5 Best email marketing automation practices with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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If you have a Salesforce marketing cloud (SFMC) for your email automation, you can reach your audience and have meaningful interactions with them while improving your relationship with your customers. Whether it is for scheduling emails or creating campaigns, you can manage everything using the same user-friendly interface.  

Here are the best 5 foolproof strategies for getting impressive results with your Salesforce Marketing Cloud and email marketing automation 

1. Segmenting your audience 

You create a slew of emails for nurturing your customers’ journey and you still don’t get what you expect. Do you know why? It is because you are not targeting the right audience to read your emails. With an email automation campaign, you can go through your customer data and segment it accordingly.  

• Who is your target audience?  
• Why should they read your emails?  
• How can you engage with them?  

These pieces of information help you drive automation strategy. You can create personalized email content and design, try and test them and analyze the results. Use the following features and leverage the SFMC for effecting email marketing automation.  

• SFMC Journey builder – Create multiple segments and journeys. Add new insights into the journey- create and add a new email to it.  
• Salesforce Template layout – For creating a new email copy, designing, and using the in-built elements for automated emails 
• Filter contact – For segmenting your main audience, creating segmented data extensions, and sending emails. 
• Contact builder – Create further segments using the data and analytics.  
• Email studio – For segmenting your audience by creating data filters or SQL queries. 
• Audience studio – For creating filters across data extensions for a more precise segment of your audience.  

Stuck with creating SFMC personalized journeys for your customers? Get help from our automation specialist! 

Some tips for effective segmentation of your customers 

• Based on the product interest, you have to segment your audience into groups 
• For best results, use the data in your ESP 
• For creating special offers, use service or product-interest data 

2. Use customer data and identity-based marketing for design

Use the data like demographics, content viewed, and subject lines they responded to, for personalizing each message and increasing the brand value. With your content in the email, make it easy for opt-ins and opt-outs for your customers.  

Also, keep an eye on what your customers are buying. Check which services they are availing of and check when they visited your website last to strengthen your identity-based automated email marketing efforts.  With all this information, you can create special offers for your target audience, remind your customers about the annual subscriptions, encourage new purchases and also send custom content that can drive them to act.  

Some tips to effectively leverage customer data: 

• Adjust your send items and frequency based on when most of your customers open your emails. 
• To improve email open rates, use words that the subscribers can resonate with 
• If any of your emails are driving high click-through rates, you can test and use it as a template for sending it to others 
•  Identify which links the customers are clicking on to know what they are most interested in.  

3. Simplify scheduled automation with Salesforce Template

Schedule emails and drive productivity while scaling your marketing efforts. You can save a lot of time and resources on this. Plan email campaigns and create them way ahead of time. You can also schedule updates to data and content just before they are sent to the inboxes of your subscribers.  

Determine your campaign schedule and identify which season or festival works best for your subscribers. Plan and send push emails just before those specific days. Simultaneously, you can identify and plan for weekly, biweekly or even monthly newsletters or promotional emails that you can send on a regular basis for driving engagement. Schedule them and never miss an opportunity to connect with your target audience.  

Even-driven campaigns 

Consider event-driven campaigns that are specific to your industry. Share the details of your meeting, presence at an event, or some celebration with your audience through an automated email campaign.  

Some tips for scheduling emails 

• To determine the best time and date for sending, check email open rates 
• Use the name of each subscriber and address them in your emails 
• Include information about their previous purchases to connect with them 
• Add reference content block to build some interest for your subscribers 

4. Set Triggered Marketing Automation 

To automatically respond to email replies and send list opt-in confirmation, you can use triggered in the email studio. This is purely based on the actions taken by the customers or the subscribers.  

A triggered automated email can be a single email like a notification or an order placement. It could also be a Welcome or a Thank you message when you get the new subscribers on board.  

Types of Triggered automation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud -SFMC 

• Renewal or re-engagement  – Create email nurture journeys to re-engage with them or to reactivate their subscriptions.  

• Browse or cart abandonment – When a customer abandons the cart or the browsing session, you send a triggered email to remind them of their selected products. You can automate them for your products, services or any resources.  

Some tips for making the most with the Triggered automated email campaign 

• Send a Thank you email immediately or within the day when you get a new subscriber 
• Send a follow-up email with information on how they can use the product 
• Ask for input from your customer service team for creating great content 
• Understand how and when your customers interact with your brand using the customer journey maps.  

5. Create content that sells, add resonating subjects and strong CTAs 

When you use Email marketing automation, you expect it to run automatically. However, you need to pay attention to customizing and tailoring the content, adding compelling subject lines with strong CTAs according to your customer’s needs. Create content that interests your subscribers at any stage of the customer’s lifecycle. Include a touch of personalization by  

• Using the subscriber’s first name in the emails 
• Creating custom and unique copies with value for your customers 
• Sending birthday or festival greetings to make your customers feel special.  

Include real-time content in your emails with personalized recommendations on the products or promotions based on their interest. Use a responsive design and make your content readable with a simple yet appealing layout. Create subject lines that are not just intriguing but also make your subscribers take action. Perform A/B testing before finalizing any of the layouts or formats. Try and experiment with various visuals like stickers and emojis as they can improve the open rates by more than 50%.  

Use Einstein’s copy insight to analyze the language originality, character count, and emotional tone.

Some tips for creating effective content for email 

• Keep your CTAs bold, visible and relevant to your audience 
• Focus on one thing in one email and do not cram too many things or information in one mail 
• Add the FOMO feel in the content and keep it precise 
• Spread white text throughout the email to increase the readability  
• Use brand colors, try A/B testing for different texts and colors 

And it’s a wrap! 

Test your automation campaigns before clicking on the send button. Analyze results and improve the click-through rates as and when needed. Create and try different campaigns for different segments and leverage SFMC’s powerful segmenting, content creating, designing and analytical features.  

It’s one thing to be familiar with all the features in the marketing automation platform and it’s entirely different to actually use those features successfully and grow your business.  

From creating effective campaigns to developing compelling content and leveraging the automation features of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, if you are stuck in any of the steps and need help, our Salesforce marketing cloud email specialist can be of wonders for your business!