Maximizing ROI with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Companies are constantly searching for new ways to communicate with their customers, whether it is through advertising, audience building, email marketing, loyalty programs, or compelling content. But they are also concerned about reduced manpower and tighter budgets. With economic uncertainty looming large, marketers are always under pressure to meet customers' digital-first expectations while increasing sales, increasing efficiency, and cutting expenses.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?  

A comprehensive digital marketing platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a plethora of tools and functionalities to enhance any marketing activity. Moreover, Salesforce Marketing Cloud gives advertisers a complete picture of their target market, resulting in more personalized interactions across all marketing channels.

How to track your ROI with Marketing Cloud

Using the Marketing Cloud platform, marketers can assess the success of their campaigns in a few different ways. These are some of the methods that we suggest.

Create a dashboard

You can get a complete view of how marketing impacts the success of your business as a whole by building a dashboard with marketing KPIs that result in sales. Marketers can access a variety of comprehensive reports that track a range of data using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This makes it easier for you to understand how each marketing initiative impacts sales.

Viewing this data on Marketing Cloud is far more convenient than attempting to find it in different locations for every channel, which is unfortunately often the case with other solutions. Additionally, because your company can use these reports year after year, it will get easier and more effective every day.

Integrate Marketing Cloud with Google Analytics 360

Unified reporting is only one of the numerous advantages that Marketing Cloud can offer your team. You can monitor end-to-end customer relationships by connecting Google Analytics’s customer site engagement data to your Marketing Cloud reports thanks to the seamless integration between the two platforms.

You'll find a single interface on the Marketing Cloud dashboard that provides you with all the reports pertaining to journeys designed for web, mobile, email, and advertising. This provides you with a unique understanding of the customer journey through Marketing Cloud campaigns, from the first interaction to the last touchpoint.

Measure each activity individually

The most successful businesses monitor their marketing performance using segmented indicators. Measuring individual behavior and campaign performance is critical to assessing Marketing Cloud efficacy. We advise keeping an eye on sales and lead volume in relation to website traffic, traffic sources, campaign efficacy, and overall traffic throughout various time frames. Once you've completed this, you'll be able to use Marketing Cloud to identify a single source of truth regarding the conversion rate of visitors into paying customers.

Calculate your campaign ROI

If your company makes use of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce's Campaign ROI Analysis Report is a vital resource for determining the long-term performance of a marketing campaign. With the help of this automated tool, you can determine the rates of return on investment and assess the advantages and disadvantages of your campaign as well as the successful investments.

Within the Campaign Reports folder, the Reports tab contains the Campaign ROI Analysis Report. It determines the effectiveness of your campaign based on average cost and return on investment (ROI). Using this tool, the net gain (Value of Won Opportunities – Actual Cost) is divided by the Actual Cost to determine the percentage for each campaign in the report.

Examine the entire customer journey

Analyzing the entire customer journey is crucial when determining ROI. With real-time activity reports for analytics, sales, and marketing, Marketing Cloud can assist with that. You can assess which market segments your campaigns are performing in to find out which areas require additional investment or which channels are most effective.

Knowing which marketing channels produce the best results at each stage of the customer conversion process is therefore crucial. Instead of overstretching themselves across every avenue, marketers should focus their time and resources on the channels that yield the highest conversion rates for a given expenditure.

Share the data

Marketing Cloud facilitates communication between the sales and marketing teams, allowing them to define success and recognize the increase in revenue that follows. This can assist you in growing your business to new heights and facilitate productive teamwork among all members of the organization.

Establish the costs

Marketing teams must determine the expenses associated with their marketing initiatives, including the amount spent on staff, agencies, and creative development. Using this data, you can identify the metrics that you can use in your ROI computations and determine which ones are worthwhile for your investment.

Get the right training

To achieve success with Marketing Cloud, all team members must become proficient in measuring their own and each other's success metrics. This will enable you to determine who is making a contribution and who isn't. Make an investment in upskilling your staff so they can carry out and maintain your plan.

How To Improve ROI With Marketing Analytics

The process of utilizing data to assess the effectiveness of marketing initiatives is known as marketing analytics. The generated engagement data aids marketers in gaining a deeper understanding of their target market. This increases return on investment and maximizes marketing efforts.

Analytics are being used by businesses in their marketing more and more. In order to increase digital customer interaction, 88% of marketers surveyed Salesforce said they used marketing analytics.

Here are some pointers on using marketing analytics to grow your business:

Identify your marketing goals

Clearly define your goals and establish specific marketing objectives for every campaign. Success metrics may include customer satisfaction, return on investment, click-through rate, and conversion rate, among others.

The top three marketing success metrics, as determined by a global study of marketers.

With marketing analytics, you can:

Report on the past. You can determine what went wrong and what worked well by evaluating previous performance. For instance, in the previous campaign, which channel generated the highest revenue? How did the ad campaign perform? How many leads were generated by the whitepaper?

Analyze the present. Analyze the success of your present marketing efforts. What kind of content is getting greater interaction? Which channels have higher conversion rates? Where and how are people discussing your business?

Predict the future. By leveraging marketing analytics, you can predict the lifetime value of a customer. Questions such as “Which channels warrant further investment? Which categories should be the next focus?” can be answered by drawing on the power of marketing analytics.

You will have access to a wide range of data with regular reporting, analysis, and forecasting, enabling you to make well-informed decisions for your company's requirements.

Invest in analytic capabilities

An increasing number of sources are producing data, which raises the possibility of siloed data. For data-driven marketing initiatives, you must use a platform that provides a single, cross-channel view of customer data.

Emerging tech like automation and artificial intelligence (AI) help speed up cross-channel data analytics, freeing up resources so marketers can concentrate on strategic, creative work.

Take data-driven decisions

All of the data you have access to can be transformed into useful insights by marketing analytics. Your marketing teams will be able to access all the necessary information with ease if there is a single source of truth for data across channels. They can make better decisions with less time spent on data analysis. To reach their objectives, they can keep improving on what's working or change direction as necessary.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud – The Game-changer

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a smooth, real-time interaction with your customer by utilizing cloud technologies. Moreover, marketing Cloud provides immediate feedback on customer preferences, allowing you to tailor your content and assess the effectiveness of your marketing initiatives.

The following tactics can help you refine your marketing journey:

Delight Your Customers with Personalization

Personalization is a crucial component of campaign effectiveness since it increases business profitability and provides a deep insight into the target audience. To guide prospects down the purchase path, Marketing Cloud assists you in developing triggers that nudge customers towards specific actions with personalized messaging.

Leverage Customer Data to Gain Insights 

Gaining insightful knowledge about your clients with Marketing Cloud enables you to create content that is specifically tailored to their needs. To stay ahead of the game, Marketing Cloud even uses its predictive analytics capabilities to assist you in predicting future actions.

Establishing a Single Source of Truth

With Marketing Cloud, you can create a comprehensive picture of your customers. By combining user information, marketing campaigns, privacy management, and customer profiles, you can produce a single customer view for every possible point of interaction. By having all customer data synchronized on one platform, you can provide your customers with a single source of truth and make sure that everyone is on the same page.

Want to Leverage the Power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and get a faster return on your marketing investment?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful platform that can empower marketing teams to drive business success. Seek advice from a trusted Salesforce Consulting partner like Girikon to make sure you're utilizing the Marketing Cloud appropriately and to quickly recover your marketing CRM investments. You can maximize client value at every stage and assess marketing ROI with predictability if you have our strategy, support, integration, and training in place.

Our certified Salesforce consultants would love to help if you want to make full use of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Simply send us an email at sales@girikon.com  and we'll take it from there.

About Author

Indranil Chakraborty

Indranil is a technology enthusiast with over 25 years of experience in project management, operations, technology and business development. Indranil has led project teams in egovernance, business process re-engineering, product development and worked with Government and Corporate customers. Indranil truly believes in the power of technology to drive productivity and growth for teams and businesses.