The cloud email marketing platform from Salesforce is now free for individual use! What is Marketing Cloud and why should you be using it (and this special offer from Salesforce)?
An Overview of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud is a combination of two separate products from Salesforce: Marketing Automation and Marketing Platform. Let’s take a quick look at both of these products and the features they offer.
Marketing Automation
Often, marketers will try to execute multiple marketing campaigns at the same time – but fail because of ineffective strategies and confusing data. Marketing Automation from Salesforce helps to solve this challenge by providing a simple user interface for marketers to define and execute marketing campaigns across different platforms and devices.
The intuitive interface makes it easy for anyone to understand how to use marketing automation, even if they have no previous experience. Once set up, marketing automation can be used to define a series of tasks that can be executed with a few simple clicks of a button. Tasks can include sending out a mailer, setting up a social media campaign, or even scheduling a webinar.
Marketing Platform
The Marketing Platform from Salesforce provides marketers with the ability to create and promote marketing content (such as emails, landing pages, and social media posts) across multiple channels (e.g. email, social media, and mobile).
With Marketing Platform, content can be curated from different platforms and used to create a cohesive message across different touchpoints – increasing the chances of the campaign to resonate with your audience.
What do you get with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (compared to individual products)?
The Complete Package
With both Marketing Automation and Marketing Platform individually costing $9.00 per month, it makes sense for organizations to pay an annual fee of $180.00 for the combined product. This package provides you with access to a dedicated marketing advisor who can help you to plan and forecast marketing activities, as well as a suite of analytics tools to track the effectiveness of your campaigns.
An Important Note About Email Marketing
With any form of marketing, the email is an essential part of the communications mix. Email marketing is just one of the many strategies that can be used to reach audiences – but it’s definitely one of the most popular ones. Why? Because email marketing is a proven way to get results.
When planning your email marketing strategy, it’s important to look at what you’ve got already. Review the emails that have been sent out in the past and establish a baseline for comparison. This will help you to pinpoint the exact type of open rate and click-through rate that you’re looking for – and provide you with the data to prove the efficacy of your strategy. In addition to establishing a baseline, try to focus on segmenting your email list – creating a group of people who are more likely to be persuaded by your campaign than those on the whole list. The sooner you can isolate these groups, the sooner you can tailor your strategy to be more effective. With email marketing, the more you know, the more you can do.