Salesforce Marketing Cloud: helping you create valuable content

How great does it feel to receive an actually interesting email from a brand or business you like? I bet most of us are pleasantly surprised when that happens.

Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash

How annoying is it when you feel like you are spammed with content that is not relevant at all for your needs?

Content creation is an art. Put simply: if you give customers content they actually want, you are paving the way for loyalty and ultimately a better ROI. But if you give them content that doesn’t resonate with them, you are pushing them away. You are giving them the message: “I don’t know you”, or even worse, “I don’t care about what you like”.

Let’s circle back to Patricia’s shoe store. In order to deliver content that her customers will be happy to receive, she decides to tailor an action plan:

• She builds personas. For this, she focuses on the daily habits, the obstacles they face, the problems that they want to solve, their activities.
• She can gather information from many sources, such as the rest of her CRM (where she might have collected information such as demographics, purchasing habits, location, and others that might help her segment her audience. She can also survey her customers either presencially or via email and turn this information into actionable insights.
• When it comes to personalizing emails, she takes the opportunity of new subscribers and prepares a Welcome Series for them. This is a string of emails that not only give the subscribers information, but also asks them to complete their profile (sometimes even giving them incentives for it). This helps Patricia tailor her content with precision. This type of email personalization is called dynamic content, since it changes and adjusts to the subscriber’s preferences. Patricia and her team must remember that every time they use dynamic content they also need to be prepared for the different eventualities that different email clients pose, so they should always include fallback static content in case something goes wrong.

There are some things Patricia and her team need to think about before they launch all of this. Email inboxes are overflowing, so whatever they send needs to stand out. Also, everything they send must be responsive in order to properly serve the subscribers on mobile, which represent a high percentage.

Patricia and her team start small, but grow their subscriber base. With enough subscribers, they can access information such as:

• Context data: what type of device was used the most? What locations were more responsive? Is there any day where emails are more successful? Is there a time of day where emails are more successful? Can you track higher success rates with, for example, a certain weather?
• Positive data: how strong is deliverability? Are we having a good rate of opens? What about click links? And finally, are we getting conversions directly from emails?
• Negative data: are we bouncing off our subscribers’ inboxes? Are they asking to unsubscribe?

All of these indicators are useful when it comes to understanding not only the best conditions to send an email, but also whether our content is charming our subscribers. And if this sounds intimidating, don’t worry — Marketing Cloud can help you figure this out with its Einstein feature, using Artificial Intelligence to find behavioural patterns that are sure to make your emails a hit!