The Salesforce Certified Marketing Associate credential is for individuals who are interested in an entry-level marketing role within the Salesforce ecosystem. This certification highlights the knowledge, skills, and abilities of an individual new to Marketing Cloud Engagement and general marketing concepts.
1. About the Salesforce Certified Marketing Associate Exam
Content
40 multiple-choice questions and up to 5 non-scored questions
Time allotted
70 minutes
Passing score
65% (26 out of 40 questions)
Exam Fee
USD 75 plus applicable taxes
Retake Fee
Free
Prerequisite
None
For up to date information about this certification please refer to the official exam guide here!
Describe key components of a marketing strategy and how they align with the overall marketing purpose.
Given a scenario, identify key requirements for implementing an effective email opt-in process in a marketing campaign.
Recall the regional nature of privacy laws with respect to the subscriber base in order to uphold privacy standards in the context of marketing.
Given a scenario, provide examples of basic email goals, metrics, and relative value in assessing the success of a marketing campaign.
Given a customer experience scenario, summarize the type of content and message conveyed to the target audience.
2.2 Marketing Cloud Engagement Basics: 22%
Identify solutions for regional or business related account structures as they relate to business units and corresponding permissions in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Apply essential features of Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) for marketing activities.
Identify different Salesforce curated resources for assistance, training, and support when using Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Differentiate between subscriber keys, contact keys, and contact IDs to uniquely identify subscribers.
Given requirements, determine a proper Cloudpage form submission setup.
2.3 Email Sending and Journeys: 22%
Outline the necessary configurations to activate a journey and configure entry criteria for a successful activation.
Given a scenario, identify the recommended configuration for the email send wizard settings.
Distinguish between template components and content blocks when building emails in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Given a scenario, identify which journey functionality should be used to address business needs.
Given a scenario, identify how to accomplish content rendering validation.
2.4 Data Management: 18%
Given a scenario, summarize the various data import mechanisms and requirements.
Configure settings when creating a new data extension, including settings for data fields.
Given a scenario, recommend the best way to interpret a data extension to identify the desired target data
2.5 Reporting and Analytics: 10%
Identify where specific data can be found in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Interpret undesired send results and possible deliverability consequences.
3. Salesforce Salesforce Certified Marketing Associate Exam Study Course
Keep them short and sweet. Short and medium-length subject lines have higher open rates than long ones, which ultimately affects conversion rates.
Use your branding to your advantage. Limiting the length of your subject line doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice style. Infuse your brand into the messaging and take advantage of brand loyalty.
Test, test, and test again! This is how you determine which subject lines yield the best results.
The Skinny on A/B Testing. At its core, A/B testing takes two versions of your email, and tests to see which one works better.
Great CTAs (Call to Action) are:
Urgent: Use CTAs that create a need for urgent action.
Brief: State the CTA briefly, with no more than five words.
Action-oriented: Begin your CTA with a verb (download, register, buy, save).
Clear and predictable: Be clear and link to a place that doesn’t surprise subscribers.
Limited and visible: Focus subscribers’ attention on one to two prominent CTAs.
CAN-SPAM guidelines:
Accurately identify the sender in the header information.
Use a subject line that accurately represents the content of the email.
Identify the message as an advertisement.
Include your physical mailing address.
Honor opt-out requests promptly. Process an unsubscribe request within 10 days, and keep your unsubscribe mechanism operational for at least 30 days after the mailing.
Provide a mechanism to opt out. You cannot require a subscriber to log in or visit more than a single page to unsubscribe.
The profile center is a webpage where subscribers can provide and update their personal information and basic preferences (or attributes). Any attribute you store about a customer shows up on their profile center (things like email, gender, and name).
A subscription center is a page that identifies which messages a subscriber receives from your business.
Marketing Cloud Sender Authentication Package (SAP) is used to customize links and images to match the branding of the authenticated domain that you’re sending email from.
A Sender Policy Framework (SPF) record is a list of IP addresses that are allowed to send email from your domain. The IP list authenticates that email from your domain is from you and helps protect your brand by reducing the chance that your email is mistaken for spam.
Subscriber replies processed and forwarded by Marketing Cloud’s reply mail management (RMM) feature can be rejected at their destination due to authentication failures if the header is left untouched. To resolve this issue, use DMARC Forward Reply Rewrite to wrap the message in an authenticated domain.
A/B Testing is a market testing method in which you send two versions of your Marketing Cloud Email Studio communication to two test audiences from your subscriber list. Track which version receives the highest unique open rate or highest click-through rate and send that version to all remaining subscribers.
The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.
CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:
Don’t use false or misleading header information.
Don’t use deceptive subject lines.
Identify the message as an ad.
Tell recipients where you’re located.
Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future marketing email from you.
Remember that subscribers and members can opt out of marketing emails, too.
Honor opt-out requests promptly.
Monitor what others are doing on your behalf.
Email can contain three different types of information:
Commercial content – which advertises or promotes a commercial product or service, including content on a website operated for a commercial purpose;
Transactional or relationship content – which facilitates an already agreed-upon transaction or updates a customer about an ongoing transaction; an
Other content – which is neither commercial nor transactional or relationship.
Know the restrictions on targeted advertising and third-party data. Each of the U.S. state privacy laws directly regulates tracking consumers across various websites and mobile apps for targeted advertising.
New privacy rules mean greater control for consumers. This includes the right to be forgotten (delete my data), access and portability (give me a copy of my data), and restriction of processing (stop further use of my data).
Data minimization means rethinking your whole process. Data minimization requires organizations to collect and use data only to the extent necessary.
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) law gave California residents broad new rights, such as:
The right to know what categories of Personal Information businesses are collecting about them
The right to know whether businesses are Selling their Personal Information and to whom
The right to prohibit businesses from Selling their Personal Information
The right to access their Personal Information
The right to request that a business delete their Personal Information
The right to equal services and pricing when exercising rights under the CCPA
The CCPA requires that Businesses engaged in activities that constitute a Sale under CCPA provide “a clear and conspicuous link on the Business’ website, titled Do Not Sell My Personal Information,” that leads to a page that allows a consumer to opt out of the Sale of their Personal Information.
Salesforce has carefully prepared for the CCPA. Salesforce qualifies as a Service Provider under the CCPA and is dedicated to helping our customers comply with the CCPA when using Salesforce services. Salesforce customers who previously signed our Data Processing Agreement (DPA) likely already have adequate terms meeting the requirements of the CCPA.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) establishes rules for how companies, governments, and other entities can process the personal data of data subjects who are in the European Union.
Key Principles of GDPR:
Fairness and Transparency – Organizations must always process personal data lawfully, fairly, and in a transparent manner.
Purpose Limitation – Organizations can collect personal data only for specified, explicit, and legitimate purposes. They cannot further process personal data in a manner that’s incompatible with those purposes.
Data Minimization – Organizations can collect only personal data that’s adequate, relevant, and limited to what’s necessary for the intended purpose.
Accuracy – Personal data must be accurate and, where necessary, up to date.
Data Deletion – Personal data must be kept only for as long as it’s needed to fulfill the original purpose of collection.
Security – Organizations must use appropriate technical and organizational security measures to protect personal data against unauthorized processing and accidental disclosure, access, loss, destruction, or alteration.
Accountability – A data controller is responsible for implementing measures to ensure that the personal data it controls is handled in compliance with the principles of the GDPR.
Marketing Cloud Engagement helps you speak to customers with the right message at the right time. It enables you to understand each customer’s attributes, behaviors, and purchases to expertly tailor messages—strengthening customer relationships and growing your business.
With Marketing Cloud Engagement, you can do things like:
Connect known and unknown profiles to gain a unified view of the customer.
Leverage data and Einstein artificial intelligence to make every interaction relevant.
Create two-way, real-time engagement when and where the customer wants.
Measure, report, and optimize on marketing performance, impact, and customer loyalty.
Marketing Cloud Engagement Products
Product
How it Rocks Marketing
Advertising Studio
Use CRM to securely power 1-to-1 advertising across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Display at scale.
Salesforce CDP
Achieve a single, actionable view of your customer using Salesforce’s custom data platform.
Marketing Cloud Intelligence
Enable cross-platform marketing intelligence by unifying data sources, visualizing AI-powered insights, and creating actionable reports to drive ROI.
Email Studio
Use data from every department to build smarter email—from basic marketing campaigns to sophisticated 1-to-1 messages.
Google Analytics 360
Gain cross-channel insights for seamless customer journeys with Google Analytics 360 + Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Marketing Cloud Personalization
Visualize, track, and manage customer experiences with real-time interaction management—driving valuable engagement at the right moment.
Journey Builder
Deliver cross-channel personalized experiences at every step of the customer lifecycle with campaign management.
Mobile Studio
Send consistent SMS, push, and chat app messages in real-time.
Marketing Cloud Engagement Products
Mobile Studio features mobile messaging tools, including:
MobileConnect to create and send text messages (SMS and MMS)
MobilePush to create and send automated, interactive, or scheduled push messages from mobile applications
GroupConnect, or Chat App Messaging, allows brands to create 1:1 conversations on group messaging apps (LINE) using rich customer data
There are five task groups associated with digital marketing:
Strategy and planning
Data and analytics
Creative and content
Campaign operations
Marketing technology
Essential Marketing Team Roles
Role
Task Group
Responsibilities
Marketing manager
Strategy and planning
Leads strategy, manages the marketing team, and serves as admin for Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Data architect
Data and analytics
Designs solutions for business needs, including the data model.Leads integration, builds data views, and drives data analysis.
Content manager
Creative and content
Manages all creative assets.Builds and deploys all creative content for marketing campaigns.
Campaign manager
Campaign operations
Manages and oversees campaign delivery and technical implementation.QAs and approves all campaigns.
Solution architect
Marketing technology
Implements business needs including building campaigns, automations, setting up audience segments, creating data views, and other technical configuration projects.QAs all campaigns and supports deployment
Essential Marketing Team Roles
Marketing Cloud Engagement release terminology:
Agile development: A project methodology used to manage software development work. Agile methodology focuses on completing small, short-term tasks versus a waterfall approach that focuses on a large-scale project.
Bug: An identified error or flaw found in our product that is being tracked for status and completion.
Downtime: The amount of time a product is unavailable.
Emergency release: A product update that occurs when an update needs to be made immediately to fix a bug that is impacting security or performance.
Feature: A change made to Marketing Cloud Engagement that adds new functionality or improves current functionality.
Freeze: A cut-off date for changes. Feature freeze relates to what will be added to a release and a release freeze refers to the date no additional changes can be made to an upcoming release.
Functional test: A Quality Assurance (QA) test that evaluates a group of functional requirements.
GA: Denotes a product feature that is generally available (GA) to all customers.
Integration test: A QA test that tests if different parts of the system work together after updates.
Known issues: Issues discovered and logged by members of the Trailblazer Community. These issues are monitored and tracked by Salesforce product teams as bugs.
Lifecycle: The cadence of product improvements and fixes.
Patch release: A weekly release that focuses on fixing bugs and known issues.
Pilot features: A feature offered to a limited number of customers who have signed up to test that feature.
Sprint: A short time period (often 2 weeks) when product teams work on a specific list of tasks.
Stack: The database group that your Marketing Cloud Engagement account is part of. Your stack and specific database (called an instance) impacts your account’s release date.
Unit test: A QA test to ensure an individual update meets requirements and follows expected behavior.
Tenants – The Marketing Cloud Engagement edition your company purchased dictates the type of tenant you’re working with.
Tenant Type
Description
Enterprise 2.0
A tenant is the top-level account and includes all associated business units.
Enterprise 1.0
A tenant is the top-level account and includes all associated On-Your-Behalf or Lock & Publish business units.
Core
A tenant is a single account.
Agency
Each top-level account and each associated client account is a separate tenant.
Account Name and MIDs – Your initial account name is set at the time your Marketing Cloud Engagement account is provisioned for you. A unique member identification code, or MID, is assigned to every account.
Marketing Cloud Engagement Instance – Knowing your instance is necessary to configure the Web Collect URL, SOAP API, and more.
IP Allowlist – The recommended best practice is to allowlist the entire set of IP ranges for your region.
Marketing Cloud Engagement includes standard roles and permissions
Marketing Cloud Engagement Administrator—This role assigns Marketing Cloud Engagement roles to users and manages channels, apps, and tools. (Hint: this is you!)
Marketing Cloud Engagement Viewer—This role views cross-channel marketing activity results in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Marketing Cloud Engagement Channel Manager—This role creates and executes cross-channel interactive marketing campaigns and administers specific channels like Email Studio.
Marketing Cloud Engagement Security Administrator—This role maintains security settings and manages user activity and alerts.
Marketing Cloud Engagement Content Editor/Publisher—This role creates and delivers messages through applicable channel apps.
Business Units – Business units control access to information and sharing of information throughout Marketing Cloud Engagement. For example, a company with multiple divisions or brands can create a business unit for each brand, so that users within that business unit can access only their brand-specific content.
Marketing Cloud Engagement sends are grouped into two categories: user-initiated and triggered.
User-initiated send: When you choose the subscribers and the time to send a message—that’s a user-initiated send. These are typically marketing-related messages. You manage the entire process of a user-initiated email message through Marketing Cloud Engagement. A monthly newsletter sent to company employees is an example of a user-initiated send.
Triggered send: A triggered send occurs in response to an action that your subscriber takes. Although you define the content and interaction for that message, it sends automatically when a subscriber does something. These are often transactional messages. For example, sending a confirmation email to a customer who purchases something on your website is a triggered send.
Tips for improving the deliverability of your messages:
CAN-SPAM Act – Differentiate commercial emails versus transactional emails, which are treated differently under the CAN-SPAM Act.
Content Detective – Content Detective tool to identify potential spam triggers in your email content. This feature mirrors the logic used by spam-filtering software to identify words, phrases, and patterns that are likely to trigger filters and then recommends a resolution to each identified problem.
Text Versions – Preview and modify text versions to ensure those subscribers are still receiving an impactful message.
Subscriber Preview and Test Send – Select Preview and Test to render the email as a subscriber will receive it. This gives you an opportunity to see how personalization displays for subscribers, and validate AMPscript or other programmatic languages you may have used to create the message.
IP Warming – Build up approximately 30 days of desirable sending history and data so that ISPs have an idea of the mail coming from your new IP address.
Sender Authentication Package – The Sender Authentication Package (SAP) in Email Studio provides a collection of products designed to help ensure that your email messages reach the intended recipients’ inboxes.
Marketing Cloud Engagement standard reports
Report Type
Description
CloudPages
Access the data you collect from Smart Capture forms using the CloudPages Data Extension on any CloudPages Landing Page, Microsite, Facebook Tab, or MobilePush Page.
Contacts
Learn the total number of billable contacts in your account or data about an individual contact.
Discover
Discover provides templates with measures and attributes preselected to answer a specific business question. Each template suggests a specific chart type and applicable features in Discover, such as custom calculation, data filters, or conditional formatting. Use one of the templates or start with a blank page and build your own report.
Email
Review email performance by device or attribute, examine email success in specific campaigns, discover what day is the best performing send day, get statistics on impression tracking, and much more.
Journey Builder
See tracking and engagement metrics for emails sent in journeys, aggregated by day or a specified period of time.
Mobile
Get the total number of subscribers and unsubscribes for SMS, tracking information about SMS messages, and keyword activity summaries. Run reports for push message tracking results. Review a summary of outbound messages sent to LINE followers, including the delivered message count.
Preference management in Marketing Cloud Engagement includes two standard pages: a basic profile page that collects subscribers’ personal information and a subscription center which handles campaign-specific opt-ins. Creating a custom preference center combines these two pages into one and allows you to tailor it to your audience and brand.
Subscriber data, in Marketing Cloud Engagement, is stored in either a list or a data extension.
A list is a collection of subscribers that receive your communications. You can create as many lists as you need to segment your subscribers and target your email communications.
A data extension, on the other hand, is a table within the application database that contains your data. You can use a data extension to store not only sendable subscriber data—just like with a list—but also relational data like purchases, inventory, and rewards program data.
There are three ways to import data into a data extension.
Manually with the Import Wizard—This is a handy-dandy wizard located within the data extension. It allows you to manually bring your data into a data extension, and we discuss it in more detail later.
Import Activity—The Import Activity, like the Import Wizard, allows you to manually bring your data into a data extension. The main difference is the Import Activity can be automated using Automation Studio.
API—You use an API call to import your data.
Content Builder is a cross-channel content management tool that lets you consolidate images, documents, and content in a single location for use across Marketing Cloud Engagement.
You can individualize content with:
Personalization strings: Insert subscriber attributes, such as subscriber name, into the subject line, preheader, or content of your email.
Dynamic content: Display content according to rules that you define based on the subscriber’s attributes or data extension field values.
AMPscript: Use this scripting language to embed subscriber-specific content within HTML emails, text emails, landing pages, SMS messages, and push notifications from MobilePush.
Tracking tab allows us to view:
Sent – Total number of emails sent.
Delivered – Total number of emails delivered.
Deliverability Rate – The percentage of emails that were delivered compared to the number that bounced (soft and hard).
Total Soft Bounces – The number of emails that were recognized by recipients’ mail servers but were returned to the sender because their mailboxes were full or the mail servers were temporarily unavailable.
Total Hard Bounces – Number of emails that permanently bounced back to the sender because the addresses were invalid.
Email Opens – The total number of times subscribers open an email where the images render.
Open Rate – The percentage of emails that were opened (images rendered) compared to the number that were delivered.
Clicks – The number of subscribers who clicked on a link in the email.
Click Rate – The percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link compared to the number of emails delivered
Unsubscribes – Total number of subscribers who clicked unsubscribe.
Unsubscribe Rate – Percentage of subscribers who clicked unsubscribe compared to total number of emails delivered
The All Subscriber list is a collection of subscribers who have received an email communication from you or have been added to a list. You can learn a lot about each subscriber from this list.
Subscriber Status: View which subscriber is active, unsubscribed, held, or inactive.
Subscriber Key: See each subscriber’s unique identifier in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Profile Attributes: Input relevant information about the subscriber.
Preference Attributes: Know what kind of communication the subscriber prefers.
Promotional messages (sometimes referred to as commercial messages) are sent to a list of subscribers who have opted-in to receive promotional/marketing-type content from your brand. Examples include newsletters, sale notifications, new product announcements, event invitations, and inspirational updates.
Transactional messages are sent in response to a user’s interaction with your website or business or service. Examples include shipping notifications, account alerts, and identity validation. These messages are often critical in nature, but that’s not to say you can’t promote your brand in a transactional message!
A group is a subset of subscribers you’ve taken from a list. You can filter groups by profile and preference attributes using a simple drag-and-drop interface.
A data filter is a group of criteria that segments a list or data extension.
You can automate segmentation in Marketing Cloud Engagement with filter activities and query activities.
Reply Mail Management (RMM) manages replies to the email jobs you send through Marketing Cloud. RMM processes the reply automatically, if appropriate, and forwards the message if the message requires personal review.
Send classifications in Marketing Cloud Setup lets admins define parameters for an email job in a central location. Send classifications include these components.
Delivery Profile – specifies the delivery information for a message in a central location.
Sender Profile – specifies the From information for a send in a central location.
CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing) classification – defines the CAN-SPAM classification as Commercial or Transactional.
Contact Builder is a Marketing Cloud Engagement app which lets you access, manage, organize, link, and view contact data from all Marketing Cloud Engagement applications and channels. Contact Builder has several tools to help manage contact data for use in building 1:1 relationships:
Contacts Configuration. Determine how Contact Builder processes imported contact information.
Data Designer. Define information about your contacts and relate that data directly to the contact record by linking data extensions.
Data Extensions. Create and manage the data extensions that hold contact information.
Imports. Create the processes that move contact information into your data extensions.
Data Sources. Visualize where your contact data originates and assign attributes to those sources.
A contact is a person you send messages to through any marketing channel. A contact typically appears in the All Contacts section, but a contact record can also appear in other locations.
A subscriber is a person who opted to receive communications or belongs to a particular channel. A subscriber lives in the individual studios. Subscribers can be imported or created manually and are stored in data extensions.
The Contact Key is a unique identifier that you assign to a contact.
The Contact ID is a number Salesforce uses to uniquely identify a contact on the backend.
In Email Studio, contacts are identified by the Subscriber Key, which becomes the Contact Key in Contact Builder.
In Marketing Cloud Engagement, attributes represent a single piece of information about a contact. Email address is a good example of an attribute. So is gender. A contact can contain two types of attributes.
Profile attributes describe who the contact is. Some of this data is provided by the subscriber, such as gender, state, or interest (do they like hiking or running?).
Behavioral attributes describe what the contact has done. For example, a contact indicates some related interests or clicks links when reading a newsletter.
Attribute groups are data sources that are logically grouped together, and they allow you to organize data and configure relationships in Contact Builder.
Populations are used to categorize distinct subgroups of contacts. Think of a population as the subset of the main list of people who could enter a journey.
You can link attribute groups and populations using the Contact Key value.
There are three types of data extensions in Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Standard data extensions are used for building a custom set of fields.
Filtered data extensions are used to create a subset/segment from an existing data extension.
Random data extensions allow you to randomly select subscribers from a source data extension
All data extensions are either sendable or nonsendable.
Sendable data extensions have a send relationship and map to a subscriber. Contacts are added to All Contacts when you send to them.
Nonsendable data extensions are reference data, such as the weather, airport codes, orders, product tables, etc.—things you want to use to personalize emails, but not a person you are sending an email to.
Shared Data Extensions – you can share data extensions with other business units by storing them in shared data extension folders.
Segmentation allows you to create specific criteria or rules and apply the rules to a data extension.
Marketing Cloud Connect is used to synchronize Sales Cloud and Service Cloud data with Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Email Studio in Marketing Cloud Engagement is used to build and send personalized email.
Landing Pages – CloudPages is a Marketing Cloud Engagement application used to create and publish targeted marketing content to customers across multiple channels.
Delivery profile includes some important message information for each send.
A header with a link to view the email message as a webpage
A footer containing the physical mailing address required by CAN-SPAM regulations
An unsubscribe link allowing users to remove themselves from your mailing list (also in the footer)
Send Throttle sends emails during the hours you specify every day, starting the day you send the email until all emails send. To enable the Send Throttle feature.
In Setup, go to Email Studio.
Choose Email Optional Features, then Send Throttling.
Use the slider button to enable.
Prebuild Burst Sending allows you to send emails fast. The audience is locked down and the emails are built when the schedule send time is set. You can use this feature for flash sales or emergency messaging.
A File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard protocol for securely moving files between environments. Each Marketing Cloud Engagement account comes with a Secure FTP (or SFTP) that needs to be configured before you do any import activities.
A send log is a data extension that is created to store specific data about your email sends—beyond the information already stored in tracking.
In Marketing Cloud Engagement, an SQL query activity is used to execute queries and retrieve data for reporting or segmenting audiences.
System data views are Salesforce-created queries that you can use to find information about your subscribers. You won’t be able to make changes to these precreated data views. Here are some of the most commonly used views.
Query these data views in Automation Studio to view click and open data for emails from your Marketing Cloud Engagement account. Helps to identify additional messaging opportunities by indicating subscriber engagement on a specific JobID.
Query this data view in Automation Studio to view complaints data related to emails from your Marketing Cloud Engagement account. Use to prune your lists to ensure more accurate audiences and improve deliverability.
Internet Service Providers (ISP) – An ISP is a provider of an email mailbox to an end user (that is, your subscriber). This can include companies that provide Internet connectivity like a cable company or a service that provides free web-based mailboxes such as Gmail or Outlook.com.
Internet Protocol (IP) Address – An IP address is a unique numeric identifier (for example: 136.147.131.11, one of the Marketing Cloud Engagement sending IP addresses) that every machine connected to the Internet (or network) has to distinguish your online activity from another machine.
Shared and Dedicated IPs – Shared IP addresses are shared with other organizations on an email server. Sending reputation in a shared IP pool is based on a blended reputation of all senders. A dedicated IP address is used by one organization to control its own sending reputation.
Domains and Subdomains – Domain names are friendly names that are associated with IP addresses and are used to identify the sender. You can also have a subdomain that relates to your domain. Here’s an example.
Private Domains – Private domains (like cloud.getcloudyconsulting.com) can be purchased separately for use with email or for landing pages.
Domain Name System (DNS) – DNS is a database that connects IP addresses with their corresponding domain names. You can delegate your domain to Salesforce to manage DNS on your behalf, or self-host directly through your provider.
Phishing – Phishing is impersonating a trustworthy source to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details.
Spoofing – Spoofing is falsifying information in an email message; for example, using a fake “From” address.
Email Authentication – Email authentication is a process that confirms an email isn’t forged and is from the organization who owns the provided domain name. This process allows an ISP to block known spammers and approve email from reputable domains. This process varies by ISP, with some ISPs being stricter than others.
Sender Authentication Package (SAP) – An SAP is purchased from Salesforce and includes a collection of products, including an authenticated private domain with link and image wrapping, a dedicated IP address, and reply mail management (RMM). We cover this topic in more detail in the next unit.
Security Socket Layer (SSL) – SSL encrypts communications between networks, allowing sensitive information such as credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, and login credentials to be transmitted securely.
Sender Authentication Package (SAP) through Salesforce ensures you have compliant, authenticated email messages when sending from our platform.
IP warming is the process of gradually increasing the volume of mail sent by a new IP address. The goal is to build up at least 30 days of desirable sending history so that ISPs have an idea of the kinds of mail coming from your new IP address.
Ten Marketing KPIs to help you understand how well your messages are connecting:
Delivery rate is the percentage of emails delivered. ((Number of sends) – (Number of Bounces)) / (Number of Sends).
The click-through rate is the percentage of clicks once an email is opened. (Unique Clicks) / (Delivered Emails).
Clicks by link/URL – These are unique clicks on a link within a single email or across many emails. They are sometimes tracked by aliases or UTM parameters.
Event lag is the average time that passed between the click and send time.
Bounce rate by bounce type – Bounce rate is the percentage of messages rejected by the email client (e.g., Google, Apple). Calculation: (Bounces) / (Sends). Bounces are typically organized into a few categories, including:
Block. Bounces resulting from a complaint, blocklist, content, URL block, or authentication error.
Hard. Bounces caused by an unknown domain or user, or syntax error.
Soft. Bounces resulting from a full or temporarily inactive mailbox, or temporary domain failure.
Technical. Number of bounces caused by the server, data format, or network error.
Unsubscribe rate and complaint rate – The Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of unsubscribes per deliveries. The complaint rate is the percentage of complaints per deliveries. A complaint is logged when a subscriber flags the email as spam.
Web traffic and conversions – Indicate the percentage of recipients who completed the email’s intended purpose, such as converting online to visit, purchase, download, or complete a similar call to action.
Campaign performance (by campaign and by email) – Creating distinct email marketing KPIs for each can help; for example, click-through rate for a whole campaign versus click-through rate for individual emails across multiple campaigns. Doing this will help you understand why a campaign is working or not, and which emails to use in future ones.
Subscriber list growth and trends – Tracking the health of your various lists and segments is a vital indicator of how your emails are performing over time, and if your email sign-up CTAs are effective.
Most and least engaged subscribers – High engagement may indicate a customer with high brand loyalty, who maybe should be targeted in an upcoming loyalty offer.
The Journeys dashboard gives you a high-level overview of journey performance for the most recent version of a journey, regardless of whether it’s running, finishing, stopped, or still in draft status.
The Journeys dashboard also includes the number of contacts in the journey’s audience and the percentage who completed the journey.
Journey Builder Reports
Journey Builder Email Send Summary
Tracking and engagement metrics for emails sent in journeys over a specified time frame. Choose specific journeys and versions to include in the report.
Journey Builder Email Sends by Day
Tracking and engagement metrics for emails sent in journeys, aggregated by day, for a specified time frame, along with specific journeys and versions to include in the report.
Journey Builder Reports
Three reports commonly used for journeys:
Email Overview: Provides a high-level view of top KPIs like Sends, Delivery Rate, and Open Rate, as well as how these metrics have performed over time.
Journey Performance by Email: Provides an in-depth view into your journey and activities data, including the journey performance and a detailed breakdown by domain, day of week, audience, and more.
Email Engagement: Provides a detailed visualization of your email engagement data including engagement KPIs, engagement timelines, and in -depth breakdowns by domain, day of week, audience, and more.
Use Journey Tags to organize your journeys and use the search or filter tool to quickly locate them in the Journey dashboard.
Organize your journeys in folders so they’re easy to find.
