Introduction
The platform and the process of sending emails is no pomp show, as compared to other modern messaging platforms. However, it was and is the most successful form of communication to build customer relationships. Email marketing increases the efficiency of your marketing, sales, and customer service if you know how to use it in the best possible way. It provides subscribers and potential customers with valuable information, which eventually aids in achieving business goals.
Successful Email Marketing campaigns depend on the way you utilize this state-of-art technology that has blessed the marketing industry. Email marketing, though it makes digital marketing easy, is one of the most complicated processes of managing marketing campaigns. It needs efficient brainstorming of the entire marketing team for a successful result. To help your brands reach audiences at key decision-making moments, you need to know how and when to use email marketing.
To ease these problems, Salesforce, a reputed name in the marketing industry helps marketers develop potential email marketing campaigns with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). It enables its users to quickly create and deploy efficient email marketing campaigns for their brand. SFMC provides everything you need to set up unique email campaigns. Its feature-rich email automation platform is one of the best CRMs for segmenting a broad target audience and building dynamic customer journeys. SFMC enables marketers to execute multi-channel marketing campaigns and help set up pre-and post-campaign analytics as well. Irrespective of its unique advantages, email marketing managers often face certain challenges with SFMC. We have made a list of five common challenges of using SFMC to discuss how you can overcome those challenges:
Challenge 1: An Overwhelming Data Model
Marketers who are used to more visual tools and functionalities like logos, style guides, and images can get overwhelmed by SFMC’s data model. Thus, SFMC offers drag-and-drop capabilities, Marketing Cloud Connect, and Salesforce reports to enable marketers to leverage its data capabilities more easily and effectively. You can access subscriber data with SFMC data extension to run queries and send emails to a subset of subscribers. Its Audience Studio allows you to create data filters or SQL queries in Email Studio, or filter data extensions and more precise segments. SFMC’s Salesforce Contact Builder helps link together different data extensions to make them accessible using Marketing Cloud Connect.
To understand what objects, fields, and filters are involved, you can build a report of your target audience in Sales Cloud and use the objects as your data model. Avoiding focusing on individual data extensions will simplify the way you build and execute campaigns.
With SFMC, you don’t have to create new data mappings and other technical abstractions that add to your administration effort. You can simply use the existing data mappings in Sales Cloud. To make SFMC adhere to the sharing and permissions within Sales Cloud, enable Scope by User. This will send emails only to those contacts or leads to which you have access. To send emails to reports or campaigns, either as individual or batch distributions, use Email Studio. Moreover, SFMC can be naturally synced with Sales Cloud for standardized dashboards across your brand, yet leveraging data extensions for specific use cases where Salesforce data cannot be utilized.
Challenge 2: Gathering More Data About Subscribers
For a successful customer relationship, brands should send messages that are relevant and useful to the customers. Customers these days expect hyper-personalized services, for which brands need to know them better. This involves building a richer customer profile by collecting more data about them over time. The process can get exhausting for marketers and can sometimes even turn customers off completely.
Thus, SFMC offers Progressive Profiling for your landing page. With this feature enabled in your system, every time someone visits your page for the first time, a simple form will be displayed asking for their first name, last name, and email address. On the second visit, a ‘Welcome Back’ message will get displayed. On their third visit and beyond, if they submit the form, a different form asking a feedback question will get displayed. SFMC uses cookies to track customers and the values are added into a data extension. Thus, every time a prospect visits your landing page, you can collect more information to get to know them better to improve your email campaign performance.
If you want to set up Progressive Profiling in SFMC, here are a few steps that you need to follow.
Step 1: Create a data extension to store the form values.
Step 2: Create the CloudPage and make sure your Progressive Profile incorporates GDPR and privacy considerations. Display your disclaimer that incorporates all legal requirements. Also, the visitor should give consent to place a cookie and be tracked.
Step 3: Do not forget to test the Progressive Profiling.
Challenge 3: Improve Email Campaign Deliverability
Email deliverability failure is one of the biggest challenges that most marketers face despite having a proper email marketing campaign in place. If your email delivery rates are also low and you don’t know how to overcome this situation, remember that maintaining email deliverability is a tricky affair and is a common problem in all organizations. However, the key success factor for email marketing is email deliverability and you cannot compromise on that. To make sure your emails do not land in the recipient’s spam folder, you need to leverage SFMC’s Sender Authentication Package (SAP) tools.
SAP works towards improving your campaign deliverability by keeping your domain from getting blacklisted. To bring your brand name in front of a larger audience, SAP ensures that all references to SFMC are replaced with your brand’s domain. For high email deliverability rate, SAP includes:
i. A private domain
To send emails from your brand’s authenticated domain, SAP uses a private domain. This proves to your recipients’ ISP that the email is being sent from an authentic sender so that it reaches their inbox directly and does not get marked as spam. SAP uses Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Sender ID, and DomainKeys/DKIM, to authenticate your emails.
ii. Account branding
To modify links and image wrapping, and enhance the trust within recipients, SAP replaces generic references to SFMC with your authenticated domain.
iii. Dedicated IP
A dedicated IP address establishes you as a legitimate sender and is helpful when you send huge volumes of emails. You can also use more than one dedicated IP to separate commercial emails from transactional emails. However, don’t forget to “warm” your IP to establish a reputation with ESPs and ensure your emails get past their spam filters.
iv. Reply Mail Management (RMM)
RMM is used to automatically manage replies from recipients that do not require manual handling. You just need to set up filters to handle non-standard unsubscribe requests or automatically delete out-of-office messages or send appropriate alerts.
Challenge 4: Making Your Brand’s SFMC Email Templates Stand Out
As several brands use the same basic SFMC email templates, to make your emails stand out, you need to work a little more and follow these procedures.
i. Add custom or web fonts
Using custom fonts helps differentiate your brand from other brands. It gives your email a unique look and feel. To implement the font in SFMC, select the custom font along with the regular and bold font weights and use the link or the import method. After you confirm which method that you want to use with your ESP, paste the link in the
of the email. You can access the link using the Code View modules and mention where you want the web font to be used. Then enter ‘font name’ before the declared web-safe font.ii. Modify retina images
If you are using SFMC’s readymade templates with retina images, you will need to modify them. Since retina images are saved at double the size, if you do not modify them, they will not render correctly in desktop Outlook versions and will appear completely distorted in the email’s layout.
Add max-width of 600px to the image setting so that the image never gets any larger than it is in the desktop view. For desktop Outlooks, serve a set width for the image.
Challenge 5: How to Target the Right Customers
SFMC offers advanced personalization techniques, yet marketers fail to make the most of it because either they are not aware of the kind of data available, or are unable to build the right segments. Segmenting and personalizing customer data can highly increase conversion rate and thus it is important to automate segmentation.
Besides traditionally segmenting customers based on their income levels, location, gender, and age, you also need to analyze their purchase information and communication preferences to create a customer persona. Since such data comes from different data sources, identifying them can get challenging.
You can use data filters available in Email Studio or SQL queries available in Journey Builder to manage a vast amount of data. You can also use Audience Builder to filter across data extensions. These segmentation tools available in SFMC will help you create a data model. A data model helps connect various points to identify your segment to design and execute your email marketing strategy accordingly. By tracking user engagement through data views or writing SQL queries you can find the correct information to improve your email engagement metrics.
Conclusion
With the increasing number of emails in your target customer’s inbox, you might want to enhance your email marketing strategy. This increases the open-rate and also protects it from getting redirected to the spam folder. A well-strategized email marketing campaign helps build an authentic connection with your target market and boosts business growth. Moreover, a personalized and customer-driven email marketing strategy nurtures customer relationships by building trust and aiding your organization to generate high ROI. SFMC helps plan, design, execute, and analyze email marketing campaigns if you can overcome the general challenges.
Do you need help with Email Marketing Campaigns using SFMC(Salesforce Marketing Cloud)? Let Sootra Consulting’s expert team of professionals show you how it works and set up the process for you – all you need to do is drop us a “Hi” at [email protected]. So, let’s start talking!Also, you can check out our other awesome blogs over here.
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