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.
