Your guide to Email Studio, Mobile Studio & Journey Builder
Introduction
Most marketers already understand the importance of personalization, contextual marketing and multi-channel communications. In a nutshell, these tactics brand experience that attracts, retains and delights customers.
The real challenge facing you and your marketing team is actually learning how to maximize your use of software like the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), to put these tactics into action for the best possible results.
We’ve written this guide for existing SFMC users, as well as marketers who are considering it as an option for their organization.
In this guide, we’ll shed light on some of the core components of the SFMC and discuss how to successfully manage and maximize your return on investment.
The following pages highlight three of the SFMC’s key features:
1. Email Studio
2. Mobile Studio
3. Journey Builder
These three tools work much more efficiently when used together rather than individually. We’ll look at why each is a crucial component of creating an integrated marketing experience – focusing on how they work and what they deliver.
Email Studio
Email is a critical marketing channel that helps brands drive online commerce and build relationships with customers.
In fact, 79% of Salesforce’s current customers say that email has a positive impact on their brand’s bottom line.
How does Email Studio benefit brands?
Email Studio is designed to help marketers deliver the right content to the right people, manage campaign development from start to finish, and get the best return on investment from their email campaigns.
Email Studio enables brands to engage with their customers via an email channel and monitors how, when and if they respond. This means you can identify customers that are available for different activities and offers at different lifecycle stages. Armed with such information, you can build up a database of preferences that will make future communications even more targeted.
What are Email Studio’s top features?
Single Source of Content: Duplicated content is one of marketing’s worst nightmares. With Email Studio, you can create a single repository of unique content that allows you to share consistent messaging and marketing content internally. This is particularly important for large enterprises and franchises that may have various marketing teams deployed in different locations and departments.
Easy Email Design: You don’t need to know HTML to create emails. Email Studio offers its users the ability to create and share content using the Content Builder. Its simple ‘drag and drop’ functionality makes it really easy for your marketing team to create compelling content without any coding knowledge required.
Contact Management: You can also manage your subscribers, remove, exclude and create groups to ensure that you only send the right communications to the right customers at the right time. What’s more, the system’s tagging and sharing functions make it possible to create targeted one-to-one emails at scale.
Smart Triggers: With Email Studio, you and your team can see which content will drive conversions. You can automate your delivery schedules to send emails at specific times and even trigger emails in response to certain activities.
For example, if a customer has bought train tickets for a particular journey on a particular day, then you can automatically send them real-time information that alerts them to any relevant cancellations or delays that could impact their trip. And once they’ve completed their journey, you can send them information about special offers based on what you know about them and their travel interests. Due to content relevancy driven by customer data, you increase the chances of high engagement. You also increase your operational efficiency, and reduce cost per communication, whilst allowing your resource to force on more vital, strategic tasks.
Any obstacles to Email Studio?
When trying to maximize Email Studio, some brands may struggle to extend beyond its out-of-the-box features, particularly in terms of activities like reporting, email design, and segmentation, which ironically would help to achieve the value you're looking for from your investment. Working with an SFMC partner agency can help you tailor Email Studio’s potential capabilities to your brand’s specific needs. It is highly customizable, but in order to switch on its more advanced features there needs to be clear strategic direction and sometimes changes to your internal operations and processes.
How can brands maximize their use of Email Studio?
To build even better communications, Email Studio’s A/B testing capabilities, as well as its tracking functionality, help you work out the best time of day to target certain audiences with specific emails. This allows you to measure customer engagement according to predefined metrics and build reports on customer activity.
Using Email Studio in combination with Journey Builder and Mobile Studio makes for an easier and more integrated experience that ticks all of the right boxes: personalization, automation, real-time communications, and multi-channel engagement.
Mobile Studio
Mobile Studio essentially does everything Email Studio does – but manages and deploys mobile-powered communications instead.
Now that the world of mobile is increasing, so if our expectations for mobile-first content, from the design and UX, through to the speed and ease of two-way communication.
How does Mobile Studio benefit brands?
Mobile Studio enables marketers to build and send highly targeted messages to mobile devices with ease, and then track and monitor responses. It pushes engagement by delivering a more one-to-one instant experience throughout the customer lifecycle.
What are Mobile Studio’s Top Features?
Multiple Communication Types: Mobile Studio allows you to reach customers on any connected device, delivering personalized mobile messaging with SMS and MMS marketing, push notifications should your brand use apps, and group messages to send information to more than one person.
Quality Templates: You can also set up templates so that you can build videos and images into your marketing content effortlessly. Delivering messages with rich contextual content like event maps, restaurant menus, or other visual information is great – and with a ready template, you can push out messages that much faster, with ensured brand and message consistency.
Geo-Targeting: With geo-targeting and segmentation, you can even target local branches and your customer bases in those areas. For example, you can promote your brand to your nearest customers by sending them automatic messages that include coupons and promotions relevant to their closest store.
Real-time Automation: By automating your mobile marketing, you’ll never miss a timely opportunity to engage with your customers. You can schedule your marketing efforts to trigger messages at the right moment based on predetermined user behavior, as well as deliver time-sensitive messages such as password resets, shipping updates and alerts using an open API platform.
Any obstacles to Mobile Studio?
Some people are still not that comfortable engaging with mobile. Many prefer a more interactive, visual brand experience on their desktop, as well as the privacy of their mobile.
Again, to strengthen your mobile communications, you need to harness the full power of all the Salesforce Marketing Cloud tools. To build a truly multi-channel experience, you can’t rely on Mobile Studio alone. At the same time, don’t leave mobile out if you think it can be useful to your brand, even if it’s just for convenient or urgent communications.
How can brands maximize their use of Mobile Studio?
To get the most from Mobile Studio, start small and build it into your Salesforce Marketing Cloud activities slowly. Many brands are not as experienced with mobile marketing as they are with email marketing, so it pays to take your time and develop your mobile programs thoughtfully. You should never look at mobile as a single channel, as through our smartphones we have the ability to touch multiple channels instantly: email, website, app, and SMS – so they need to align with one another.
Of course, all your activities need to resonate with the customer. The feedback loop is a great way to use mobile to gather information about your brand’s user experience and make the necessary adjustments. It allows customers to answer questions and vote on different aspects of your brand, helping you stay relevant and on message.
Journey Builder
Journey Builder is the tool that ties all of your Salesforce Marketing Cloud activities together – it allows for true multichannel experiences.
Customers engage with a brand across multiple touchpoints, however internally within the brand these touchpoints may be owned by different people, maybe even different departments. Yet, the customer has little sympathy. They see your relationship as one seamless experience regardless of channel or device. Therefore, there is huge pressure to deliver against these expectations.
How does Journey Builder benefit brands?
It’s the marketing automation tool that allows you to connect every sales and service interaction across email, mobile, advertising and the web into one seamless customer experience (or ‘journey’).
With Journey Builder, you can orchestrate your entire customer lifecycle, integrating activities from Mobile Studio, Email Studio and more, to deliver a seamless multi-channel experience.
What are Mobile Studio’s top features?
With its simple ‘drag and drop’ functionality, Journey Builder helps you build superior customer journeys from start to finish, enabling you to listen to and collect data from your customers.
By listening for customer cues, you can identify important moments and tailor your engagement in direct response to what your target audience is saying online. It also allows you to stay alert to your customers’ changing needs, enabling you to adjust your engagement to match their preferences.
Any obstacles to Journey Builder?
Journey Builder only works to its full effectiveness if you feed it customer data that is correctly segmented. However, without the right tools, segmentation can be complex.
How can brands maximize their use of Journey Builder?
To make the most of Journey Builder, you need to use Automation Studio effectively. Automation Studio is a part of Journey Builder that facilitates the automation of your brand journeys across all channels and also helps you filter and segment your data correctly. Segmentation is crucial because it allows you to use Journey Builder more effectively and schedule more personalized campaigns.
Automation Studio allows you to set up a whole range of different types of automation – from very simple to very complex. It also allows you to write advanced SQL queries and data filters for more effective segmentation.
With Journey Builder, you can orchestrate your entire customer lifecycle, integrating activities from Mobile Studio, Email Studio, and more, to deliver a seamless multi-channel experience.
Summary: How to maximize your use of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud
To get the most value out of the SFMC, marketers need to understand the software suite in its entirety. Maximizing your investment requires a clear grasp of what solutions the software offers, how they can meet your business needs, and what potential stumbling blocks you need to look out for.
The most common challenge that brands encounter when trying to maximize their use of the SFMC is not knowing how to use its different tools in tandem. While the software works best when its tools are used in combination and not in isolation, marketers still need to know which tools to use at the right time, and for what purpose.
Another problem brands commonly face is not knowing how to extend their use of the SFMC beyond the software’s out-of-the-box capabilities. Taking a general approach limits your use of the software, rather than makes it work for your brand’s specific needs. A key example is when brands don’t use Automation Studio to segment their customers properly – which leads to poor use of Journey Builder and, in turn, sub-par marketing results
The most common challenge that brands encounter when trying to maximize their use of the SFMC is not knowing how to use its different tools in tandem.
Working with Celerity
As a Salesforce Marketing Cloud gold partner, we have the experience and skills to deliver product solutions that ensure our customers benefit fully from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Our Centre of Excellence expertise means we can provide an end-to-end system integration experience, big data and insight services, and fully customizable trigger programs. Our data modeling and segmentation experience help brands build the all-important Single Customer View (SCV). To ensure that our clients benefit from their new software as quickly as possible – and with little to no disruption – we oversee their systems integration and attend to any problems immediately.
With over 40 years of cumulative experience, our professional services team knows how to successfully manage implementations and maximize your return on investment. We understand Salesforce from a practical and strategic point of view and can integrate it smoothly and seamlessly into your marketing strategy – helping you delight your customers with personalized, relevant multi-channel engagement that boosts your revenue.
