channels and integrates with tools like Advertising Studio for personalized ad campaigns.  
  • Email Studio simplifies email marketing with drag-and-drop tools and advanced personalization options.
  • Mobile Studio engages mobile users via SMS, push notifications, and geofencing for location-specific campaigns.  
  • Analytics Builder provides real-time insights and visual dashboards to optimize marketing strategies.  
  • Marketing Cloud Connect seamlessly integrates with Salesforce CRM to enhance automation and collaboration.  
  • Structured Query Language (SQL) enables advanced data segmentation and customization for complex campaigns.  
  • Training and certifications can help marketers master the platform, enhance their skill set, and boost career prospects in Salesforce marketing.  

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud, previously called Exact Target, was a digital marketing platform that Salesforce acquired in 2013. As a marketer, you plan, personalize, and optimize marketing campaigns across multiple channels. The cloud platform is integrated within Salesforce CRM to make it easy for users to have a complete view of customer interactions. It lets you map customer journeys, build email or marketing campaigns, and analyze collected data. SFMC takes traditional marketing up a notch to provide a personalized experience to your consumers and keep them engaged.

Let’s look at some essential marketing cloud features and how they are helpful.

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Top Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features

While the marketing cloud offers endless options to customize your marketing efforts, some Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features stand out. Besides providing a powerful customer experience, these features save time. 

1. Journey Builder

Journey Builder is a powerful and important tool that helps you create customer journeys from onboarding to loyalty programs. Unlike many campaign builders, it works across multiple channels to develop various touchpoints. One notable feature of Journey Builder is the Ad campaign. By using Advertising Studio and Journey Builder together, you can create a customized ad campaign that can help businesses target their potential customers. The journey builder will then map every interaction and even send emails or SMS to keep the customers engaged.

2. Email Studio

We know that email marketing is the most preferred form of communication between marketers and their target audience. SFMC provides an in-built Email Studio feature to create compelling email copies and manage their distribution. The drag-and-drop features make it easy to use and do not require any technical assistance. It analyzes customer data and helps you personalize emails with relevant content that converts leads and even suggests improvements. It is a great tool to build lasting customer connections.

3. Mobile Studio

The digitalized customer is always on their phone, and you cannot afford to miss any chance of interaction. Thus, the Mobile Studio feature of SFMC allows you to communicate with your customers through mobile devices. It focuses on engaging customers through SMS, push notifications, and even group chats. The Geofencing feature of Mobile Studio lets you create a fence for a geographical area and target the people within that area. This helps you to convert walk-in leads into customers.

4. Analytics Builder

No marketing is complete without analytics, and SFMC understands this better than any marketing platform. The Analytics Builder is a powerful feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It uses real-time data to bring out insights to help you optimize marketing strategies. You can check the performance of your campaigns through visual representation using reports and dashboards. The tracking tools also help understand your customer interactions and touchpoints on multiple channels with segmented insights. These insights can play an important role in making informed marketing decisions for your organization.

5. Marketing Cloud Connect

The integration abilities of SFMC are unmatched by any other marketing platform. If you are already familiar with Sales and Service Cloud by Salesforce, connecting your customer data using Marketing Cloud Connect will be a breeze. This allows the journey builder to receive relevant data from other platforms and create automation easily. Based on your Salesforce CRM records, you can send emails or SMS to specific customers who are more likely to purchase. It also makes collaboration between sales and marketing teams smoother and more efficient.

6. Structured Query Language (SQL)

SQL is a technical Salesforce Marketing Cloud Feature that an SFMC developer best operates. SQL lets you precisely segment your data into groups. These segments are more complicated than the Data Filters in Email Studio, so you can use the data for more complex marketing campaigns. You can also customize the tables and data as you view it. While it is not easy to manage this feature, it is absolutely worth the effort. 

Besides these, there are some more features that you must know about:

  • SFMC has a content builder which is a centralized tool to create, manage, and reuse content across emails or ads. It is used to ensure consistency and efficiency in your marketing campaigns.  
  • Since marketing happens on social media these days, the marketing cloud has a social studio to monitor, publish, and engage with your audience on social media platforms.
  • As we mentioned before, the advertising studio is used to create engaging ads as part of the marketing strategy. It helps in delivering relevant and personalized ads across multiple platforms.  
  • Leverage AI-driven insights from Einstein AI to predict customer behavior, personalize messaging, and improve marketing performance effortlessly with intelligent automation.  

These marketing cloud features make it the go-to platform for Salesforce marketers. Now, we will discuss some of the benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to help you understand why you need it.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits

Besides the individual features that we mentioned above, there are various ways in which the SFMC benefits your marketing strategy and customer retention. Here are some of those:

  • SFMC acts as an asset when it comes to marketing personalization. It analyzes the data and makes relevant suggestions so that you can create hyper-personalized content that resonates with customers.
  • Whether you run ads on social media, send promotional emails, or automate SMS for consistent messaging, SFMC allows you to use multiple channels for your marketing. It seamlessly integrates and provides cross-channel engagement. 
  • You can automate your tasks with the marketing cloud. It increases the efficiency and productivity of teams by taking over repetitive manual tasks like following up with a customer via mail. 
  • We mentioned the Analytics builder earlier as a top feature of SFMC. The data-driven insights from analytics tools are essential for a successful campaign to perform and bring in results.
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Training and Certification

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerhouse of tools redefining marketing with personalization, efficiency, and data-driven strategies. To use the features and create a campaign that works, you will need to master the platform. The process is quite simple. The first step is to get into Salesforce Administration. If you are already in the ecosystem, then Salesforce Marketing Cloud Training can help you start with SFMC. Further, you can prepare to get the official Salesforce Marketing Cloud certification, which will demonstrate your expertise and enhance your career prospects as a Salesforce Marketer.

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