The future of marketing is “Marketing Automation”. Marketing Automation is a critical concept which cannot be explained in a single word but it can be defined in simple words as the use of appropriate software to automate the marketing processes such as customer segmentation, campaign management and a lot more which would otherwise had to be done manually. Thus it optimizes the utilization of time and effort and increases the efficiency to reach out to a larger section of the crowd to a great extent. Thus marketing automation has involuntarily become an integral part of the customer relationship management.
Salesforce made a colossal promise and that is Marketing Automation.
Marketers need to be farsighted enough to apprehend the complete journey people have with their brand and how to measure and optimize its impact on their business. Nowadays Internet has added millions of channels for lead generation, customer acquisition and marketing. So it has become imperative to design an exuberant solution for the marketers which will make the customer management more effective and pleasurable.
With this thought process Salesforce has launched the ‘Journey Builder’ which looks forward to visualize and manage all its customers irrespective of their location. It is not only event driven that initiates conversations with customers based on history, location, preferences, and real-time behavior but also supports visual journeys i.e. bring ideas to life, create the journey, and set it in motion.
The #journeybuilder in @marketingcloud – amazingly powerful tool to automate marketing engagement @Dreamforce #DF14 pic.twitter.com/UWZUVaiXAR
— Gitanjali Sriram (@GitanjaliSriram) October 15, 2014
“Plan the journey. Personalize the experience. Optimize the results”…. is the motto of the Salesforce journey builder.
So here we are going to discuss about each segment in detail.
- Plan the journey: Journey builder has a unique and exceptional marketer friendly user interface which provides a convenient drag and drop tool which can effortlessly actualize your ideas into live journeys in a jiffy. It demonstrates and shares in a visually optimized way each customer’s journey with your brand. Journey Builder syncs with all your plans weather it includes online channels like email or mobile, or an offline channel like direct mail. Journey Builder enables you to increase campaign performance as well as drive customer satisfaction to another level with event-driven approach i.e. sparks conversations with customers based on history, location, and real-time behavior.
- Personalize the experience: Weather in hundreds or in millions it has always been a daunting task to form brand relationships with customer. It has always been a difficult task to give them real time response. It enables you to customize every interaction of a particular customer and cater to their need and deliver the appropriate content at the required time. It has in built integration with emails, text messages and push notifications.
- Optimize in Real-Time: It helps to track and test every campaign element in real time. It measures results over days, weeks, or months with campaign version control. It can be used to analyse visually so as to which channels are performing above the bar and thereby evaluate the marketing strategy with random split-testing and make on-the-spot changes with almost no requirement for certain technical expertise.
- Connect in entirely new ways: Journey builder for Apps entrusts you to provide the users a unique experience of blending the digital and physical world across cross-channel platforms. It can deliver one on one messages in the apps via the desired devices or channels.
Getting started with Salesforce Journey Builder:
The simple steps to build a journey builder interaction are as follows:
- Set up your company’s contacts in contact builder and refer to the prerequisites for details.
- Then begin by clicking on New Interaction.
- The interaction canvas displays in flow view which is a zoomed out perspective of a single interaction. It shows a zoomed out version interaction to make its strategy easily readable.
- After naming the interaction choose a contact entry setting.
- Then click on Select an Event and choose or configure an event that suits the purpose of the interaction best.
- Then identify an Event Source from which contacts are drawn out, to be injected into the interaction.
- Add activities on the canvas to form the structure of the contact’s way through the interaction.
- Configure the activities and wait period to construct the flow of the interaction.
- Lastly activate the interaction.
In today’s close-knit and highly connected world, each and every customer interaction adds up to the value. Marketing Cloud allows you to make utmost of every touch point, giving you powerful tools to manage the customer journey like a cakewalk.
Marketing automation though is a fairly new concept but it has become the fuzz word these days. Due to the smart devices and smart connections the customers want to interact using any channel. Journey Builder helps to establish rock solid relation with customers by orchestrating targeted, individualized customer journeys across channels and devices. The scalable one on one marketing engine puts the power of personalization in the hands of marketers—allowing them to plan, personalize, and optimize every interaction with each individual customer. It capacitates the marketers to fully guide their customers on a one on one basis on every possible channel and device. It gives a complete 360 degrees view of the customers to convey the correct information at the correct time via an appropriate channel.
Pratyush Kumar
