15 Tips for Mastering Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a powerful tool for simplifying marketing automation and improving customer engagement. We've been working on the system for many years - in fact well before it was acquired by Exact Target and then Salesforce in 2012. Although this seems a long time ago to me, my boss Mike seems to believe that it was just yesterday (even though it was about 13 years ago)!
We've gathered 15 practical tips that will save you time, improve your campaigns, and in turn, maximise results.
1. Use a Clear Naming Convention for Everything
A consistent naming convention is essential for organising materials such as campaigns, email templates, and lists. This ensures your team can quickly locate and work on resources.
If you’re setting up your marketing automation platform, think carefully about creating a structure that will grow with your campaigns over time. However, if your current setup lacks organisation, it’s never too late to implement a new naming convention. Introducing a structure can significantly improve efficiency.
Tip: Use a structure that includes campaign names, date and the version (e.g., BU_Year_Month_CampaignName_Type_Version) for easy identification.
2. Create Folders and Maintain a Clear Structure
Creating an organised folder system may seem obvious, but it’s one of the simplest and most effective ways to improve efficiency. Without an organised folder system, files can become difficult to find, leading to unnecessary confusion and wasted time. To ensure everything is easily accessible, structure your workspace.
A well thought out folder system ensures that everyone knows exactly where to find materials, whether they’re working on campaigns, accessing client work, or collaborating across departments. Maintaining consistency in folder organisation is especially crucial as your team grows.
Tip: Use a structured approach like Year > Business Unit > Month (if applicable) > Campaign Name. For example: 2025 > EMEA > 02_February > ProductLaunch_Campaign
A structured system saves time and makes collaboration more seamless.
3. Use SFMC's Automation to Simplify Processes
SFMC's automation features, like Engagement Studio, allow you to create workflows that trigger specific actions based on user behaviour. These automations save time and increase efficiency when managing campaigns.
To use Engagement Studio effectively, start by mapping out your workflow before building it in Marketing Cloud. Define your campaign goals and outline the key steps you want to automate, such as nurturing leads with a series of emails or adjusting scores based on engagement. A clear plan helps you design workflows that align with your objectives and avoid unnecessary complexity.
Tip: Start with simple automations, like assigning leads to sales based on activity, and test them to ensure they work as expected. For actions like sending a thank-you email after a form submission, use the Form Completion Action. Regularly review and adjust your workflows based on performance data to improve results.
4. Set Up Engagement Programs for Nurturing Leads
Engagement programs let you automate lead nurturing by delivering relevant content over time. This keeps your brand top of mind as prospects move through the sales funnel and helps build stronger relationships with your audience.
Example: If a prospect downloads an eBook, you can add them to a nurture flow that shares additional content related to the eBook topic. Over time, they might receive a series of emails with blog posts, case studies, or webinars that dive deeper into the subject.
Tip: Set clear goals for each engagement program, such as driving webinar registrations or converting leads into customers, and ensure the program aligns with your overall marketing strategy.
5. Use SFMC's Scoring and Grading System for Lead Qualification
SFMC's lead scoring and grading features help you prioritise high quality leads, by evaluating both their level of engagement and their fit with your ideal customer profile. Lead scoring and grading work together to give your team a clear picture of which prospects are most likely to convert.
Lead scoring assigns points to prospects based on their interactions with your content, such as opening emails, clicking links, visiting landing pages, or downloading resources. The more a prospect interacts with your content, the higher their score, indicating a stronger interest in your brand.
By combining scores and grades, you can prioritise leads who are both highly engaged and a good fit for your business. For instance, a lead with a high score but a low grade may not be worth pursuing, while a lead with both a high score and grade should be a top priority.
Tip: Regularly review and adjust your scoring and grading criteria based on past data to improve accuracy.
6. Segment Your Audience for Maximum Relevance
Segmentation is key to delivering the right message to the right audience. SFMC allows you to create segmented lists based on user behaviours, demographics and interactions. By creating segments based on customer behaviour or demographics, you can adjust your messaging and improve engagement.
Example: You can create a segment of users who have downloaded eBooks on specific topics. This allows you to send highly targeted follow up emails, offering related resources like webinars or case studies.
Tip: Use dynamic lists to automatically update segments as users engage with your campaigns. This ensures your messages remain relevant without manual intervention.
7. Use A/B Testing to Optimise Campaigns
A/B testing can boost engagement and conversion rates by helping you understand what resonates best with your audience. Experiment with different subject lines, email copy, CTA buttons, and visual elements. By testing variations, you can improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Example: You could run an A/B test on an email subject line by comparing one that’s more straightforward, such as "Exclusive Offer Inside" versus one that creates more curiosity, like “You Won’t Believe This Special Offer”. Then, you can analyse how each version performs in terms of open rates and click-through rates.
Tip: Run A/B tests and analyse the data to refine your approach:
- Open Rates - Compare subject lines to see which one gets more attention.
- Click Through Rates - Check which version of your email leads to more clicks to your landing page.
- Conversion Rates - Determine which email leads to more conversions, such as form submissions or downloads.
- Bounce Rates - Check if one version has higher bounce rates, which might indicate deliverability or issues with the content.
- Engagement Metrics - Look at how long recipients spend reading your email.
8. Personalise Email Content for Better Engagement
Personalisation is key to grabbing attention and boosting conversions. Using the recipient’s name or company name can make your emails feel more relevant, but only if your data is accurate. If your database contains incomplete or inconsistent entries, personalisation can have the opposite effect.
Tip: Use merge fields to automatically insert personalised details and create more engaging, targeted messages efficiently. However, always have a backup option (e.g., “Dear Customer”) in case the data is incomplete. Regularly check and clean your database to ensure accuracy and improve personalisation effectiveness.
9. Keep Contact Data Accurate for Successful Personalisation
To make your personalised emails more effective, it’s essential to keep your contact data up to date. Instead of relying on static information, you can use progressive profiling to gather more details over time as contacts interact with your forms.
Example: Each time a contact downloads a resource or fills out a form, you can ask for additional details, starting with basic information like name and email, then gradually collecting additional data like job title, company size, or industry. This allows you to build a more complete profile without overwhelming users with lengthy forms.
By using progressive profiling, you ensure your database remains current, helping you refine segmentation and tailor your messaging more effectively.
Tip: Use progressive profiling to update contact records gradually but focus on collecting information that directly improves your ability to deliver relevant content. Regularly review the data to guarantee it aligns with your personalisation strategy.
10. Monitor Email Deliverability and Engagement Metrics
Tracking email performance metrics like open rates, click through rates and bounce rates is key for campaign success. Keeping a close eye on these metrics helps you identify issues early and improve overall performance.
Tip: Set up alerts for key metrics, such as high bounce rates, so you can quickly address issues. But, keep in mind, access to these alerts may depend on user permissions within your platform.
By setting up alerts for important metrics, you can stay ahead of issues and ensure your emails are making an impact.
11. Regularly Clean Your Lists for Accuracy
A clean email list reduces bounce rates and ensures your campaigns reach active, engaged users. Over time, inactive contacts can negatively affect your deliverability and overall email performance. Regular list cleaning helps keep your audience relevant and engaged.
Example: Removing inactive users who haven’t engaged with your emails in the past 6-12 months can improve your sender reputation and boost open rates.
Tip: Use SFMC's list management tools to regularly find and remove inactive users from your list.
By using SFMC's list management tools, you can keep your email list accurate and effective, ensuring your campaigns consistently reach engaged and interested recipients.
12. Test Emails Across Different Devices
Emails don’t look the same on every device. With over 46% of email opens happening on mobile devices, ensuring your emails are responsive and display properly for all recipients is essential. A poor user experience can lead to decreased engagement and higher unsubscribe rates.
You may have a well-designed email that looks good on a desktop but displays poorly on mobile, this could result in a missed opportunity to connect with nearly half of your audience. Testing ensures your messages are responsive and display properly for all recipients.
Tip: Use SFMC's email preview tools to test your designs across a variety of devices before sending.
13. Use Email Metrics for Insights into User Behaviour
SFMC's email reporting features allow you to see who opens, clicks, and interacts with your content. This helps you gain valuable insights into customer behaviour and preferences, so you can refine your marketing strategies.
Example: If a particular email campaign has a high open rate but low click-through rate, it might indicate that your subject line is effective, but the content or call-to-action needs improvement. Tracking opens and clicks helps you understand which parts of your email resonate and which need adjustment.
These insights can help you make more informed decisions on messaging, timing, and segmentation, driving better results and engaging your audience more effectively. Tracking this data also allows you to identify disengaged segments, giving you an opportunity to re-engage them with tailored content.
Tip: Use SFMC's email reporting tools to track opens, clicks, and other engagement metrics for a better understanding of how your audience interacts with your emails.
14. Manage Gmail Submissions to Improve Data Quality and Deliverability
When designing forms, it’s important to consider Gmail addresses in your submission process. While excluding them entirely can help reduce spam risks and prevent deliverability issues (since Gmail tends to flag embedded or linked forms as spam), it can also lower lead volume and deter genuine prospects. Instead of completely blocking Gmail users, consider a balanced approach to manage them effectively.
Tip: Use progressive profiling to gather additional information, such as a business email, from Gmail users. Alternatively, set up an automation rule to move Gmail addresses into a separate list, where you can offer lower-funnel content and gather more data. This approach allows you to gradually collect more insights before offering high-value assets.
15. Partner with Experts to Maximise Marketing Automation Success
Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a powerful suite of tools to drive marketing success, but navigating its full potential can be challenging. Working with experts ensures you’re getting the most out of the platform.
Tip: Engage marketing automation specialists, like Napier, to unlock SFMC's full capabilities. Our digital team can help with everything from strategy and implementation to campaign optimisation, allowing you to focus on achieving your business goals while they handle the technical details. Our knowledge and experience can improve campaign results, and ensure you stay ahead in a competitive market. Get in touch today!
B2B Marketing Predictions for 2024
We’re often asked to give our take on the latest trends in marketing. As an agency, we are constantly analysing what has happened, and look at future predictions as a way to inform how our clients should alter their marketing strategies moving forward.
In this blog post, we delve into B2B marketing and PR predictions for 2024, exploring what B2B marketers can expect from the marketing landscape in the coming year.
Someone will get fired for using AI wrongly
Artificial Intelligence (AI) in B2B marketing cannot be ignored. It continues to develop and improve rapidly, offering a variety of tools and techniques to enhance efficiency and effectiveness in reaching target audiences and driving sales. Data analysis, content creation and marketing automation are just a few examples of how AI can be utilised within B2B marketing.
However, there are limitations to AI, and its effectiveness can vary based on the complexity of the subject or market. Whilst AI can be great at creating generic content, its performance in creating content for more specialised or technical topics is not as effective. This introduces the risk of AI inputting inaccurate information into content pieces or producing what is quite typically seen as ‘bland’ content.
It's no secret that content needs to stand out and be of a higher quality than competitors to be successful. Given that B2B marketing is typically more technical and niche, inaccuracies can provide a lot of issues for companies, and if the content isn’t engaging, then this could put lead generation and PR activities at risk.
B2B marketers should certainly embrace AI as a valuable tool but must not rely on it fully. As mentioned in the Napier podcast crossover episode with the marketing automation moment, ‘AI is good at being average, but to truly excel in the competitive world of marketing and PR, we must be above average’.
Digitalisation in Marketing
Digitalisation has unlocked a world of opportunities within B2B marketing and is likely to expand even further in 2024. Digital platforms have enabled B2B marketers to reach a global audience and allowed companies to communicate their messages in different ways.
Video content is a major component of digitalisation and is continuing to rise in popularity as a B2B marketing strategy. Its versatility offers many possibilities, such as product demonstrations where complex information and instructions can be simplified, as well as providing personalisation to target specific areas of an audience.
Podcasts are another effective tool within digitalisation, with more and more decision makers turning to podcasts for business-related content. The format allows companies to deliver valuable content to B2B tech audiences in an accessible way, enabling them to build brand presence and engage target audiences directly.
Given its ability to increase reach and build authentic connections, whilst also providing valuable information, it’s no surprise that digitalisation will continue to be popular in 2024.
ABM campaigns will become more personalised
B2B ABM campaigns will continue to embrace a more personalised approach, in order to help deliver tailored experiences that relate to targeted individuals. Strategies we could expect to see include, personalised emails and messages, one-to-one communication, and personalised interactions where customer queries and pain points can be solved. With personalised marketing becoming more common across the marketing landscape, personalisation can often be a key tactic in helping prospects understand that your service is the best solution to their needs.
The opportunity to personalise ABM campaigns not only supports the development of trust-based relationships but also drives higher engagement levels, ultimately increasing interest in your company.
Google will block third-party cookies on Chrome
At the start of January 2024, Google began testing its new tracking protection feature, where website access to third-party cookies will be restricted by default. This comes as a concern as many companies use these cookies to track people's activity across the web as a way to monitor the success of campaigns. With Google's plans to phase out third-party cookies for all users by the latter half of 2024, marketers will have to start relying on first and second-party data instead.
This change will require marketers to reassess how they spend their money on first-party data to get optimal results. Despite this change being a challenge for some in the B2B marketing space, it’s important to remember that Google won’t stop tracking altogether, and there are still opportunities for marketers to use first and second-party data to their advantage.
Thought leadership content will be data-driven
Thought leadership content is often imperative within a B2B marketing strategy. Typically thought leadership pieces can be opinion-driven, and although this is valuable, we are seeing a shift in thought leadership content being led by data.
This transition comes at a time when stories now need to be told through data, as a way of building trust and credibility between the company and target audience.
Although there is still a space for opinion-based content, audiences are more likely to trust and engage with those who back up their words with data over those who don’t, particularly in the B2B tech space where products and services are often specialised. While sounding smart is important, genuine intelligence backed by data is what ultimately leads to success.
B2B businesses will sack three quarters of its salesforce
Sales are in charge of developing relationships with clients and closing deals on products and services, but with the increase of digital tools, is the human element of the sales process still necessary?
In 2023 we saw the rise of the self-service buyer, and this will continue in 2024, meaning that effective marketing strategies will become even more crucial as more people will be making sales decisions without talking to salespeople. The pandemic accelerated this approach, as restrictions on face-to-face meetings forced buyers to do more self-directed research. Buyers are also becoming more informed and like to research products and services on their own before making a purchase. This approach means that companies need to maintain not only a high level quantity of content, but also content that remains high-quality, ensuring that they are engaging and generating interest from prospects.
While the use of digital tools and technologies is continuing to reshape the sales process and could definitely be responsible for the downsizing salesforces, the skilled human touch still remains necessary for nurturing relationships and closing deals.
Marketers will think about the whole customer journey
Often marketing strategies can be implemented without the full customer journey being defined. We hope to see a shift where B2B marketers will consider the complete customer journey for a campaign, ensuring they understand and identify opportunities throughout the customer journey to entice and retain customers more effectively. For instance, thinking about the full customer journey allows marketers to address customers' pain points more effectively, leading to improvements in the purchasing process and ultimately improving customers’ experience and loyalty.
Although an ideal approach with many benefits, the complexity of incorporating this into every single stage of the customer lifecycle is likely to make this a more gradual transition than we’d hoped for. Similar to each stage in the customer lifecycle, B2B sales processes are typically long and intricate, involving multiple decision-makers and touchpoints; they make tracking every stage of the customer journey a challenge. So, while it's a great goal, B2B companies may proceed with this approach at a slow pace.
Companies will realise the value of trade media
Trade media enables companies to effectively target a specialised audience within a specific trade or industry. Despite its many benefits, not all companies have embraced this approach. Some may be hesitant due to the possibility of fewer readers or low levels of engagement, and some may be focusing budget on other activities such as digital marketing.
However, it's important to recognise that those interacting with the publications are directly from the industry you are targeting. Instead of focusing purely on quantity, companies should prioritise the relevance of their audience engagement.
Trade media also excels at reaching potential buyers with those you have no prior relationship with, especially in situations where these buyers are unaware of your solution. This is an advantage for introducing new solutions or services to buyers who may not yet be familiar with them.
As companies begin to analyse the ROI of trade media, they will start to change their perspectives and begin recognising its value in driving business success within more niche areas.
B2B Influencer Marketing
B2B companies are beginning to recognise the worth of using influencers to engage with their audiences. Influencers associated with B2B marketing are typically industry experts with a large influence within their field. These influencers can help B2B companies boost their brands' message and increase credibility amongst target audiences. It’s important to bear in mind though that it is crucial to approach B2B influencer marketing strategies differently to the typical B2C influencer marketing as they differ significantly. B2B influencer marketing tends to revolve around providing data-driven content that addresses more complex topics.
As B2B buyers continue to utilise online platforms for information and networking, influencer marketing has become an effective strategy for B2B companies to connect with their audience in a more engaging way. For this reason, B2B brands should certainly explore and embrace this marketing technique further and look to collaborate with influencers in their niche to help drive interest.
Conclusion
It’s clear to see that the B2B marketing landscape is rapidly evolving and is motivated by the many emerging trends discussed in this blog post.
From the rise of AI and digitalisation to the increasing importance of personalised ABM campaigns and the transition towards the restriction of third-party cookies for tracking, B2B marketers are facing both new challenges and opportunities.
As we progress through 2024, B2B marketers must stay knowledgeable of and adapt to these shifts, whilst also prioritising the customer and their experience, in order to remain competitive and drive business success.