Salesforce For Email Marketing: Interview with Mar Tech expert

Marketing Cloud provides an expansive range of tools that can be used for different types of customer engagement processes. One of them is Email Studio.

Our team is constantly involved in setting up Marketing Cloud for various industries, and often gets questions like "Does email marketing work at all?" or "Is Salesforce good for it?". So we decided to talk a bit about the basic business values of email marketing with ISV & Mar Tech expert Mounir Nejjai.

He shared some tips about strategy creation and helpful tools for email marketers. Let's go!

1. How come you’ve created a Mar Tech blog?

I had an IT engineering degree and was hired as business values of email marketing by one of the biggest consulting firms in France. My first assignment on a marketing automation project was in the finance industry. I recall telling my partner that I didn’t know anything about marketing. His answer was: “Neither do they!”

In fact, I was pretty lucky: I started in that field just when Marketing & Technology got engaged… A few years later, they would adopt Data… and my engineering background gave me the necessary hard skills needed while I was learning marketing concepts.

For the last 15 years, I helped 100+ companies with their martech projects. I worked as Design Authority, Subject Matter Expert or Program Architect on 20+ projects over 5M$ integration cost. And in 2021, I decided that instead of delivering Business Consulting, our mission was to deliver Business Value.

Now I run a Salesforce Marketing Cloud ISV to create immediate value for clients through packaged solutions available on AppExchange.

I also give career advice to Salesforce Marketing Cloud professionals and build a community around that shared vision of client success and self-improvement.

2. Are email campaigns still one of the most effective marketing tools?

Now and then, somebody will come up with a catchy statement like: “Email is dead!”.

Some marketers mistakenly believe that social networks are gaining momentum and don’t leave room for email. They don’t operate on reliable facts and think that representatives of some generations don’t use email at all. And so on, and so on.

But, whether you’re talking about B2B or B2C, there are no marketing operations without data. You need a Database. The acquisition is mainly List Building. And the simplest and most powerful entry in a list is an Email address.

The simplest and most powerful entry in a list is an Email address.

Now you’ve got Email and an option. Do you really want to use another channel? You’ve got the cheapest access to your customer already!

Of course, this inbox is saturated. Of course, there has been a lot of abuse. But if your brand has built a great relationship with the customer, and that means Trust, emails are the most effective marketing tool.

Don't forget to check out: Setting up a Successful Email Marketing using Salesforce

For 90% of one-way communications, Emails will remain the best tool at every stage of the funnel. If we talk about industries and types of companies, I would rather rely on facts.

According to McKinsey research, an average employee spends 28% of the workday reading emails. So I would say that it makes sense to use email marketing as a digital tool for B2B companies. You absolutely will gain the time for the attention to your brand if you do it competently because your target audience has a chance to contact you at least once for 2,5 hours 5 days a week!
What concerns industries, it’s not a secret, that retail gets the maximum of using email marketing. Of course, conversion is high in the B2C segment. Financial Services with Travel & Hospitality are keeping it up.

So, as you see, email marketing fits corporate and personal sales both online and offline for most industries.

3. Why is Salesforce a great solution for email marketing? How does it differ from other email platforms, such as Mailchimp, SendPulse, etc.?

When it comes to email marketing, you build your stack according to your size and maturity. You will consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud (either Engagement or Account Engagement) once you have data in your CRM and want to use it. In this case, Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors would be Adobe, Oracle or Braze.

But Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a great solution if you consider the platform. You can easily use your CRM data, you have powerful Artificial Intelligence features with Einstein and one of the most powerful Customer journey orchestrators with Journey Builder.

Once you’ve stepped in, you can build up for scaling long-term: Customer 360, Personalization, Intelligence and now Genie.

Your challenge will be to skill up your resources as fast as Salesforce innovates.

As for me, Salesforce meets the needs of both SMB and enterprise companies, but be careful with budgets: of course when customization needs are rising, you have to pay for that. But exactly the CRM gives you that opportunity.

4. How to build a successful email marketing strategy?

Every marketing communication has 3 components. The customer, The message and The brand.

You should always start with the Customer. Define your Personas. Who are they? What do they want? Why would they buy from you? What is it they’re searching for? Build segments for each Persona and prepare the data you need to personalize your message.
When it comes to the Brand, you need to be Trusty. Domain name. IP warm-up. Preference center. Reply Mail Management. It’s the boring part, sure, but nobody wants to end up in SPAM.
The Message: unfortunately, when it comes to B2C, I feel like it’s the most underrated topic. I see a lot of brands sending Image-only emails. No clear CTA. Poor Copywriting.

If you’re using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you have all you need to optimize send time, subject, pre-header, content, and so on!

Just Test. Every. Thing.

Always be testing. Use A/B Testing. Spend time on reports.

We can’t just say that the customer today needs high personalization and then just assume that we can come up with a 5-steps email journey as a one-size fits all strategy for welcome… Where are the facts?

Check out another amazing blog by Twistellar here: What Do Salesforce MVP Think About Certification?

5. How to measure performance and optimize your emails? Are there any best ways to increase openings and deliverability?

You have a pretty good view of your performance using Salesforce Marketing Cloud reports. A bit more if you use Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence (ex-Datorama).

Deliverability is a continuous fight. You can stay ahead using Litmus or InboxMonster. They can help to reach the inbox of your customers and stay there. I would also recommend that you also be attentive to the sources of the database formation and respect the user's permissions for receiving commercial communications.

Whatever, Openings mean your objects are clear, personalized but also that your customer has been waiting for something. Personally, I believe in gifts and scarcity. The basis of consumer behavior has always been, is and will be psychological factors. So I’ll go with 2 apps we’ve published on AppExchange:

Voucherz: allows you to send coupon codes to your customers. Coupon emails get 14% higher open rates (mention it in the subject).
Calendarz: we have a new feature that allows you to display a countdown… Create an urge to click on that CTA!

As Email marketing mantra should be “always be testing”... go for easy-to-use, drag-and-drop tools. You need a few minutes to install and use the 2 mentioned apps, so you can quickly send emails and assess added value during the free testing period.