How to in Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Best Practices

Struggling with Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Clevertouch has delivered successful campaigns through marketing cloud across the entire customer lifecycle, for both global organisations and national scale projects.

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"84% percent of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services."
Salesforce State of Marketing 2021

Marketing Cloud provides marketers with the ability to orchestrate extremely complex marketing communications at scale. But the potential of great customer experience can sometimes be hard to meet due to a fall down in ability, process and the alignment within the Marketing and IT functions. With this in mind, we’ve laid out some best practice tips and suggestions to alleviate some of the pain that comes with operating within a complex Marketing Cloud instance.

Account Set Up

Account set up is arguably the most important part of any Marketing Cloud implementation, with everything that follows being directly influenced by your actions at this stage. If the correct process is not put in place from the very beginning, then inevitably there will be problems further down the line.

Every contact you have in Marketing Cloud is counted as a contact, regardless of whether you send to them or not.

Marketing Cloud has levels of contact pricing, and if you exceed certain numbers you will then enter the higher tier and be charged for the use of the larger contact audience. The easiest solution is to set up a deletion automation to remove contacts which don’t meet an established minimum criteria for future sends, as well as duplicates, fake contact details etc. This is an essential set up in the early part of platform deployment, and will ensure that your Marketing Cloud instance stays within the contact count cap.

The counted contacts are:

All contacts from All Subscribers
All contacts from Mobile Connect
Salesforce Contacts
Salesforce Leads
Salesforce Users

Use Roles and Permissions to ensure all members of your Marketing team only have access to those Marketing Cloud features that are necessary to them.

User roles and permissions are ways to manage your marketing team, and streamline your Marketing Cloud instance, preventing inexperienced hands operating outside of their preassigned areas. There are a number of stock roles available, but you can also create custom roles from within the user section of the setup, providing bespoke access for particular team members who might not fit a predetermined stock role.

When setting up your user roles and permissions, ensure that you set up two admin accounts, so that one of them may be used as a failsafe option should anything go wrong with the original admin.

The list of standard roles are as follows, all with different access and purposes:

Administrator
Analyst
Content Creator
Data Manager
Distributed Sending User
Marketing Cloud Administrator
Marketing Cloud Channel Manager
Marketing Cloud Content Editor/Publisher
Marketing Cloud Security Administrator
Marketing Cloud Viewer

Use Notification Services to set up instant alerts of issues in real time, and resolve them.

These kind of automations can be relatively easily set up, and simply send notifications whenever an issue arises in real time, notifying the correct person of failures, and providing the opportunity to resolve them. This greatly improves the customer experience of your organisation as it allows for issues/errors to be resolved in real time, rather than left to the last minute, only when someone finally notices the issue.

Learn the common validation errors by wrote so you can fix them quickly and efficiently.

Validation errors commonly come appear as issues arise with your email and landing page builds, and learning what they are, and how to fix them, will alleviate much of the pain of issues within your Marketing Cloud platform, allowing for easy fixes.

Email and Content Builder

You’ve set your accounts up, you’ve organised the automations and you’re up to scratch with any errors your platform may throw at you, and now’s the time to establish a process for your email and content creation.

Have a folder structure, and stick to it.

Establish a folder structure and naming convention to organise all content builder assets.

When operating within a large Marketing Cloud instance, with a lot of hands in the mix, it is paramount that you establish a consistent folder structure that can stretch across your various business units and national marketing teams.

It doesn’t necessarily matter what path you choose to go down to organise your assets, so long as it is consistent across the entire Marketing Cloud instance. However, setting up a TEST folder will make it a lot easier as your instance grows, because it keeps actual email and content folders uncluttered.

When importing content, only import the content you need, as and when you need it.

This is because it reduces clutter, and limits the time it takes to import. We recommend you keep it to a few folders/files at a time. As well as this, hosting all of your images in content builder will improve loading performance.

Try not to use SSJS (Server Side Java Script) within your emails as this will slow the performance.

Try and use AMPScript within your emails to achieve a better performance and functionality. AMPScript works better for inline greetings such as first name in email, as well as running faster than SSJS when it comes to email sends. When you send an email, realistically you have an extremely short window with which to engage a prospect, and so email performance is key, and AMPScript will help deliver on that.

Data

Accurate and organised data is unquestionably the most important aspect of any marketing technology programme. This is because, if you’re not sending it to the right people, or even worse, the wrong people, it doesn’t matter how personalised or well written your content is, your marketing initiatives will fail. Here are just a few data tips to help ensure your sends are as successful as can be:

A strong folder structure is essential to segmenting and organising your data

If there are multiple campaigns running, all utilising different segments, then it is beneficial to establish a naming convention and folder structure. This is exactly as in the email and content builder; it doesn’t necessarily matter what approach you take to this, so long as it is consistent throughout. Imagine that if you left one day, would your replacement be able to immediately be able to pick up where you left off and completely understand the structure.

As long as the audience size is not too small, as in less than 10,000, then you should utilise data extensions to store contact data.

The reason for this is that data extensions are scalable, and query activity can be used to perform advanced segmentation. As well as this, API calls can be used for advanced integration, and essentially the performance is better compared to the alternative, lists. Lists have limited functionality, whereas Data Extensions offer full flexibility to store and relate subscriber information.

Always work in TLS and secure your code.

TLS is the outbound messaging systems support Transport Layer Security, and if it isn’t working properly, none of your communications will operate. You are almost certainly working with sensitive data (hint hint GDPR), and keeping it secure is an essential part of your Marketing Cloud technology.

Journey Builder

Journey Builder is an incredibly powerful studio which operates within the Marketing Cloud technology infrastructure. It gives you the ability to orchestrate personalised nurture campaigns over long periods of time, but if used poorly, will fail to deliver on the hard work and effort. Here are a few tips on how to make the most out of Marketing Cloud Journey Builder:

Journey builder is not suitable in implementing high-volume prospecting email campaigns, with a fast turn around of conversions.

Journey Builder provides a multi-channel, holistic campaign journey framework, ideal for running for a longer length of time, with a variety of goals and exit criteria. It is designed for records dripping in to the campaign gradually, rather than a batch and blast platform, operating large scale fast send campaigns. Sending to the tens of thousands can take a long time to process, and so if you go down that route, scheduling an email for 15:00, may not actually arrive until 15:30!

Exit criteria are essential in ensuring contacts/prospects can exit the journey when it is no longer relevant to them.

Exit criteria exist to remove customers who no longer fit the campaign journey’s purpose, or for those prospects who’re no longer relevant to the journey’s content. For example, if a prospect becomes a customer, you don’t want them to continue to receive prospecting content.

Utilize the goal feature of journey builder, but remember that there can only be one ‘defined’ goal per journey.

A Journey goal is quite simply a measurement of customer actions that you want to promote, and you can measure goals based on a goal target you set by creating a filter on contact data.

A journey goal can be used in two ways:

To measure the success of the journey (% of people who did xyz). This can be linked with data outside of the actual journey, so it doesn't need to be email-based metrics. For example, if they attend an event and there's something in Salesforce that shows that, it can then be linked back to the journey for reporting purposes.
To exit someone when they reach the defined campaign goal. This could be if they buy a product or engage with a set number of emails they'll then exit. This is usually used in longer journeys that may last some months.

The Clevertouch Solution

All of the above can be tricky to orchestrate, especially when taking into account the huge talent deficit in the marketing technology industry, particularly within those more complex platforms such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Customers are now expecting more than ever. In fact, 69% of customers are now saying that a disconnected customer experience negatively impacts their perception of your brand.

It could not be clearer that customer experience now needs to be at the heart of everything we do as marketers, and the technology needs to be able to match the demands that customers are now facing marketers with. External consultancies can help alleviate the stress of unskilled hands within the platform, and provide a strong spine from which the rest of your marketing operations can function.

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