Building a Roadmap within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be a challenging task that needs to be executed with perfection. The economical benefits by adding automation to different stages of the journey can be immense in addition to the personalized attention given to customers one on one.
Building an effective Roadmap requires a business to list out a detailed plan of objectives from marketing & consumer journey and audience segmentation by personas or by other segmentation tools. It also requires prioritizing important communications and building an effective timeframe; each of these activities can be created within your customer journey using Journey Builder within the Marketing Cloud.
Before you get started on delivering personalized attention that your customers crave, you should ensure your team has ticked off these 5 checkpoints.
1. Define your Goals
Identify why would your organization look to automate much of its marketing activities. Would it be to provide better sales leads or to enhance your customer experience? This key decision will help manage relationships with clients or help you deliver a stand out customer experience. Needless to say, both can be achieved in parallel. Having your goals in place before you begin creating a journey will give you a better grasp on which key attributes need to be measured to determine the ROI. These goals will also help your team optimize for the right purposes and help them take faster decisions.
2. Create your Marketing Strategy
A Marketing Cloud Roadmap makes use of multiple channels like email, social media, paid media and more through tools provided by Salesforce, some of them being Journey Builder, Einstein and Audience Studio. By using Salesforce for your implementation, you can create cross-functional teams for effective collaboration and quick wins. A key decision here would also be to select communications that can be automated as well as personalized. By having a cross-functional team, it keeps all your departments on track towards the common goal.
3. Ensure Data Governance
When you integrate multiple departments for the customer journey, always ensure securing the customer’s data and showcasing only relevant information to the respective departments. It is imperative to account for which is being utilized and which isn’t. Having a senior leader to support the governance structure can be vital to comply with industry standards. Creating a buyer persona and the relevant journey will help you visualize the flow of data and assist you in putting security checks where required.
4. Scalability
You may be planning to run campaigns weekly or monthly, but these timeframes may need to change based on your business needs. Fortunately, Salesforce provides with holistic campaign management tool like Campaign Studio which well help you with campaign management.
5. Optimizing for Future Growth
Once you have your Roadmap, it is important to prioritize elements that need constant monitoring and updating based on changes in the customer journey. Having a health check in place to ensure your automation rules are delivering the right content at all times.
Putting these checkpoints in place will help your team execute a feasible plan and test with a pilot. The pilot can help you weigh your short term and long-term goals which can help you decide where can you make the most of automation in your marketing plan. If you need help in creating an execution plan, Salesforce partners like Winobell can help you visualize your marketing cloud roadmap.