5 Key Things to Consider When Designing Email Campaigns in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

• May 19, 2022
• Indranil Chakraborty

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio is the leading enterprise email marketing platform allowing marketers to deliver an intelligent personalised message at scale. Connecting commerce, sales, service and customer communities for a consistent customer journey. Now each message can be tailored using an intuitive UI with drag and drop tools, easily customising content for your target audience. While personalising unique content for each subscriber. Email marketers can leverage Einstein AI to predict the needs of their customers, empowering them to suggest the right product at the right time. With automation, brands can connect with customers with one-to-one messages even at the scale of millions.

Email studio lets you easily switch between templates or code when creating the right look and feel for your message. Once your message is ready, email studio allows you to review each email before sending to each subscriber is delivered the right content. Once emails are sent, marketing teams can use first-party data to target and attract new customers through advertising across the web or connect with them on their mobile devices. Real-time analytics empowers you to monitor campaign performance across the entire customer journey. View campaign metrics to optimise campaigns and ensure users stay engaged. You can approve content, deliver campaigns and monitor performance, and manage users from anywhere.

Before we talk about Design Strategy, let's look at what you can do with Marketing Cloud e-mail Studio.

TARGET YOUR AUDIENCE

Create profile data based segments to drive engagement.

Deliver great content to your target audience

Use drag-and-drop functionality to segment and fine-tune your subscribers, to deliver relevant messaging. Filter millions of profiles at the click of a mouse and get real-time counts for sending.

Become more efficient by automating most tasks.

Effortlessly import, segment, and filter data from any source to allow you to deliver focused campaigns.

Discover the right audience with inbuilt intelligence

Keep your most active subscribers engaged more often, and improve overall message deliverability by reducing messaging frequency to inactive subscribers.

BUILD YOUR BEST EMAIL

Create sophisticated, engaging messages.

Deliver responsive design based messages to customers on any device

Effortlessly optimize messages for mobile so that your emails appear exactly as you intended whenever and wherever they’re opened. Always.

Use a library of customizable templates to build your emails

Get creative with best-in-class templates and populate emails content in to time.

Deliver dynamic messages that inspire call to action.

Take advantage of user-friendly dynamic features like a personalized scripting language, drag-and-drop functionality and carousels to delight your subscribers in real-time.

Engage customers throughout their journey with personalised messaging

Foster strong customer relationships with conversations that engage at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

PERSONALIZE YOUR CONTENT

Deliver relevant and engaging email experiences in no time.

Deliver data-centric content.

Get the most out of your data using dynamic content and scale personalization across your campaigns.

Enhance and enrich the subscriber experience.

Deliver multi-dimensional, engaging, and delightful experiences to your subscribers’ inbox.

Leverage Einstein to power personalization.

Use AI to tailor content for each message based on individual user behaviour.

Automate intelligent messages.

Create your message once, and leave it to AI to deliver the best and freshest content every single time. Review metrics to refine your content over time.

SCALE YOUR CAMPAIGNS

Reach customers with 1-to-1 messages, even at the scale of millions.

Send with confidence.

Preview and test every message before sending to ensure quality and establish criteria to disallow accidental delivery of test messages.

Automate the email journey.

Boost your marketing team’s efficiency and simplify your job. Set up delivery schedules for messages so that customers experience your brand exactly the way you want with the minimal manual workload.

Build 1-to-1 relationships with customers.

Leverage flexibility and scalability of email studio and empower yourself to maintain engaging 1-to-1 relationships even with an audience of millions.

Fine-tune on the go.

Make iterations to your journey as you go, and run tests quickly. Understand what’s working, and what isn’t, and driving perfection in your campaigns.

From building your email strategy to delivering seamless journeys, here are the 5 best email campaign design practices to help you drive customer engagement at scale.

STRATEGIZE

Develop your email plan of action.

Know your audience, establish clear goals, and build a content strategy to maximise the impact of your email messaging.

Build in-depth personas.

Develop persona profiles having information about day-to-day work habits, challenges to conversion, and key questions.

Leverage CRM data.

Use your CRM to understand demographic and behavioural data, which allows you to segment your audience effectively.

Identify consumer needs.

Clearly identify the journey of your target audience. Whether it be onboarding or a re-engagement email journey.

Set a clear vision for email marketing.

Set specific goals.

Outline the objective you wish to achieve through your email campaigns such as brand awareness, deeper engagement, or driving sales.

Create useful content.

Understand how and why your audience should connect with your message and how you can deliver content that meets their needs.

Chart your path.

Define how you intend to measure the success of your email strategy both for your business as well as your audience.

Develop an effective, customised content strategy.

Map clear journeys.

Plan for different email journeys, such as transactional and onboarding journeys, that show you a connected flow from one email in a journey to the next.

Make a schedule.

Create an outbound email calendar that details the frequency of your outgoing communication.

Collect useful metrics.

Determine the data collection mechanism to measure the success of your outreach program. Parameters such as open rates, click-through rates, landing page impressions, sales originating from your emails, can help you get clarity on the effectiveness of your campaign.

DESIGN

Content is vital to great email design.

Engage your audience with effective content.

Sender ame:

Cleary reveal your identity to the viewer

Subject line:

Create an effective subject lines that reflects the content in the email to encourage engagement.

Header:

This is at the top of your email area  that includes your brand’s logo.

Navigation bar:

The navigation bar mirrors your website navigation and drives traffic to key entry points of your site.

Primary message:

The primary message includes your main reason for reaching out to your audience.

Social media bar:

Include links to your brand’s pages on social media networks.

Footer:

This includes an unsubscribe link, compliance information or link, and disclaimers.

 

Device friendly Content.   Automatically tailor messaging, that’s fits any device.

Design to inspire engagement.   Create and truly responsive designs powered by live content

Start with coding.   Use CSS3 to adjust font size, frame width, and image size for a richer experience.

DELIVER

Send every email with confidence.

Ensure inbox delivery and avoid the spam and junk folders.

Get permission twice.

Ensure that you are sending emails only to an engaged audience by using double opt-ins like email or SMS to confirm with new subscribers.

Set clear expectations.

Ensure subscribers know what they’re getting and when is the communication expected. Determine the best time for engagement.

Boost your reputation.

Establish a good sending reputation by using a sender authentication package, a collection of products that optimizes email delivery.

Clean your list.

Clean your subscriber lists regularly by reviewing data such as open rates. Segment subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails over a certain period, and launch re-engagement emails.

Avoid ambiguous “from” addresses.

Avoid using no-reply@business.com or other such impersonal sender addresses. Steer clear of being marked as spam by subscribers and email service providers.

Keep it legal.

Abide by the CAN-SPAM act. Include a clearly visible unsubscribe option, honor unsubscribe requests, and choose a legitimate “from” address.

ANALYZE

Test emails to optimize performance.

Go deeper into demographic, behavioral, and contextual data and personalize every email.

Demographic data:

Aggregate demographic data that may include subscriber’s name, gender, date of birth, mailing address, and other information collected on a signup form.

Behavioral data:

Track actions across multiple channels. This may include includes browsing activity, downloads, purchase history, email opens, and more.

Contextual data:

Marketing teams can use contextual data to deliver just in time experiences, the moment an email is opened.

Measure metrics to understand email performance after sending.

Track positive results data.

Track the delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, to have a deeper view into the engagement levels.

Learn from negative results data.

Adjust your strategy based on what’s not working. Assess unsubscribe rates bounce rates to re-align your campaign.

Know your testing audience.

Test campaigns with new subscribers because they haven’t been influenced by previous marketing or communication campaigns. Avoid targeting segments that are dormant that can potentially dilute results.

ELEVATE

Evolve your email strategy as you grow.

Know the consumer experience.

Take stock of all other consumer touchpoints across your company’s channels, including social media, SMS, website, app, and even sales and service interactions.

Assess the role of email.

Understand how email fits into each individual consumer’s journey. Identify opportunities to boost experiences in awareness, acquisition, onboarding, engagement and retention.

Inform your adjustments.

Test the consumer’s journey before going live. Modify and optimize the journey before your subscribers actually experience it to give your marketing teams the best chance at success.

Contact Girikon today, a certified Salesforce Consulting Partner to help you create engaging, objective-oriented email campaigns that deliver results.