Salesforce Marketing Cloud Basics

 Marketing cloud has own platform.

Digital marketing is the ability to communicate with your customers through multiple channels.

ex : emails, Ads,SMS,Push notifications

Marketing Cloud Terminology :

1.Business Unit(BU)

Business units allow you to control access to information and sharing of information.

2.Contact(s)

Contacts are the individuals you communicate with, which could be across multiple channels.

3.Data Extension

A data extension in Marketing Cloud Email Studio is a table within the application database that contains your data.

Note :

 Marketing Cloud is  all about the volume of contacts and the number of messages you send out.

 

What Is a Journey?

A journey is a multi-day or multi-step activity or interaction with the customer and it's built inside of an app called Journey Builder. 

IP Warming & Deliverability :

IP(11.222.333.44)

IP's are used to uniquely identify the server or individual on the internet,

in Marketing Cloud's case this identifies an account.

Note : this is the back-end configuration that gets sent out.

Domain :

This product assigns a domain used to send email.

This domain acts as the From address for your email Sends.

SAP(Sender Authentication Package) :

The Sender Authentication Package provides a collection of products designed to 

help ensure that your email messages reach the inboxes of the intended recipients.

1.A private domain

2.Account branding

3.A dedicated IP

4.Reply Mail Management (RMM)

SAP is an all-inclusive toolset that will help you get the most out of your email marketing campaigns. 

When configured properly, it will improve email deliverability, increase trust, and keep your domain from getting blacklisted.

Preference Center :

A preference center enables subscribers to decide what types of messages they want to receive from your organization.

Marketing Cloud Integration Types :

1.Salesforce Integration(Marketing cloud Connect)

2.Manual Imports

3.sFTP

4.API(REST,SOAP,SDK)

1.Salesforce Integration(Marketing cloud Connect)

This is the integration allows you to pull in objects and data from your Sales or Service Cloud instance in the Marketing Cloud.

And once they're brought into Marketing Cloud, they're called synchronized data extensions. 

So you're not just reading it in real time, like Salesforce Connect. You're actually doing a synchronization of the data, 

so the data lives on the Marketing Cloud stack in whatever that data repository.

2.Manual Imports :

This is where you have a CSV file and you literally go to a data extension and you import that file, and this is your sending list.

3.SFTP

we have the SFTP as there's a secure FTP that's hooked up to Marketing Cloud.

It's part of the package that you get with Marketing Cloud.

You can have other systems dump files into this FTP, and you can pick them up.

4.API(REST,SOAP,SDK)

what this actually looks like is there is a site called the API Marketing Cloud Experts Ninja, 

and this is a site that is kept up with a lot of the example API routes here.

https://api.mcexperts.ninja

Types of Data :

1.Customer(Contacts,Leads,Accounts)

2.Order

3.Store Location

4.Content

5.Activity

6.Preference/Interest

Studios & BUilders :

The studios are usually the channels that you're interacting with a customer and the builders are the mechanisms behind it that allows you to do that channel communication.

Studios :

1.Email Studio

2.Mobile Studio

3.Social Studio

4.Advertising Studio

5.Web Studio

6.Interaction Studio

Builders :

1.Analytics Builder

2.Journey Builder

3.Content Builder

4.Personalization Builder

5.Audience Builder

Data Extensions :

Data extensions are the way you capture information.

A Data extension is like a table with different columns that can hold data in rows. 

You could use this data extension to store Subscriber information or related information that will be used for sending emails. 

You have to mark it as Sendable in order to send emails from Data extensions. 

There are broadly three other data extensions that could be used on a scenario basis.

a. Standard Data Extension – 

A standard data extension allows you to create custom fields to store data. 

This can act as a standalone data extension with desired fields either to capture the data or use it to as a sendable data extension.

b. Filtered Data Extension – 

A filtered data extension is generated by filtering fields, measures, and filters for sendable data extension from a Source data extension. 

This is mostly used when we want to have a different sendable data extension populated with final data that is used for sending emails.

c. Random Data Extension – 

A random data extension allows you to randomly select subscribers from a Source data extension. 

This data extension is mostly used to have a separate sendable data extension that is used for sending emails to random subscribers.

Synchronized Data Extension: 

This data extension is mainly used to populate Salesforce Standard/custom object data from Sales cloud/service cloud into Marketing cloud.

Salesforce Data Extension: 

This data extension is mainly used to send back email tracking information from email studio sends in Marketing cloud to Sales or service cloud.

We should integrate Salescloud with Marketing cloud using Marketing cloud connect before viewing/using Salesforce Data extension.

subscriber key :

A subscriber key is a text field that contains a value that uniquely identifies a subscriber in your Marketing Cloud account. 

Marketing Cloud Connect uses subscriber key to identify the Sales or Service Cloud record associated with the tracking data returned from the Marketing Cloud.

Content Builder & Assets :

1.Content :

A single artifact that is used for marketing to customers;this can include images,content,video etc.

2.Content Block :

A collection of content that form a message on a topic for the customer.

3.Template :

A standard way of branding content that enables a marketer to build using a drag and drop functionality.

Note : Content Builder is where we're dealing with the content, the content blocks, and the templates.

Email Template :

Another key aspect here of templates is that when you put content here, you can lock certain sections, 

and this can keep the consistency of your brand across all your channels.

So it's important to lock the header and the footer in a lot of cases.

Litmus integration :

So one of the huge things about email production is that you want to test not just your inbox, 

but we want to test all the inboxes and the variety of inboxes. So as you're thinking about email production in Marketing Cloud, 

you want to think about is this looking good in Outlook and Gmail and mail clients and iOS devices.

Personalization with Dynamic Content :

1.drag-and-drop 

2.AMPscript

Contact Builder :

The Contact Builder app provides access to contact data contained within your account and the relationships designed to help you use that data. 

Use Contact Builder to manage, consolidate, organize, and link data from all Marketing Cloud apps and external sources.

Journey Builder :

Inside of Journey Builder, there's a concept of two types of data. There's contact data, and there's journey data.

Journey data is, think of it as a snapshot in time. When the person enters the journey, we're taking a snapshot of who they are, and we're using that throughout the entire journey whether the journey is a day long or a week long.

Contact data, however, is real time.