Powering Near Real-Time Orchestration in Marketing Cloud with Data Cloud’s Data Actions

Data Actions enable you to harness the power of data and insights available in Data Cloud to optimize business metrics and minimize delays in engaging with customers. With near real-time event-driven orchestration, you can supercharge your event-driven apps, orchestrations, and integrations by managing routing of data and insights. Data Actions can be likened to the conductors of the data symphony in the cloud.

This blog post explains how to orchestrate journeys in Marketing Cloud driven by changing data in Data Cloud using Data Actions.

Why use Data Actions?

Let’s discuss a few potential scenarios. It’s holiday season at a high-end jewelry store. A customer’s yearly spend has now elevated them to a loyalty level of “Gold” and you want to make sure that this customer now receives all the promotions that are available to gold-tier customers. Without any additional effort you want this customer to be injected into the “Gold” promotional journey and you want them to start receiving promotional messages incentivizing them to spend more to move to the “Platinum” level.

Next, imagine you are working at a financial institution and as transactions come into Data Cloud, using streaming insights you have identified one of the transactions as fraudulent. You now want to send the affected customer an email and SMS message in near real-time. While working at the same institution, you may encounter a scenario in which you want to inject a customer into a journey when their portfolio value decreases by a certain margin.

Another scenario applies to virtually any type of business: If a customer creates a case that requires a follow up, then when the case status changes you’ll want to send an email to the customer giving them a status update and detailing next steps.

For all of these scenarios, you can use Data Actions in conjunction with Marketing Cloud to send out timely messages and alerts based on changes to data in Data Cloud.

What type of data can trigger a Data Action?

Data Actions in Data Cloud can be triggered by any of the following (and more):

• CDC events. For example, a profile record is inserted/updated/deleted in a data model object (DMO).
• Streaming events. For example, data comes in from your SDK, ingestion API, or Marketing Cloud Personalization.
• Streaming Calculated Insights. For example, insights that are based off streaming data coming into Data Cloud.

What types of Data Action targets are possible with Marketing Cloud?

You can automate operational tasks, including sending emails and triggering a journey based on Streaming Insights, events coming from streaming sources, or changes to data in data model objects.

Trigger emails. With Data Actions and Marketing Cloud transactional API, emails can be fired based on specific actions or behavior undertaken by customers. This allows marketers to send near real-time automated messages based on user behaviors as and when they take place.

Orchestrate journeys. With Data Actions and Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, customers can be added to journeys based on specific actions or behavior undertaken by them. The journey may include engaging with the customer on a required channel (for example, email or SMS) and it can be a single-step or multi-step journey.

Prerequisites

Prior to setting up a Data Action, you’ll need to complete the following prerequisites.

Data Cloud

In Data Cloud ensure that the following have been completed:

• The Marketing Cloud connection is set up in Data Cloud.
• The business units are selected, and mapping is enabled in Data Cloud.
• The data that you intend to use to drive the Data Action and use in the email or journey is mapped and available.

Marketing Cloud

In Marketing Cloud make sure that:

• The email that you’re planning to use has been created in Marketing Cloud Content Builder, and all the mandatory fields are filled in. Data Actions support Template Based, HTML, and Text Only email options. Validate the email by doing a test send to verify that it has all the required fields for compliance.
• The Marketing Cloud subscription list (All Subscribers) includes the subscribers’ subscriber key, first and last names, and email address. Currently, you cannot use Data Actions to send to subscribers that do not already exist in Marketing Cloud.
• The intended journey has been created in Marketing Cloud Journey Builder.
• While creating the data extension in Marketing Cloud for the journey, if you are using non-nullable fields ensure that values are being passed to it as part of the Data Action otherwise the journey entry will error.
• Since the fields in the data extension will be populated by the Data Action in Data Cloud, all the data extension attribute/column names must adhere to the following naming convention: They must start with the object API name of the data model object selected in Data Cloud, followed by an underscore and the attribute API name. For example, if you want a column to store the Account information from the Case DMO, the column name would be ssot__Case__dlm_ssot__AccountId__c.

Case Data Model Object

• The column that contains the subscriber key value in Data Cloud needs to be mapped to a column in the data extension.
• The data extension needs to be marked as Sendable, and the column with the subscriber key value needs to be mapped back to the subscriber key in Marketing Cloud

Data Extension Settings

• The journey entry source must be an API Event type; create the API entry event definition based on the data extension you just created.
• While configuring the journey settings, if you’re using the email channel, ensure that “Use email attribute from Contacts” is selected.

Journey Settings

Setup in Data Cloud

Follow these steps to complete the setup in Data Cloud.

Create a new Data Action Target in Data Cloud

1. In Data Cloud, navigate to the Data Actions Target tab, and click New.
2. Enter the Data Action target name. (The Data Action Target API Name field is auto-filled.)
3. For the Data Action Target Type, select Marketing Cloud.
4. Select the business unit where the contact is mapped and where the journey exists.
5. For the destination, select Journey Builder API Event.
6. Select the Journey Builder API event that you want to send when the data action conditions are met. This would be the journey you created in the prerequisites for Marketing Cloud.
7. To filter subscribers, select Filter out subscribers from the selected business unit. You can select this option when you want to send to subscribers that only exist in the target business unit. This is optional, the default behavior is to target subscribers in All Subscribers in the enterprise.
8. Click Save.

Note: If you have to make changes to your existing journey and created a new version, as long as the journey entry API event hasn’t been changed the latest version of the journey will automatically be used as the Data Action target.

Data Action Target Setup

Create a new Data Action in Data Cloud

In Data Cloud, navigate to the Data Actions tab, and click New. Then Select the Data Action Target that you just created.

Data Cloud Data Actions Tab

Select the Data Space, then the Object Type (Calculated Insight or Data Model Object). To follow the example below, choose Data Model Object, choose the primary data model object, and then the field in that object that contains the subscriber key that maps to an existing subscriber key in Marketing Cloud.

Data Action Setup

Now set up the rules that will trigger the action. In the example below, anytime the value in the Points field is greater than 10,000 the subscriber is entered into the Marketing Cloud Journey. Note that you can set up the journey to prevent re-entry if you don’t want the subscriber to be injected multiple times into the same journey.

Data Action Event Rules

Once the Data Action is published you can view it in the list of Data Actions.

Recently Viewed Data Actions

Selecting additional attributes to include in the Data Action

In the example above, when creating a new Data Action in Data Cloud, step 4 involved selecting a primary object. Data Actions also allow you to select objects that are related to your primary object. With this capability you can use attributes from your related object or objects while setting up your Data Action rules and also enrich the data sent to Marketing Cloud.

If you want to include these additional attributes in Marketing Cloud you have to create the fields in the data extension following the same format as you did when setting up the journey; they must start with the object API name of the Data Model object selected in Data Cloud, followed by an underscore and the attribute API name. As before, for example, if you want a column to store the Account information from the Case DMO, the column name would be ssot__Case__dlm_ssot__AccountId__c.

Note: If you don’t want to include these fields in Marketing Cloud but only want to use them in setting up the rule within the Data Action you don’t have to create them in the journey data extension in Data Cloud.

To see how this works, follow these steps:

Select the related object you want to include.

Related Object Selection

Select the related attributes to include; you can include up to 10.

Related Attributes Selection

Use attributes from your primary and related objects to define the action rules.

Event and Action Rules

Conclusion

By seamlessly integrating near real-time event-driven orchestration, architects can elevate the efficiency of event-driven applications, orchestrations, and integrations. In doing so, you can not only optimize business metrics but also ensure minimal delays in customer engagement, marking a transformative step towards a more agile and responsive architecture.