Once you invest in Marketing Cloud, you’ll want to plan for an implementation phase. Part of getting Marketing Cloud up and running in the way you need it to is by locating and activating certain settings that will help you get the most out of this versatile tool.
But when there’s much to absorb about the Marketing Cloud, the settings can get lost in the haze of information. To guide and troubleshoot, here are some Marketing Cloud settings worth knowing to help you achieve liftoff.
Set Up Data Views
Setting up *data views* is an important step that’s often overlooked. Data views create a short path to subscriber responses, showing details like open rates, bounce rates, unsubscribes, clicks, and complaints. After all, data is what you need to gauge the health of your marketing campaign. By properly setting up the data views, information the way you need it is always just a click away.
Contact ID Management
The thing that makes Marketing Cloud so relevant to marketers is its ability to pull customer data from multiple sources and then sync them into unique contact IDs. Not only that, the data updates every 15 minutes, so the carefully cultivated data extension you built for a push campaign always has the freshest, most up-to-date information flowing in. It’s a big time saver.
Unless you know something about managing Contact ID, those benefits will disappear, causing problems such as duplicate subscriber keys as well as CAN-SPAM issues.
One solution is building an integration from Marketing Cloud to Salesforce known as contact ID management. Otherwise, there’s no built-in two-directional sync of email opt-outs from the Marketing Cloud preference center to Salesforce.
Another mistake is importing lists directly into Marketing Cloud, instead of taking the Salesforce route. Otherwise, you’ll end up with duplicate subscriber keys, which leads to CAN-SPAM issues.
Building a Data Model for Journey Builder
Without a solid data model, Journey Builder won’t be able to execute all the features that Marketing Cloud has to offer.
For example, let’s say you build a journey around a campaign to get investors to sign up for an online webinar. But thanks to an error in the data model, it can’t reliably show you how many recipients signed up. From there, your well-planned campaign hits a snag: How do you communicate with your recipients if you don’t have the data that tells you what action they took? Having a solid data model prevents these issues from happening.
Build a Send Log into Your Data Extension
Marketing Cloud does store records of each sent message, whether it was email or an SMS push. But an important way to optimize Marketing Cloud is by building a send log into your campaign. Basically, a send log is an advanced version of tracking that lets you zoom on specific details and collect them.
It’s also highly customized, so it’s not something that operates by default. Building a send log into your campaign will give you access to the specific data you need to measure performance and gain insights on customer behavior.
Turn on Audit Trail
Turning on Audit Trail lets you see who’s logged in to Marketing Cloud and when. This lets you ensure that sensitive information is safe, secure and being used by authorized users. You’ll want to make sure it’s set up, or you can’t access this data. It’s a user accountability system that provides another layer of security for sensitive customer information — which is critical in the financial space.
Enable Contact Delete
Salesforce is designed around the idea of eliminating duplicate contacts. As contact information gets imported from various sources, this creates new opportunities every day for duplicate contacts. It’s not hard to see how this can lead to data compliance regulation issues. It can also cause the financial institution to exceed their contact limits in Marketing Cloud, adding to the costs of using it.
Enabling Contact Delete prevents your contact list from doubling overnight, and keeps expenses under control.
Achieve Liftoff on Marketing Cloud with EMS
Now that you have some ideas to optimize Marketing Cloud, what’s next?
A Salesforce implementation partner has the team of experts to get Marketing Cloud up and running quickly, so you can spend less time figuring it out and more time doing what you do best — marketing.
EMS Consulting can help you quickly build, customize and launch powerful onboarding journeys that can truly help your organization achieve results that drive more return on your Salesforce investment. Talk to us today.
