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Learn How Marketing Cloud Engagement Products Work Together

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you'll be able to:

  • Explain how to use Marketing Cloud Engagement products to enable 1-to-1 customer engagement at scale.
  • Share an example of how Marketing Cloud Engagement connects to the rest of the Salesforce Platform.

Introduction

In the first three units, we discussed each of the Marketing Cloud Engagement products as individual solutions—but the real power of Marketing Cloud Engagement is how those products work together and connect to other Salesforce clouds, including Sales and Service. 

Now let’s talk about how a financial services brand can use Salesforce to better understand its customers, use AI to personalize experiences, and engage across every interaction in the customer lifecycle.

In this scenario, we use Cumulus Bank, our fictitious financial services brand that serves millions of customers worldwide. The bank uses Marketing Cloud Engagement to attract new prospects and mature them with uniquely targeted products and services. We show you how the bank engages its latest prospect, Sandra, as she starts her search to buy a new home in London.

Attract New Customers

After spending several months in London, Sandra and her spouse decide to relocate their family there. Sandra does some online research on home mortgage options in London, and comes across Cumulus Bank. She clicks into the search result and starts checking out the website. Immediately, she notices an ad about its mobile app, which helps potential home buyers in London. Intrigued, she downloads the mobile app.

Cumulus website on a mobile phone

From within the app, Sandra registers her email. While she is in the app, she sees how easy it is to get a quote on homes she likes. Amazing—and something to do on her next walk to her favorite neighborhood.

A couple days later, Sandra receives a push notification from the app, reminding her to continue her research.

Later that day, she decides to take a stroll around her favorite neighborhood and test out the app. She is blown away by how the app smartly adapts as she uses it—it recommends homes similar to what she is looking for.

From those recommendations, she finds one home that looks amazing: It is in her budget, in a great location, and the perfect size for her family. She clicks to start the mortgage process. But she realizes she is getting a little ahead of herself and should discuss it with her spouse before securing financing. So she closes the app.

The Marketer Challenge

As you can see, customers don’t neatly follow the journeys marketers lay out for them; they may drop off right in the middle of the buying journey. In this scenario, knowing that Sandra closed the app before securing financing, how can a Cumulus marketer find a customer like Sandra, and reengage her? First, they need to connect unknown behaviors (like Sandra on their website) with known behaviors (like the personal information Sandra entered using their app).

To make these types of connections, the Cumulus marketer can use Data Cloud for Marketing to view and manage all of their different customer data sources in one place. Helping Cumulus figure out who is the next-best audience they should target. Data Cloud for Marketing ingests Cumulus data attributes and standardizes their formats so that marketers can identify and surface easy-to-understand personas and turn them into segments with just a couple clicks.

Screenshot of Salesforce CDP Segmentation tool

The Cumulus marketer creates a new segment called "Working Moms, Mortgage Seekers." Then Cumulus sends it to Marketing Cloud Engagement , using its various functionalities to further personalize the customer experience. That includes site content customization, Google Analytics 360, multi-channel journeys, and suggested next-best actions to take.

Journey Builder flow

Using Journey Builder, Cumulus marketers can create a Mortgage Re-engagement Journey, and choose the audience. In this case, the audience segment is the "Working Moms, Mortgage Seekers" they just created using Data Cloud for Marketing.

This means that all the customers, like Sandra, who match the attributes of that persona (Working Moms, Mortgage Seekers), are brought right into this journey where Cumulus marketers can take advantage of rich Journey Builder functionality—like an Einstein Split, dynamic content, and send time optimization—so that they're only messaging customers when and where they’re most likely to engage—email, mobile, search, or maybe on the open web. Let’s see how this plays out for Sandra.

Increasing Conversion

Sandra is on her phone one day and gets an email from Cumulus with a mortgage rate offer. The timing is great as she’s now had a chance to discuss the house she found with her spouse. The email is personalized to Sandra—the marketers used Journey Builder and AI to gather data about what Sandra was looking for and created an email with a mortgage rate offer she wanted. The email is also interactive, and allows her to play around with financing options right from the email. She’s a working mom, so it’s a plus that she can finish her mortgage application without having to call and talk to somebody.

Finally, Sandra chooses "Finish your application." It brings up the app prepopulated with information about her, which means she only needs to answer a couple of questions before submitting.

And that's it—she submits her financing application in just a few clicks.

A couple hours later, Sandra gets an SMS notification from Cumulus letting her know that her application has been approved, along with a special offer for an investment account with a deposit bonus. 

So to recap on all the interactions you've seen Sandra have with Cumulus, she was:

  • On their website
  • Saw an ad
  • Downloaded the app
  • Received a push notification to continue her research
  • Tested the app
  • Engaged with their email
  • Submitted her financing application
  • Was notified via SMS when approved
  • Received a special offer
  • Posted on Twitter

Growing the Relationship

Sandra's experience with Cumulus didn’t end there. The bank continued nurturing the relationship with more offers. When Sandra was walking past a Cumulus bank, she remembered she had received an offer for an investment account. So she dropped in.

When Sandra sat down with the investment sales rep, they had the full context of her experience with Cumulus: her initial website search, the recommendations for homes, and her mortgage offers. The rep gathered all this knowledge via Salesforce, which made it easy for her to pick up right where things left off. She got her set up with an investment account and that deposit bonus.

Sandra with a Cumulus Banker

On her way out, Sandra decides to withdraw some cash from the ATM before heading to the local market. This is where she gets that next-best offer. Cumulus has recognized that as a new homeowner, she might be interested in home renovation financing and they’re providing that option to her right there. She loves this and takes the offer (along with her cash). 

ATM

A week later, Sandra receives a follow-up call from a Cumulus customer service agent, checking in about the ATM offer she received to make sure everything is going well, since there hasn't been any action taken since she accepted it.

Customer Service Agent

Thanks to having a unified customer profile view of Sandra in Salesforce, with data from Marketing Cloud Engagement and Financial Service Cloud, the agent is able to tailor the conversation and provide specific and helpful information.

That’s how we define 1-to-1 customer engagement.

Analyzing the Impact

But wait. How can Cumulus marketers measure the total business impact of Sandra’s customer journey? With Marketing Cloud Intelligence.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence dashboard

With Marketing Cloud Intelligence, marketers are able to connect and unify all marketing data sources, visualize AI-powered insights to optimize performance in real time, and create actionable reports to drive ROI. Using a one-click dashboard, Cumulus marketers can build a report to see exactly how their different channels and campaigns across Sandra's lifecycle are working.

To recap, here are the Marketing Cloud Engagement solutions that went into Sandra's journey.

  • Advertising Studio to optimize their Google search marketing using first-party CRM data
  • Data Cloud for Marketing to find a persona and turn it into a targetable audience
  • Google Analytics 360 integration to use Marketing Cloud Engagement data to optimize their website and gain cross-channel insights
  • Journey Builder to activate that segment and then drive intelligent, personalized, and dynamic journeys using Email Studio, Mobile Studio, and Marketing Cloud Personalization.
  • Marketing Cloud Intelligence to measure and analyze overall marketing ROI in real time

Conclusion

Marketing Cloud Engagement is made up of several products to help you know your customer, personalize with intelligence, and engage across the entire journey. Now you know how they can fit together, as well as work with other parts of the Salesforce Platform, like Sales and Service. We can’t wait to see how you use Marketing Cloud Engagement to create 1-to-1 customer engagements in your company.

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