It’s Not the Tech, It’s How You Use It

A dive into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and our resident genius with the know-how.

Let’s face it. We have a love-hate relationship with email. We love updates from our family, but we hate updates from Karen. We love coupons for free chicken nugs, but we hate irrelevant brand messaging. We often find ourselves wondering “Did I even sign up for this mailing list?” But that’s how things are and we have to accept it, right?

Wrong.

Like most advertising, email is only bad when the consumer isn’t taken into consideration. Pressing send to blanket your entire audience with the same sales message doesn’t work, and in the end, most of your audience is going to end up bored or annoyed. Consumers want you to remember them, they want you to know what they want, and they want you to engage with them on a more personal level. In short, they want content relevant to them.

Havas Helia Campaign Developer Andrey Balandin is trained for this, and as a certified Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist, he has our clients covered. Prepare to engage.

So, what does Salesforce Marketing Cloud do?

Let’s set the scene: Late night. Payday. You’re browsing your favorite store with your paycheck burning a hole in your pocket and you find the most amazing pair of Crocs: teal with tiny flamingos (we’re not judging). Impulsively, you add them to your cart. But before you check out, your conscience kicks in. You close your browser and never look back.

Wait, did we say never?

Soon after, an email appears in your inbox, and you’re staring at those adorable teal flamingos all over again. But this time, the price has been discounted if you finish your purchase now. This time, you don’t hesitate.

And it’s all because of Salesforce Marketing Cloud — and probably Andrey.

Cool, but that’s it?

Not even close — retargeting shopping cart abandonment is just one drop in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud bucket. In fact, to address every feature from Journey Builder to Automation Studio would be incredibly tedious and probably sleep-inducing for those of us who aren’t the Andreys of the world. And we’d never do that to you. Instead, we’ll talk about something cool we’ve done at Havas Helia.

For this, we dropped Andrey a line.

“I think the most intricate, complex, and dynamic email we’ve done so far was for Loews,” Andrey said. “It was a gargantuan lift. But we covered all of our bases as a team, and the end result was incredible.”

Here’s a quick rundown:

As you may have guessed, the email in question wasn’t your ordinary email. It was essentially one email with 16 different “faces.”

Leveraging consumer data, we designed and developed our client’s email to dynamically populate based on each customer’s individual interests, with a total of 16 possible variations. The result? Easily-digestible, highly personalized messaging, leading to an increased open rate, an uptick in bookings, and higher site traffic.

TL;DR: our client = happy.

So, what’s next?

According to Andrey, up next is “implementing voice assistance search into the Marketing Cloud mix.” Essentially, we want to do for AI programs like Alexa, Cortana, and Siri what AdWords did for Google.

“Building, writing, and executing quality chatbots will be key,” Andrey explained. “But, and I can’t emphasize this enough, quality is so important. The marriage between high-quality coding and high-quality creative is the secret to success for brands.”

When it comes down to it, you can have all of the software and send all of the emails, but if you don’t have smart, driven, creative people pulling the levers, your emails could end up in the trash folder with Karen’s. And no one wants that.

Ready to get personal? Get in touch with our team of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialists at hello@havashelia.com.