Implementing Marketing Cloud with Multiple Salesforce Orgs (Part 1)
This is part 1 in a three-part series about standing up Marketing Cloud in a Multi-Org environment. In this post, we’ll provide an overview of the considerations around creating duplicate contact records. In the next posts, we’ll do a deeper dive into the approaches you can take to address them.
Even though Marketing Cloud is a Salesforce product, it’s built on a separate stack and hosted in a different data center from other Salesforce clouds. This allows it to operate independently, but you’ll have to make some design decisions if you want to connect it to a Salesforce org. In our recent publication about Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Implementation Recommendations, we covered some of the considerations around using Marketing Cloud Connect to connect a single Marketing Cloud Instance to a single Salesforce Org. Things get slightly more complicated if you want to connect more than one org.
One of the reasons for this complexity is the way Marketing Cloud identifies contacts. A Subscriber Key is a unique value that gets assigned to each contact. It’s meant to be separate from their email address, phone number or other contact info (so you can retain your communication history with them even if they change their contact information). Subscriber keys are used to track the communications that go to a contact, along with send results (bounces, opens, clicks, etc…) and their subscription preferences.
If you use Marketing Cloud Connect to synchronize your lead and contact data with a Salesforce org, the subscriber key in Marketing Cloud will match the record ID in Salesforce. If you have multiple Salesforce Orgs and some of your leads or contacts exist in both of them, they’ll most likely have different record IDs in each org, which means that they’ll also end up with their own unique Subscriber Keys when they sync to Marketing Cloud even if the rest of their contact information is the same. This creates duplicate contact records in Marketing Cloud, which can lead to a number of issues, including:
- Contacts receiving duplicate communications
- Mismatched unsubscribes
- Possible regulatory violations (GDPR, CCPA, etc.)
Wanting to connect multiple Salesforce orgs to a single Marketing Cloud instance is a valid requirement though, so how do you do it without creating a bunch of duplicate records? Luckily, there are multiple options and you can choose which one makes the most sense for your specific organization. Each option has its own pros and cons and in our next two posts, we’ll provide some additional details about the following approaches:
What about the future?
Salesforce keeps improving and developing its multi-cloud experience. In the last year, Salesforce announced 2 products as part of their Customer 360 that will help to improve cross cloud experiences and add new scenarios to this list. The products below aren’t available for Marketing Cloud yet but keep checking back for updates. In the meantime, Salesforce will continue to support and enhance the Marketing Cloud Connector that allows for both data and process integration across the 2 clouds.
- Customer 360 Data Manager: Aggregates, consolidates, normalizes, and allows querying of an “Entity” across all Salesforce Clouds and External Systems. It is included with Salesforce Orgs
- Customer 360 Audiences: Salesforce’s enhanced Customer Data Platform that allows to unify and visualize data across systems (with Data Manager), segment it, track compliance and analyze it.
Author Bios
Tiago Ruivo is a Senior Principal Customer Success Architect at Salesforce.org based in Chicago. With a deep technical architectural background and implementation experience, he helps organizations in the nonprofit and education industries succeed in their IT transformation using Salesforce and integrating it in its larger Enterprise Architecture.
Tom Leddy is a Director of Advisory Services at Salesforce.org Tom is based in the Chicago area and helps organizations in the nonprofit and education industries integrate Salesforce into their IT landscapes so they can serve their communities more effectively. He is also an author, public speaker, marathon runner and the president of Pawsitively Famous, Inc. You can connect with Tom on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Gokul Seshadri is a Senior Principal Customer Success Architect at Salesforce.org based in the U.S. He helps higher ed and nonprofit customers to succeed in their multi-channel marketing, digital transformation, and customer 360 initiatives using Salesforce.org Nonprofit Cloud, Education Cloud, and other related technologies.
Brad Shapiro (Principal Marketing Cloud Advisor) is a trusted digital marketing and communications advisor to the world’s leading Salesforce.org nonprofit and higher education organizations. With an extensive background in business strategy, digital transformation, and deep technical expertise, Brad can quickly enable organizations with the tools and strategies needed to engage audiences in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
Tony Angle is a Principal Customer Success Architect and works in the Marketing Cloud Advisory area and is based in Virginia, US. He has worked with various educational and nonprofit organizations to help bring visibility to issues around data management as well as platform governance.
