The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an online platform that streamlines and automates all marketing channels for your enterprise or business by sending out appropriate messages to customers at all phases of the relationship. The marketing automation process includes email marketing, mobile outreach, social media, web advertising, creating content, and evaluating data.
It puts customers at the forefront of the experience. Also, the platform increases revenue by saving companies time, money, and resources by automating cultivating relationships with customers, making this daunting task a lot simpler for the business. By providing a real-time view of customer data, any company using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud can employ effective marketing strategies to reach customers on their terms and preferences based on past behavior. This creates a deeper, more personal 1:1 relationship between the customer and your brand.
The Customer Journey
Imagine you are at a coffee shop you frequently visit.“What’ll you have?” asks the barista. You are annoyed because you have been here a million times, and they should know by now that you will have an iced, Ristretto, ten shot venti with breve, five pump vanilla, seven pump caramel, four Splenda, and poured, not shaken. It’s simple. Why are they not getting this? I am using this as a metaphor for the online customer experience. Customers expect their preferences to be at the forefront of their experience. With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the customer journey is simplified so that they will receive personalized marketing efforts based on the habits of their previous purchases of products you offer. What is the customer journey?
It is the experience from the beginning to the end of their relationship with your brand. Your lifelong experience with that coffee shop down the street is the customer journey. Marketing automation allows for appropriate marketing interventions that cater to the customer’s preferences. You might be wondering, what effect does this have on my business?
How Will My Business or Enterprise Change with Marketing Automation?
You have launched a website for your business. Your marketing team drives visitors daily and converts them into leads. Then, your sales team spends time chasing those leads to turn visitor traffic into sales. This drudgery is not very efficient. Your marketing team wants to use its expertise to create creative campaigns. And your sales team wants to spend time doing what they are best at; selling your product. To please both teams, the solution is marketing automation.
What is marketing automation?
With marketing automation, you automate the repetitive procedures that both teams do.
Let’s say you started a new nutrition website selling nutrition plans. You have the option on the site for people to download nutrition tips. They input their name and email address into the system. You have just created a new lead. They are added to an email drip campaign to change the potential customer from a cold lead to a warm lead. Your workflow or instructions in the system automatically sends promotional emails to the customer, videos for managing the best diet, webinars for healthy recipes, etc.
These nurtured leads can then lead you to strike with personalized sales offers that respond to their previous behaviors, making the sale more likely. At this time, it is wise to import them into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, such as Salesforce. Based on this example, your business is streamlined with a marketing automation platform like the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, saving you time and money and ultimately driving up revenue.
What Are Some Forms of Marketing Automation?
Besides email drip campaigns, there are some other forms of marketing automation. How can you create content that is appropriate for audiences on a wide scale? Read on to learn more.
CRM Automation
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is the backbone of your marketing campaign. You can use CRM with marketing automation to remain connected with customers and increase conversions. It offers a dashboard with all the customer information you need to see specific leads and change them into sales. Information includes name, email address, and purchase history. It can alert your team about new prospects.
Ads Automation
By automating advertising, you can alter advertising automatically based on consumer behavior. For example, if someone visits your business’s webpage, advertising automation can place an ad on the pages they visit. This can be done on Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest as example. Advertising automation can be employed through the Salesforce Advertising Studio.
Mobile Automation
Everyone uses their phone daily for numerous tasks by accessing apps and messages. Why not jump in on this trend and utilize it by employing mobile automation? With this feature, you can send in-app messages, texts, and notifications to catch people’s attention while they are on the go.
What does the Data Show About the Success Rate of Using Marketing Automation?
The data shows obvious reasons why it is wise to use the marketing cloud for your business. According to Demand Gen Report, leads that are nurtured using email drip campaigns, for example, lead to a 20 percent increase in sales prospects compared to leads that are not nurtured. Also, according to the Annuitas Group, if you are a business that uses marketing automation to nurture leads, you will experience a 451 percent increase in qualified leads.
Conclusion
If you want to streamline your business by making it easier for your sales and marketing team and increasing revenue, look no further than the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It allows you to reach customers based on their preferences, thus creating deeper relationships and making it more likely that they will buy your product. Using marketing automation with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can automatically send out messages to your customers with the ease of clicking on a simple interface. It’s that easy!
