5 steps to email marketing campaign success with Salesforce

Email marketing with Salesforce is one of the most influential ways to communicate with existing and prospective clients. Figures suggest that ROI rates from email campaigns far outperform other marketing methods, be they traditional or digital. With the right Salesforce partner, your organisation could be on track to enjoy increased profits with clever email marketing via the software’s powerful capabilities.

Any digital transformation consultants worth their salt will understand precisely how to create personalised journeys to capture the hearts and minds of your customer base. Contrary to certain beliefs, creating a successful email campaign isn’t an easy job – but with the right Salesforce developers, it’s possible to achieve incredible results.

There are a number of factors which determine the success of a Salesforce email marketing campaign – and right now we’re going to take a look at what your business needs to consider while designing an email campaign in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

1) Managing your campaign

Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes with an innovative feature – aptly titled “campaigns” – which allows you to seamlessly manage all marketing communications. It’s important to make the best possible use of the campaigns feature, as it will help your organisation to plan, coordinate and measure each campaign in real time. Multiple emails can be added to each campaign, allowing you to track the overall progress of a collection of emails (for example, seasonal offers or new products).

When creating a campaign, there are several key things you should always include, such as:

• A description of the campaign: this will help your organisation to keep on track with the overall purpose or end-goal of the campaign, and can be useful when looking back through old campaigns to ascertain what works best (and crucially, what could work better).

• A unique campaign code: this will make identifying each campaign (in reports, for example) much easier.

• Tags: these help you to categorise campaigns using a variety of criteria. For example, you might want to keep tabs on campaigns by metrics such as purpose, products, location or supplier. In your reports, you’ll be able to aggregate your campaign analytics with these tags.

2) Segmenting data

Data segmentation rules are reasonably simple. If a customer has signed up to receive promotional emails pertaining to a particular type of product, or a particular service only, you should only send promotional emails which are relevant to their interests – and nothing else. Of course, this isn’t always easy in practice – unless you utilise data segmentation.

Data filters within Salesforce Marketing Cloud allow you to segment customer lists using subscription attributes which can be defined by your organisation. If you’re unsure of how to set data filters up, your Salesforce partner should be able to help you.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud also has a feature called “measures”. Measures are units of subscriber behaviour (for example, levels of email opens or clickthroughs). These can be included as criteria within your data filter to help further segment your subscriber lists. One of the main reasons to do this is to target “top customers” or those most likely to click through to your site during flash sales and promotions.

3) The personal touch

Data segmentation within Salesforce allows for personalisation across your campaigns. There are two main types of personalised content that can be created in the Marketing Cloud: personalisation strings (where you include subscriber information such as their first or full name into your content), and dynamic content (content that is displayed according to rules you define based on the subscriber’s attributes. For example, if a customer is interested in a particular type of product or service, you may want to only display items relevant to their interest in a dynamic content area which otherwise contains generic offers for prospective customers or customers you hold less data for).

4) Easy email templates

Make no mistake, the design of your email is just as important as the content you deliver. You might have an unmissable offer to show the world at the moment, but you can guarantee your campaign will fall flat if the design of your email doesn’t do it justice.

Your design should inspire confidence within your customers to make a purchase. Thankfully, this is easy with Salesforce. Marketing Cloud comes with a lot of interesting, professional email templates – each of which is mobile-responsive. These templates are great for busy marketing teams, as it allows them to create innovative, interesting content without having to spend hours building email templates from scratch.

Within the email creation subsection, you’ll also have the opportunity to edit your sender profiles for maximum effect. Let’s say your name is Joe Bloggs – instead of sending emails from [email protected] you might want to hit your customers up with something catchier, like [email protected]. It might seem inconsequential, but these little touches can really add something special to your campaign.

5) Tracking

It’s pointless creating an email campaign if you don’t have access to the key metrics which illuminate how your marketing efforts are performing. The success of your future campaigns relies on understanding where your past campaigns have been successful, and why. With Salesforce, you’ll get all the statistics you need to further segment your customers for retargeting, reselling and upselling.

Salesforce consultancy UK: helping your business thrive

Salesforce is chock full of features, and if you want to use them to your advantage, it helps to have a Salesforce partner that can help you deliver email campaigns that will get your company noticed – which is precisely what 4C offers. Why not allow us to help transform your organisation and unlock value via Salesforce today?