Top Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interview Questions for 2023

Top Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interview Questions & Answers for 2023.

Q1. What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an integrated customer engagement platform that enables you to deliver personalized customer engagement at scale on every channel, from email to web, mobile, social, and digital advertising.

Q2. What is an Audience in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

An audience represents a collection of contacts that are grouped based on attributes that are used when they receive a message. An audience draws information from a sendable data extension. 

Q3. What is Audience Builder?

Marketing Cloud Audience Builder is used to segment subscribers to better target email sends.

Q4. What is a segment?

A segment represents a group of people who meet a set of user-defined criteria.

Q5. What is Audience Studio?

Audience Studio is used to create complete data profiles, discover new insights and use third party data sources.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interview Questions

Q6. What is Data Studio?

Data Studio is used for audience discovery, data acquisition and data provisioning. It can be used to create richer audiences for Marketers. Monetize data with full transparency and control.

Q7. What is Datorama?

Datorama is used to integrate data from marketing and advertising platforms, web analytics, CRM, ecommerce, and more. It can be used to analyze the data, optimize performance within campaigns, discover insights in real time, and then act on them.

Q8. What is Journey Builder?

Journey Builder is used for campaign planning and execution. It is used to automate campaigns that guide customers through a series of interactions with a brand. Journey Builder communicates seamlessly across email, SMS, push notifications, ads, landing pages, and apps. Tailors the customer journey based on real-time events like purchases, mobile app downloads, reading an email, or closed service cases. Continually adjusts customers’ paths based on their current or predicted behaviour.

Q9. What is Interaction Studio?

Interaction Studio (formerly Evergage) is used to visualize, track, and manage customer experiences with real-time interaction management. It can be used to tailor interactions with customers and prospects to increase loyalty, engagement, and conversions.

Q10. What is Email Studio?

Email Studio can be used to build emails, segment and target audiences without any coding. Tracking in Email Studio can be used to view email opens, clicks, undeliverable messages and other metrics. It can also be used to capture how many emails are forwarded and how many new subscribers each forward generates. It can be used to create a subscriber list from tracking data to monitor subscriber and list performance.

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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interview Questions & Answers

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Q11. What is a Sender Profile?

Sender Profile captures the “From” details of the send, such as sender name and email address. Sender can be specified by choosing from a List of users or providing Name and Email. You can also specify Custom Reply Mail Management (RMM)

Q12. What is Delivery Profile?

Delivery Profile identifies “How” the message is deployed, in particular, which IP (if there is more than one) should be used for send. In a Delivery Profile you can specify:

• IP address
• Header
• Footer

Q13. What is Send Classification?

Send Classification combines sender and delivery profiles and identifies the nature of the send. It consists of:

• CNA-SPAM  Classification
• Sender Profile
• Delivery Profile
• Send Priority

Q14. What is a Send Log?

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. Standard tracking options in Marketing Cloud store email send performance based on a job ID (or a system created ID) at the time of send. You can use a send log to track additional information about the send, based on what matters most to your business.

Q15. Where can you use REST and SOAP APIs offered by Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud REST API

• Contact Builder
• Content Builder
• GroupConnect
• Journey Builder
• MobileConnect
• MobilePush
• Personalization Builder

SOAP API

• Automations
• Content creation
• Subscribers and lists
• Tracking
• Triggered sends
• Other email activities

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interview Questions

Q16. What are the out of the box Journey Builder Entry Sources?

Entry Sources represent areas where contacts data or lists of customers are found in the Marketing Cloud. Out of the box Journey Builder Supports following Entry Sources

1. Data Extension
2. API Event
3. Cloud Pages
4. Inbound Chat
5. Salesforce Data
6. Event

Q17. What are out of the box Journey Builder Activities?

Journey Builder Supports following out of the box Activities that can be configure affect each contact until they reach a goal or the end of the journey. It is also possible to create custom activities:

• Messages are content sent to contacts such
  • SMS
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • Push Notification
  • Inbox
  • In-App Message
• Advertising
  • Ad Campaign
  • Ad Audience
• Flow Control
  • Wait by Duration
  • Wait Until Date
  • Wait by Attribute
  • Decision Split
  • Path Optimizer
  • Engagement Split
  • Random Split
  • Join
  • Wait Until Event
  • Scoring Split
  • Frequency Split
  • Wait Until Chat Response
  • Interaction Studio Decision Split
  • Einstein STO
• Customer Updates – automatically update a contact’s data in a data extension
  • Update Contact
  • Interaction Studio Activity
• Sales & Service Cloud –  interact with the Salesforce Sales & Service Cloud. These are available if Marketing Cloud Connect is installed
  • Contact
  • Task
  • Convert Lead
  • Case
  • Account
  • Lead
  • Campaign Member
  • Object Activity Opportunity

Q18. What is Database of Record?

Database of record (DBOR) is the system where you store the most accurate and up-to-date information about your customers, DBOR is the source of truth about customer information. E.g. Service Cloud

Q19. What are the levels of content complexity based on a Content Builder email?

• Static – a single block of HTML-based content with no personalization.
• Simple – a single block of HTML-based content with some personalization for each subscriber, added at the time of send.
• Moderate – up to 3 HTML-based content blocks. At the time of send, data found in a data extension not in the send’s audience is reviewed and added to the email as personalized content for a specific subscriber.
• Advanced – more than 5 HTML-based content blocks. It includes multiple personalization substitutions, uses impression regions, and multiple data extension lookups.

Q20. What is AMPscript?

AMPscript is a Salesforce proprietary scripting language that interacts with Marketing Cloud emails, landing pages, SMS and MMS messages, and push notifications. Using AMPscript you can:

• Add personalized, unique content for each subscriber.
• Display content based on certain conditions.
• Format data values.
• Search and retrieve relational data in multiple data extensions.

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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interview Questions & Answers

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Q21. What is Guide Template Language (GTL)?

Guided Template Language is Marketing Cloud’s newest programmatic language. GTL can be used to create personalized, repeatable content blocks and templates that are data-driven using fewer lines of code than with AMPscript.

Q22. What are some of the key Email Send Optimization techniques?

• Review account and sending procedures
  • Avoid overlapping automations and processes
• Review and streamline data
  • Commit to data hygiene
  • Preload data extensions
  • Follow data optimization best practices
  • Limit the amount of data being passed in an API call
• Reduce content complexity
  • Reduce the number of personalized content blocks
  • Try using Marketing Cloud languages over other coding languages
  • Avoid multiple lookups and complex email coding

Q23. What Sender Policy Framework (SPF)?

Sender Policy Framework (SPF) is a DNS-based email authentication feature that allows senders to publish a list of IP addresses that are used for sending. Basically, SPF records are lists of Marketing Cloud IP addresses that are allowed to send email from your domain, which help ISPs know your mail is legitimate.

Q24. What is DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM)?

DomainKeys identified mail (DKIM) is an authentication method designed to detect email spoofing. When DKIM is used, messages are signed with a cryptographic signature to verify a domain is from the authorized owner of that domain.

Q25. What is Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC)?

Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance (DMARC) is an authentication protocol that uses both SPF and DKIM to determine the authenticity of an email message. A properly configured DMARC policy can tell a receiving server whether or not to accept an email from a particular sender. It is important to note that not all receiving servers perform a DMARC check before accepting a message, but most major ISPs do.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interview Questions

Q26. What is IP Warming?

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. The ramp-up period can take longer than 30 days for some senders and a shorter time for others. Factors such as your overall list size, list quality, send frequency, and subscriber engagement can influence the amount of time it takes for your IP address to be fully ramped up. 

Q27. What is Tokonized Sending?

You can use Tokenized Sending to send contact data that is too sensitive (such as PII or PHI) to be store in Marketing Cloud. Information from customer data systems will transmit to Marketing Cloud only at send time via an API call. Instead of storing sensitive information Marketing Cloud stores a single token per send attribute. This token resembles a standard email address or phone number but does not include any information about the contact. You can also used Tokenized Sending to personalize email sends and segment and filter contacts. Any tracking and deliverability information resides in Marketing Cloud. 

Q28. What is Distributed Marketing?

Distributed Marketing is a managed package. It helps customers bridge the gap between corporate marketing, employees, channel partners, and their brand to deliver consistent experiences across corporate marketing and partner networks. Corporate marketers build and share on-brand, collaborative content in Marketing Cloud. Distributed teams of advisors, partners, and more can view, personalize, and send this content directly from CRM experiences such as Sales, Service, Financial Services, or Experience Cloud.

You can use Distributed Marketing to send email to Lead, Contact or Person Account from right with in Salesforce using email templates created in Marketing Cloud.

Q29. Explain types of Marketing Cloud Tenants.

 The Marketing Cloud edition your company purchases dictates the type of tenant you’re working with.

Tenant Type	Description
Enterprise 2.0	A tenant is the top-level account and all associated business units
Enterprise	A tenant is the top-level account and 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

Q30. What is MID?

A unique Member Identification Code, or MID, is assigned to every account (whether it’s Core, Enterprise or Agency) and any associated child accounts. The MID value is used to identify that entity. So, depending on your Marketing Cloud edition, tenants can include single or multiple MIDs. 

• An Enterprise 2.0 tenant includes multiple MIDs for Enterprise-edition accounts
• An Enterprise tenant includes multiple MIDs
• A Core tenant includes a single top-level account with one MID
• An Agency tenant includes only the top-level account. Each associated client account unit is a separate tenant

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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interview Questions

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Q31. What are Tenant Endpoints?

Marketing Cloud also assigns a unique, system-generated subdomain to each of its tenants. Your subdomain will be represented by a 28-character string starting with the letters “mc.” When your subdomain is appended to Marketing Cloud APIs, it creates endpoints that are unique to your tenant. Only your tenant can use your endpoints. No other Marketing Cloud customer can use them for their API requests. 

For example if a tenant tenant has subdomain: mc563885gzs27c523-63k636abcd

Then these are their endpoints:

REST API endpoint: mc563885gzs27c523-63k636abcd.rest.marketingcloudapis.com

SOAP API endpoint: mc563885gzs27c523-63k636abcd.soap.marketingcloudapis.com

Q32. What are Business Units?

Business units are available with an Enterprise or Enterprise 2.0 tenant. 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. You can then use user roles and permissions to control what users can do within a business unit. You can also use business units to control user access to develop API requests.

Q33. What are different types of Journey Statuses?

Status	Description
Canceled	A Single Send journey was canceled before the scheduled date and time.
Deleted	The journey was deleted.
Draft	A fully editable version that has not been activated. There are no active customers running through or waiting in it.
Running	The most recently activated version. Once activated, it becomes the primary version.
Scheduled	The Single Send journey is scheduled to send at the specified date and time.
Sent	A Single Send journey started or sent a message on the specified send date and time.
Stopped	A running journey version can be stopped at any time. Customers in that version of the journey are ejected and the journey becomes inactive.

Q34. What is Sender Authentication Package (SAP)?

Sender Authentication Package (SAP) is a Marketing Cloud account branding tool that allows you to customize links and images to match branding for the authenticated domain you’re sending email from.

SAP Features:

• Account Branding – This feature brands your account with your chosen authenticated custom domain. This feature modifies view-as-a-webpage, link and image wrapping, and removes all references to Marketing Cloud in favor of your custom authenticated domain
• Private Domain for Email sending – This feature assigns a domain used to send email. This domain acts as the From address for your email sends. Salesforce Marketing Cloud authenticates your email sends using the Sender Policy Framework (SPF), Sender ID, and DomainKeys/DKIM authentication
• Custom Domain for CloudPages – This feature includes a private domain for CloudPages
• Dedicated IP Address – This feature assigns a unique IP address to your account. All email messages sent from your account from Marketing Cloud use this IP address. This IP address represents most of your sending reputation
• Reply Mail Management – This feature controls the replies you receive from your subscribers. You can assign filters for out-of-office messages and manual unsubscribe requests

Q35. What’s the purpose of a Tenant-Specific Endpoint?

Each Marketing Cloud account exists within a tenant, or a top-level account with any associated business units. Tenant-specific endpoints are individualized addresses that you can use to communicate directly with Marketing Cloud (e.g. REST and SOAP API requests, FTP activities, and MobilePush interactions). Instead of sending requests to a generic endpoint that needs to be routed and bounced around a system before it finally reaches its destination, you get a direct address that handles only your requests.

Key benefits of Tenant-Specific Endpoint:

• Improved Security – Manage security needs (such as certificates) more easily, and better govern access to Marketing Cloud
• Lower Latency – Route requests directly to Marketing Cloud, and avoid bouncing around multiple instance locations
• Better Disaster Recovery – Limit repair efforts to only those instances that need help without preventing access to other users
• Improved Uptime – Limit performance issues to a specific subset of users instead of causing larger outages

Some of the Tenant-Specific Endpoints are:

• SFTP location
• REST API and Authentication requests
• SOAP API requests
• Secure Single Sign-On (SSO) requests
• MobilePush SDK interactions
• LINE Account access

This article will be updated shortly; please return for additional Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interview Questions and Answers!

Additional Salesforce Marketing Cloud Resources

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist Exam Guide
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Administrator Exam Guide
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developer Exam Guide
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultant Exam Guide
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Implementation Guides

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