What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Written by Alina Makarova, Growth Marketer at DESelect. DESelect is an app for Salesforce Marketing Cloud that makes it easy for marketers to segment without relying on SQL.  

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a product of Salesforce, which is the biggest CRM platform in the world. It enables marketers to get to know customers, personalize, and engage with them during their customer journey. It provides an opportunity to engage with customers using various digital marketing channels: email, web, mobile, social, or digital advertising. 

What else can you do with Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

First off, it is possible to create unified views of every customer combining known and unknown customer profiles. Moreover, SFMC allows measuring and reporting to optimize your marketing performance and achieve better campaign results while improving your customer relationship. Lastly, you can take your marketing to the next level by enabling Salesforce Einstein’s artificial intelligence capabilities.

What does Salesforce Marketing Cloud consist of?

There are several built-in apps in SFMC that help to get a 360 view of your customers and communicate with them at every level. Here you can see how these apps look like in SFMC itself:

Below you can find a quick description of the main functions of these apps.

Name of the app	What is it used for?
Content Builder	Create content for your emails, in-app messages, push notifications.
Journey Builder	Deliver cross-channel personalized experiences at every step of the customer lifecycle with campaign management.
Interaction Studio	Visualize, track, and manage customer experiences with real-time interaction management—driving valuable engagement at the right moment.
Email Studio	Use data from every department to build smarter email—from basic marketing campaigns to sophisticated 1-to-1 messages.
Mobile Studio	Send consistent SMS, push, and chat app messages in real-time.
Advertising Studio	Use CRM to securely power 1-to-1 advertising across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Display at scale.
Social Studio	Listen, publish, and engage to create customer advocates. Connect social to marketing, sales, and service in one platform powered by AI.
Web Studio	Allows you to create Cloud pages.
Einstein	Einstein Email and Web Recommendations power delivery of relevant content based on prior user behavior.
Analytics Studio	Allows to get deep insights into the behaviors and interests of your contacts across channels. You can use these insights to set marketing goals and refine customer journeys.

Beyond the above-mentioned apps, there are many possibilities to expand the capabilities of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. On AppExchange you can find various apps that can be added to your SFMC instance. For example, DESelect enables you to segment your customers easily without the need to rely on SQL which is the default approach in SFMC. 

Who is Salesforce Marketing Cloud made for?

If you need to create long-term relationships with your customers, then SFMC is a great solution for you. It enables multichannel communication, and possibilities to track, analyze, and report the received data to create a 360 view of an individual customer. It is primarily used for B2C marketing purposes. 

Moreover, SFMC always changes and evolves opening new horizons for marketers to communicate with their customers. Lastly, the apps found in AppExchange make the platform even more powerful, aiming to save marketers time and improve their user experience.