Email marketing is one of the fastest and most cost-effective ways to grow your business. However, a common email marketing roadblock for many organizations is not being able to find a platform that can fully support all their marketing goals. Marketing Cloud is Salesforce’s marketing automation platform primarily for B2C businesses with a library of digital marketing applications and features including email marketing through Email Studio.
Email Studio’s Top Features Designed for Your B2C Team to Succeed
Content Builder
Content Builder makes email content creation easy for marketers of all technical skill levels with drag and drop email creation. Utilize ready-made templates from Content Builder and customize to fit your team’s branding. If you want to take your content even further from a layout perspective outside, you can even add in your own HTML code; giving you nearly limitless possibilities to your email marketing designs. Additionally, Content Builder helps you save time as you create new emails by setting up your email banners and social sharing links through content blocks that you can reuse the next time you go to create a new email campaign. What’s more, the dynamic content feature allows you to make your emails highly personable to your subscribers and enhance their journey by displaying alternative versions of your original email content based on your subscriber’s unique identifiers; such as location and personal interests. Also, to make sure that your subscribers have the best experience possible when viewing your emails, you can easily preview emails in the preview mode or take your preview capabilities one step further with a Litmus integration. With the Litmus integration, view how your subscribers' emails will appear across varied browsers and devices; giving you a more in-depth view of what you can expect your subscribers to experience and make any adjustments as needed to your campaign.
A/B Testing
Shooting in the dark can be a pitfall for many teams when it comes to email marketing. For example, they aren’t sure why their emails aren’t giving them better KPIs and what to do about it. With the A/B testing functionality, you can create a copy of your original email and change different elements in your emails such as subject lines/preheaders, send times, graphics, and more. The key to making two versions of your emails though is just to change one aspect of your email so you know for certain which variable resulted in one email performing better than the other. Once you create the two versions of the same email, you can send out the control and variable emails to a small portion of your subscribers and see which email performed the best. The best version will then “win” and go out to the rest of your subscribers set up to receive that email campaign. When used strategically, A/B testing can truly help you increase your click-through rates and conversions, resulting in a more optimized campaign.
Subscriber Data
Within the platform, subscriber information is stored in a couple of different ways; Lists, and Data Extensions. One of the main differentiators of Email Studio is it can handle such a high level of emails in complex ways that many marketing automation systems cannot. With Lists, subscriber data is stored in a one-to-one connection and keeps basic information. Lists are optimal for simple emails such as a welcome email to a new subscriber and will include important data for the marketer in your team such as the email status - active or bounced, name, and email address. Now with Data Extensions, this is where you start to really get into campaign personalization capabilities. Information storage in Data Extensions can include a subscriber’s home address, phone number, and what their areas of interest are; empowering you to send more personalized content and optimize your subscriber’s customer journey. With subscriber data, it is important to note that there is another use case for Lists over Data Extensions. If you want your subscriber to complete a double opt-in; depending on the requirements of your campaign, you will need to store their information in a List. Every time you add a subscriber manually or by automation processes, you need to make a decision on what type of campaigns the subscriber will be receiving. If you want the content tailored to each subscriber specifically based on their unique traits, you will need to store it as a Data Extension and if not, then you will store their information as a List. Keep in mind that this is just a starting point in evaluating how you should organize your subscriber data.
Tracking
Analytics are everything to marketers. It truly dictates almost every decision they make when working on new campaigns and strategies or adjusting current ones. With the Tracking tab, you can see message delivery, open and click-through rate, how many subscribers resulted from a forward, and much more. Additionally, there are Einstein features available in Marketing Cloud which allows users to understand subscriber retention and predictive insights. With Einstein, you can eliminate the guesswork of trying to determine when is the best time to send emails so you can get more opens by using optimal send days/times. Another advantageous feature is Einstein Copy Insights which analyzes your email copy and clear metrics related to CTAs, punctuation, and personalization. With all of the robust data Marketing Cloud has available, they consistently deliver more and more ways to help you reach your campaign goals.
Marketing Cloud has been a widely recognized marketing automation system for quite some time and is a great tool to take advantage of, especially for B2C businesses. One of the main reasons Marketing Cloud has been such a success for many teams is because of all of its powerful capabilities. If your team is unsure of how to optimize your email marketing to your exact preferences, reach out to us and we will analyze not only your current email marketing methods but new ways we can take your business to new heights with Email Studio inside of Marketing Cloud.
