The Top 10 Marketing Cloud Hacks You Should Know

Even if you are an expert in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it never hurts to have a few tricks under your sleeve. You will continue to learn about the Marketing Cloud tricks that this powerful platform has to offer.

I unearth ten Marketing Cloud capabilities in this article that you might not be aware of but that might help you get through difficult times (just like Sindbad the Sailor). Any day, using standard Marketing Cloud features is preferable to developing a bespoke solution!

What is a Marketing Cloud?

Customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, social media management, data analytics, and other marketing tools and capabilities are all combined on a single platform called a marketing cloud. It offers advertisers a unified interface to control their campaigns, monitor performance, and get insightful data about their target market. Businesses may boost client interaction, optimize their marketing efforts, and get greater outcomes by utilizing the power of a marketing cloud.

Hack 1: Personalization and Segmentation

Segmentation and personalization are crucial components of effective marketing strategies. You may use a marketing cloud's extensive personalization and audience segmentation features to send customized communications to your audience.

You may categorize your audience into distinct groups based on demographics, habits, or preferences with the use of comprehensive customer data and segmentation tools. Due to the ability to build customized advertisements that appeal to each category, engagement, and conversion rates increase.

Hack 2: Edit a Salesforce Entry Event (in an Active Journey)

Remember how painful it is when you have to configure the entire Salesforce Entry Event all over again because unlike everything else, it cannot be edited even after creating a new version of Journey?

After wasting hours reconfiguring the Salesforce entry sources, I finally found a trick!

1. Before going live with any Journey which has a Salesforce Entry Event, create a copy of this Journey. The copied Journey will be used for initial testing – so store the original Journey somewhere secure.
2. After the initial testing, you could find a few issues and need to edit the Salesforce entry event. On the actual Journey, the Salesforce Entry Criteria will be non-editable
3. Delete/Stop the copied Journey.
4. Now you should be able to edit the Salesforce Entry Criteria in the actual Journey. If you are still concerned that are issues, and you might need to modify the Salesforce Entry Source again, create a copy and follow the same process.

Don't forget to check out: Maximizing Your Marketing Potential with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Hack 3: Edit a Salesforce Entry Event (Without Duplicating the Journey)

The plan above is good if you are in the testing phase. However, if you follow this process after the Journey has been running for some time, then you will have two journeys with their own individual analytics.

In the future, when you need to report the journey performance, engagement data will have to be extracted from both journeys. Prevent this by following these steps:

• Create a new version of the running journey.
• Come back to the old version and stop it.
• Go to the new version and now you should be able to modify the Salesforce entry source.
  Note: This will affect the contacts still in the journey as none of these contacts will move to the new journey version, nor will they move forward in their current journey version.

Hack 4: A/B Testing and Optimization

In the world of marketing, experimentation, and optimization are key to driving continuous improvement. A/B testing is a powerful technique that allows you to compare two different versions of a campaign element and determine which one performs better.

Marketing clouds offer A/B testing capabilities that enable you to test different elements of your campaigns, such as subject lines, call-to-action buttons, or landing page designs. By testing and analyzing the results, you can gain valuable insights into what resonates with your audience and optimize your campaigns for maximum impact.

Hack 5: Social Media Integration

Social media platforms play a significant role in today's marketing landscape. Integrating your marketing cloud with social media management tools allows you to streamline your social media marketing efforts and effectively engage with your audience.

Marketing clouds offer features such as social media scheduling, publishing, and monitoring. You can schedule posts in advance, ensuring a consistent presence on social media platforms. Additionally, you can track and analyze social media engagement, monitor mentions of your brand, and respond to customer inquiries or feedback promptly.

Hack 6: Mobile Marketing Strategies

With the increasing use of mobile devices, mobile marketing has become a crucial aspect of any comprehensive marketing strategy. Marketing clouds provide tools and features specifically designed for mobile marketing.

By utilizing mobile marketing features, such as SMS or push notifications, you can reach your audience directly on their mobile devices. For example, you can send personalized offers or reminders via SMS or deliver push notifications to engage users with your mobile app.

Marketing clouds also offer mobile analytics, allowing you to track user interactions, app downloads, and in-app behaviors. These insights help you understand how your mobile marketing campaigns are performing and make data-driven decisions to optimize your mobile marketing strategies.

Hack 7: Manually Add Records to an Existing Data Extension

This feature might sound obvious to Marketing Cloud consultants, but it remains hidden from many Email Studio specialists.

This feature comes in handy when you need to add a new record, or possibly a test contact, into an existing Data Extension. Instead of having to import into the Data Extension with a .csv file with just a single record, you can add a record to the data extension with a few clicks via the Contact Builder user interface.

Hack 8: Retrieve Salesforce Records on a CloudPage

Consider this scenario – you are doing some tests and you need some data associated with a contact record in Salesforce, say the contact’s “Total order value”.

You log into Salesforce CRM and look for the record only to find the ‘Total order value’ field is hidden from the contact layout. Now you know reaching out to the Salesforce team to fix the permission could take some time but instead, you can do this…

Assuming your Salesforce is integrated into Marketing Cloud, you can do an Ampscript lookup on a CloudPage to get the required data.

Check out another amazing blog by Eden here: 5 Ways Salesforce CPQ can Transform Your Sales Process

Hack 9: Brand Builder

Brand Builder lets you customize the user interface and color scheme for parts of your Marketing Cloud account. You can customize the:

• Marketing Cloud Login Page
• Email Page
• Marketing Cloud Application
• Subscription Center

This feature certainly can give you some beautiful experiences. We used this feature to welcome one of our new Marketing hires by putting a welcome banner on the login page. That was a good day!

Hack 10: URL Expiration

One of our entertainment industry clients would send event promotion emails far in advance of the actual event date. They reported that when their customers were clicking on the CTA button, they were reaching an error page. Turns out that they had the URL expiration set to 60 days (the default) which meant all the CTA URLs expired before the actual event.

This useful feature lets you control when links in emails sent from your account will expire, however, you need to be conscious about its use, otherwise, you might end up losing business without even noticing it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the top 10 marketing cloud hacks outlined in this article provide valuable insights and strategies for marketers looking to maximize the potential of their marketing efforts. By leveraging the capabilities of a marketing cloud, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Certification, marketers can streamline their processes, deliver personalized experiences, and optimize campaigns for maximum impact.

From personalization and segmentation to automation and data analytics, these hacks enable marketers to create targeted, relevant, and engaging campaigns that resonate with their audience. By integrating social media, mobile marketing, and email marketing best practices into their marketing cloud strategies, marketers can reach their audience across multiple channels and deliver consistent brand experiences.