Whatever the case, you know your emails will feature a lot of product images. But the challenge is you’re new to this, and you’re not a professional coder.

Furthermore, you’re not sure whether you’re going to get consistent design across email clients. 

The solution? Sliced images! While not perfect, it’s a neat alternative to heavy coding.

We’re familiar with the limitations imposed by certain email clients when it comes to displaying images. As a result, we’ve had to switch to the “sliced image” design technique on several occasions. We’ve had good success with this, and you can too.

In this post, we’re going to tell you what sliced images mean, how to implement them in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, along with the technique’s pros and cons. 

• What Are Sliced Images in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
• Implementing Sliced Images in SFMC 
• Pros of Sliced Image Email Templates
• Cons of Sliced Image Email Templates
• Best Practices for Using Sliced Image Email Templates
• How Often Should You Use Sliced Images?

What Are Sliced Images in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Sliced images in email templates refer to emails whose design is built using multiple separate images instead of HTML coding. A single image is cut up into smaller “slices” using an image editing software, such as GIMP and Photoshop. Each slice is a single image file. These individual images are then used to build the email layout. 

Imagine your email layout as a pizza. You cut it up into slices (corresponding to tables in SFMC), which then become the building blocks of your email.

Implementing Sliced Images in SFMC

Implementing sliced images does not entail following a different set of instructions. You just need to follow the steps to create email templates in SFMC. 

But let’s begin from the beginning:

• Design your email layout in an image-editing software, like Photoshop, Canva, etc. For the purpose of this post, we’ll be using Photoshop
  
• Use the Slice tool to cut up the image into separate pieces for the header, hero banner, logo, footer, and so on
  
• Utilize the “Save for Web” function to optimize each image slice. For more info, refer to Adobe’s documentation on slice images
  
• Log in to your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account
  
• Create a new template in SMFC using the drag-and-drop builder. Learn how to create an email template in SFMC. 

• Use the Image content block to insert each sliced image into the template

Pros of Sliced Image Email Templates

1. Facilitates Beginner-friendly Email Design 

Sliced image templates are ideal for beginners in email design. You don’t need any expertise in HTML or CSS—just your preferred image editing software.

2. Ensures Design Consistency across Clients

You want your emails to look stunning and consistent across email clients like Gmail or Outlook. Sliced images ensure that! Since the layout is embedded within the image itself, rendering discrepancies between email clients are minimized.

This consistency is crucial for maintaining brand identity across email campaigns.

3. Promotes File Size Reduction

Although image optimization is crucial regardless of the technique, sliced images can sometimes provide a file size advantage. You might achieve a slightly smaller overall email size by dividing the design into smaller segments. This translates to faster loading times for your emails, improving overall subscriber experience. 

4. Streamlines A/B Testing 

Sliced images make A/B testing a breeze. You can swap out specific image slices to test different headlines, CTAs, or product offers. 

Think of it like a modular design system. You can quickly experiment and optimize your email campaigns for better results.

Cons of Sliced Image Email Templates

1. Limited Flexibility 

Updating or modifying the email design involves editing the image slices and possibly re-uploading them, which makes implementing changes a bit challenging.

2. Accessibility Issues 

Screen readers used by visually impaired individuals may struggle to interpret sliced images, which can hinder accessibility.

3. Limited Responsiveness

Sliced images can be difficult to adapt for responsive design across various screen sizes and devices, which may result in a poor user experience on mobile devices.

4. Image Blocking Risk

If email recipients have image blocking enabled, the entire email may appear blank since it relies heavily on images.

Best Practices for Using Sliced Image Email Templates

Keep the following in mind when using sliced images:

• Maintain standard image quality to avoid pixelation. (Pixelation is a common issue where individual pixels become visible in images)
  
• Align the slices with standard email design elements like headers, content sections, and footers to facilitate easy assembly in SFMC
  
• Test your email across various email clients before hitting the send button

How Often Should You Use Sliced Images?

There are chiefly two factors to consider for determining when and how often you should be using sliced images: 

• Target segment: If the audience predominantly uses mobile to view emails, responsive email design becomes essential, making sliced images less suitable

• Campaign goals: If your goal includes interactivity or personalization, sliced images may not provide the required flexibility compared to other methods such as HTML emails with CSS

In either of the above cases, sliced images are nonessential. This technique serves as a fallback when you lack coding skills or don’t have access to a professional developer.

Catch our all-round infographic delineating responsive email design best practices.

Design Salesforce Email Templates with Email Uplers!

We are certified Salesforce partners. Our template production team is made up of seasoned designers and developers. All Salesforce templates are tested in more than 50 different email clients. Additionally, they are tested on 15+ devices to ensure they look good regardless of the screen size. 
Building a new campaign? Get in touch with our Salesforce template experts today!

The post Can’t Code? Try “Sliced Images” for SFMC Email Templates appeared first on Email Uplers.

So much for the use of integrations. The problem arises in the knowledge gaps that exist concerning the different technical ecosystems of ESPs. 

But then, what are experts for?! With proficiency in more than 50 ESPs, and also a Salesforce partner, we know our way around email service providers. 

This guide will show you how to perform Litmus email testing in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Let’s begin! 

• Sync Litmus to SFMC
  
• Sync Litmus Emails to SFMC
  
• Import Emails for Testing
  
• Conduct Spam Tests
  
• Test Dynamic Emails
  
• View Integrated Report

1. Sync Litmus to Marketing Cloud

The first step is to connect Litmus to your Marketing Cloud instance. Follow the steps:

• Log in to your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account. Click your name on the upper-right corner. Select Setup from the Settings menu 

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• Select Installed Packages under Platform Tools in the left menu, as shown

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• Select New. Enter a name and description of the package. Click Save 

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• In the Add Component popup, click Add Component, select API Integration, and click Next 

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• Select the Integration Type; Server-to-Server in this case

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• Select the relevant permissions as shown here, then click Save

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• You should be able to view the API integration details, such as Client ID, Client Secret, and Tenant subdomain 

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• Next, go to your Litmus instance. Under Settings, select Manage ESPs. You’ll be required to furnish the following details.

(You can find the Tenant subdomain between “http://” and “.auth” in the Authentication Base URI. Find the Tenant instance from the URL in your browser’s address bar when you’re logged into your Marketing Cloud instance)

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• Click Authenticate & Add ESP. The setup is complete.

Read more: Considerations for Selecting the Right ESP for Email Marketing

2. Sync Litmus Emails to Marketing Cloud 

Now that your Litmus account is connected to your Marketing Cloud instance, you can sync emails built in Litmus Builder to Salesforce for testing. 

The process is simple from here on. From the Builder tab, select the Sync to ESP option. That’s all! You can view the process in the following grab. 

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3. Import Your Email for Review And Testing 

You can now import your preferred email for a final review and testing. Follow the steps below: 

• Select Create New on Litmus
  
• Select Test to run a pre-send test
  
• Click Next; from the dropdown, select Choose an email service provider

You can view the process in the following screenshot. 

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4. Conduct A Spam Test

Speaking of testing, Litmus allows you to perform a quick Spam test. We recommend testing your emails for potential spam. Here are the steps: 

• Go to Test. Then, select View and create spam tests
  
• In the upper right corner (shown in the below grab), click Start a new Spam Test
  
• From the Pull from your ESP dropdown, choose your ESP, then click Start your Test 

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Read More: How To Create An Email Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Test Dynamic Content in Your Emails in SFMC

You can also test dynamic content in your emails within Marketing Cloud:

• Log in to your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account
  
• Choose the email whose dynamic content you want to test. Select one version of the email
  
• Open the Litmus Extension from the Chrome bar
  
• Select another version of the email. Click the Refresh button in Litmus Extension to test the versions

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The above method involved testing emails at the rule level with Litmus Extension. You can also test emails at the subscriber level. These are the steps:

• Log in to your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account
  
• Open the email you want to test in SFMC in Preview and Test
  
• Now, choose the subscriber from the subscriber list
  
• Next, log in to your Litmus account. Then, go to Litmus Previews
  
• Preview the different versions of dynamic emails across subscribers

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Read more: Dynamic Content In Email Marketing – Top Industry Experts Speak

Integrated SFMC & Litmus Email Analytics

The Litmus Integrated Insights Report is a tool that gives you a comprehensive view of inter-ESP analytics data. The report integrates email analytics data from Marketing Cloud (or any other ESP) and subscriber engagement data from Litmus into a unified, single-source view. 

One of the stand-out features of the Report is Email Performance Indicators. The tool spotlights emails that are over- or under-performing, while also highlighting reasons why.

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SFMC-Litmus Email Marketing, And More! 

Specializing in over 50 ESPs, from most-popular to least-popular, we provide seamless migration and integration services. Our ESP-agnostic expertise is supplemented by our broad industry experience, client-centric approach, transparent communication, and data integrity. Reach out to our ESP experts for all your integration and migration needs. 

The post How to Perform Litmus Email Testing within Marketing Cloud appeared first on Email Uplers.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) campaign management includes a number of powerful tools that enable brands to create and manage winning email marketing campaigns. But even those who are new to SFMC can easily take advantage of the platform’s sophisticated features to discover and understand their customers, design memorable Salesforce email campaigns, and thus form and maintain one-to-one relationships at scale.

Still, it helps to understand the exact process of planning and implementing an email campaign in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So if you are an email marketer looking to launch your first email campaign with SFMC, this article is for you!

We will provide a step-by-step process to help you make the most of the platform for your first Salesforce Marketing Cloud campaigns.

But first, let’s understand Salesforce Marketing Cloud “campaign management”.

Read More: What exactly is Email Relay in Salesforce? How do you set it up?

Email Campaigns in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

SFMC provides a great app called “Campaigns” to plan, coordinate, manage, and measure email marketing communications in real-time. Salesforce Marketing Cloud campaigns are an effective way to “connect” marketing initiatives with leads and opportunities that resulted from the initiative. Multiple emails can be included in a campaign so you can track the progress of all the emails as a collection.

Common use cases for creating Salesforce email campaigns include:

• Events
• Webinars
• Direct mails
• Advertisements
• Referral programs
• Partner co-marketing
• Product giveaways

…and more

A number of Salesforce email templates are available for each use case, simplifying the process even further.

How to Execute Salesforce Campaign Management

The process of creating a campaign in SFMC has two distinct phases:

1. Define the campaign
2. Select the associations (e.g., email) that belong to the campaign

Step 1: Select “Campaigns” on the toolbar. In the upper-right corner, select “Create Campaign”.

Here are the key things to include in your Salesforce campaign management:

• Name and campaign description: The purpose or goal of this email marketing campaign
• Campaign code: A unique code to identify the campaign in reporting
• Deployment date: The campaign start date and time that determine where the campaign appears on the Calendar tool
• Calendar Color: Assign a color to your campaign from the color picker
• Tags: Tags are descriptive keywords that enable you to categorize campaigns using multiple criteria such as location, purpose, products, etc.

Click “Create”.

Step 2: After defining the campaign, it’s time to add the associations. An association is an “object”, i.e., channel-specific message, content, or activity you want to include in the campaign. And these objects are associated with a campaign in order to:

• Organize them for campaign execution
• Plan messaging
• Act as parameters for analytics around a specific marketing objective

Follow these steps to add associations to a campaign:

• In the Campaigns tool, open the campaign to which you want to add associations
• In the storyboard section, click the down arrow next to the “Add to Campaign” button
• From the drop-down list, select the association you want to add, and then click “Add to Campaign”
• Repeat these steps for each association you want to add

From SFMC Email Studio, you can add the following association types to your campaigns:

• Email: A regular email that you create and send to your subscriber list
• Triggered send: Automated emails that SFMC sends in response to a specific subscriber action, such as submitting a form

Now that you know how to create an email campaign in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, let’s take a look at the process to implement and send your first email in Salesforce campaign management.

Read More: How To Send Emails Through Salesforce

Step-By-Step Process To Create Your First Email Campaign In Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Step 1: Prepare your campaign

This first step in Salesforce marketing campaign management consists of several sub-steps:

i) Select your target audience with segmentation

Before launching an email marketing campaign, it’s crucial to create your target list. You can choose several criteria to do your segmentation, such as:

• Demographics: Age, income level, gender, etc.
• Behavioral: Purchasing habits, brand interactions, website visits, etc.
• Geography: Continent, country, city, etc.
• Psychographic: Interests, attitudes, values, lifestyle, etc.

Use Data Filters in SFMC to create data segments using any subscriber attributes (stored in SFMC).

SFMC also includes a feature called “measures” which is a unit of subscriber behavior, e. g. email opens, click-throughs, or unsubscribes, which you can include as criteria in a data filter.

ii) Specify campaign responses

In general, SFMC offers two member statuses – sent and responded. But for more clarity into campaign responses, you can also add custom member statuses, such as invited, registered, attended, no show, etc.

iii) Use campaign hierarchies

By assigning child-parent hierarchy levels to email campaigns, you can see the aggregated results of all child campaigns/initiatives in a parent campaign. Within this functionality, you can also create a custom “pick list” with detailed hierarchy levels, such as Tactic, Program, or Initiative.

iv) Add details about the email campaign

If you plan to run multiple email campaigns, you can store more information about them in order to create comprehensive campaign reports.

Step 2: Create and personalize your content

Research shows that personalized emails deliver 6 x higher transaction rates.

SFMC includes Email Studio, a robust yet easy-to-use email marketing platform to create memorable email campaigns – from basic marketing campaigns to sophisticated 1-to-1 messages. Email Studio comes with several user-friendly features and functionalities, including:

• Content Builder to create attractive emails using Salesforce email templates, content blocks, or personalized scripting language
• A/B testing to determine what’s working, what isn’t, and how to perfect each campaign
• Content Detective to identify and remove potentially “spammy” content and improve email deliverability
•  Dynamic emails with personalized content that appeals to customers and boosts open and click-through rates
• Einstein Send Time Optimization to automatically determine the best email sending time that’s most likely to lead to opens

Two types of personalized content can be created in SFMC:

1. Personalization strings: These strings let you insert subscriber attributes, such as first name, last name, etc. into the email content

2. Dynamic content: It displays according to the rules you define based on specific attributes such as location or history or data extension column values.

In addition to content personalization, you should also pay attention to email design. Keep these points in mind:

• Salesforce email templates: SFMC provides numerous templates that are mobile-responsive by default. Use them to save time instead of building the emails from scratch.
• Sender profiles: These let you define your “From Name” and “From Email Address”. Make sure they all use the same email domain of your brand.
• Profile Center and Subscription Center: To align with CAN-SPAM regulations, it is mandatory to include these links in every email footer so subscribers can give an opt-in consent to receive your emails or choose to opt out.

Step 3: Launch your campaign

Depending on the type and complexity of your first campaign, you can use Salesforce for marketing campaigns in different ways to simplify the execution process:

• Build a web form using Salesforce Web-to-Lead functionality to capture leads as part of your email campaign
• Use standard Salesforce email templates and create new ones to control the look and feel of your Salesforce email campaign

But even before launching a campaign, you can create or map a customer “journey” with SFMC Journey Builder to help you gather valuable, actionable insights about every interaction a customer could potentially have with your brand. You can then use these insights to power your email campaigns in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. With Journey Builder, you can plan, personalize and optimize your email marketing programs for each customer based on who they are, what they like, lifecycle stage, or how they respond to your brand’s communications.

By using Salesforce for marketing campaigns, you can also create different types of journeys for different types of marketing campaigns, including:

• New subscriber welcome
• Abandoned Cart
• Anniversary Campaign 
• Birthday Campaign

Step 4: Track your campaign and measure effectiveness

SFMC Email Studio provides many key metrics, so Salesforce campaign managers can track how their campaigns perform. Use the tracking reports to dig deeper into the data, to identify the best- and worst-performing campaigns, and to improve segmentation so you can create email campaigns to re-target, upsell, cross-sell, and resell.

In addition to Email Studio’s tracking feature, here are some more useful analytics tools in SFMC:

• Analytics Builder: Provides insights into subscriber behaviors and interests
• Einstein Engagement Scoring: Target the right customers to maximize engagement and conversion
• Einstein Copy Insights: Uncovers language insights in the copy so you can make changes that drive more robust email engagement
• Einstein Engagement Frequency: Recommends the optimum number of email messages to send

Wrap Up

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers features that help campaign managers create memorable email campaigns, even if they’re new to the platform. Effective campaign management in Salesforce requires proper preparation, launch, tracking, and measurement. By getting these steps right, SFMC will ensure the success of your first email campaign and all future campaigns. If you need assistance with SFMC, our dedicated resources are here to help.

The post Step-by-step Process to Launch Your First Email Campaign with Salesforce Marketing Cloud appeared first on Email Uplers.

For beginners, the application can seem a bit daunting. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is vast, and it’s normal to feel overwhelmed trying to crack the most usual workflows, such as creating a template-based email. That said, the application is also quite intuitive. A “non-designer” can create a basic email in Marketing Cloud. 

In this guide, we’ll learn how to create a simple template-based email in SFMC. We will also explain Salesforce terminology along the way, ending with certain best practices that underlie the creation and launch of an email from Marketing Cloud.

Read more : Learn how to send email in salesforce

• Creating a Marketing Cloud email template: Scenario 
  •  Log in to your SFMC account
  • Go to Email Studio
  • Navigate to Content Builder
  • Select ‘Email Template’
  • Choose ‘From Existing Template’
  • Enter the Template Builder
  • Add a hero image
  • Craft the email body
  • Edit the CTA button
  • Add links to your blog
  • Edit the email footer
  • Edit ‘Link Properties’
  • Save your template
  • A/B test your email 

• SFMC email templates: Best practices

Creating A Marketing Cloud email template: Scenario

HelixGen, a bio-science startup located in Virginia and barely a year old, wants to build a welcome campaign for all new subscribers. Currently, the company boasts 500 subscribers on their list. Their goal is to add 100 new subscribers by December.  

Samson Love, an email marketer from New York, decides to create a welcome series in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Samson starts by creating a data extension in SFMC in order to store relevant subscriber information, such as name, email address, location, and any behavioral signals from when people signed up on HelixGen’s website. 

Next, using SFMC’s Journey Builder, Samson designs a multi-email welcome series. 

That done, he proceeds to create the first welcome email of the series. 

1. Log in to your SFMC account

2. Go to Email Studio

In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Email Studio is where you can build and send personalized emails. So Email Studio is the starting point for all your email campaigns. Once you log in to Marketing Cloud, navigate to Email Studio as shown in the following screenshot. Learn more about Salesforce Email Studio. 

3. Navigate to Content Builder

In Email Studio, click Content as shown in the screenshot to go to Content Builder. Learn more about content creation tools in SFMC. 

4. Select ‘Email Template’

You’re in Content Builder. Now, go to the top-right corner of your screen and click Create. Then select Email Template, as shown below. 

5. Choose ‘From Existing Template’

From the side menu, choose From Existing Template. You should see the following popup appear.

You can choose your template from any of the four tabs. Let’s select Basic. 

6. Enter the Template Builder

On clicking Select, you’ll be taken to the Template Builder in SFMC.  The following is the Hero 1-3 Column (third option in the previous screenshot.)

7. Add a hero image

Now suppose we want to add a hero image. Click on the hero section. Replace the dummy image and browse for your preferred hero image. (After ‘uploading’ and ‘publishing’ the image, tick the Scale to Fit checkbox.)

8. Craft the email body

Next, you need to replace the dummy text in the email body with your content. Click on the content block. And compose the body copy in the content block on the left-hand side of the Template builder. 

9. Edit the CTA button

Next, you need to edit the CTA button. Take a close look at the following screenshot. Note how the button is edited, the padding changed, and the color set to blue.

10. Add links to your blog

In the pre-footer section, you can include the top three blog posts. Just click on the content blocks, and go on customizing the elements in the editor. 

11. Edit the email footer

Finally, you add the Unsubscribe link in the footer section. Regardless of the copy of the footer strip here, provide a link to the ‘Unsubscribe’ and ‘Manage Preferences’ options. Select the link image as shown here. 

12. Edit ‘Link Properties’

When you click the Link symbol, you should see the following popup called Link Properties. Fill the necessary fields and click OK. 

13. Save your template

You’re almost done creating your first template in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Navigate to the top-right of the Editor, and click Save. 

You should see the above popup. Enter a name for your template, then click Save. 

There! We have successfully created the first welcome email of the series. Now you can A/B test your email, which is an important step. 

“Testing definitely isn’t just for one-time promo emails,” according to Helen Lillard, Principal B2B Consultant at Oracle Marketing Consulting. “Set up audience journey programs like welcomes, nurtures, and reengagements with testing so that you can test your content, offer, subject line, and other elements for weeks at a time and get really solid results.”

Read More: Learn How to set up Email Relay in Salesforce

14. A/B test your email

Navigate to the A/B Testing dashboard in Email Studio. Click Create A/B Test on the top-right corner of your screen as shown in the below screenshot. 

You can choose any of the following components to test. Let’s test the email’s subject line. First, choose the email you want to test. Then enter the two versions of the subject line. Follow the tabs above to complete the test. 

Read more: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Best Practices To Achieve High Email Marketing ROI

SFMC email templates: Best practices

Creating an effective, to-spec email in Salesforce Marketing Cloud involves strategic planning and delivery. Prior to creating the next email, follow these best practices:

• Define your goal: In our scenario, the organization had a clearly defined goal: to add 100 new subscribers to their email list by Christmas. Your goal should be specific, measurable, accurate, relevant, and timely. Also, communicate your goal to all the relevant stakeholders.

• Segment your contacts: Segment the contacts on your list on the basis of name, demographics, preferences, interests, and other behavioral trends. According to Litmus’s 2024 State of Email Trends Report, 90% of marketers said that email segmentation “boosted performance.”

“Email segmentation is the simplest way to ensure you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time. You don’t need any technical skills to create segments of your audience, either. Most—if not all—ESPs will give you that feature out-of-the-box. The only thing you need to decide is what segments you want to create,” says Jaina Mistry, Director of Brand and Content Marketing at Litmus.

• Craft a strong subject line and preheader: The more compelling the subject line and preheader, the better the chances of your email getting opened. Avoid generic copy. Ditch the emojis. Keep it crisp and aligned to the content of the email.
  
• Design on-brand emails: Your designer should nail the look and feel of your brand. Ensure they follow the brand guidelines. Brand consistency is part and parcel of a positive user experience. In addition, use high-quality visuals, scannable content, and prominent calls to action. Embrace responsive design. 

• Test your email: Consider testing your email on different devices and email clients. You should also A/B test different variants of your email’s subject line, copy, and CTA to check what resonates the most with your target segments.
  
• Track, monitor, optimize: Track the performance of your email daily, and leverage any actionable insights for timely optimization.

Read more: Standard Report Builder Capabilities in SFMC

New to Salesforce Marketing Cloud? We got you covered!

Our team boasts certified Salesforce Marketing Cloud consultants, email developers, campaign managers, automation specialists, and migration experts. We’re always happy to brainstorm, create, and implement effective marketing campaigns for your brand. Get in touch with our Marketing Cloud niners today! 

The post How to Create An Email Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Templates appeared first on Email Uplers.

So much for the definition. But what about implementation? How can you use Automation Studio to launch a high-converting campaign? You might be at the very beginning of the process, or stuck somewhere in the middle, or quite close to making your campaign live, but still with a fishbone in your throat. 

All good! In this guide, we will try to cover all the three stages related to Automation Studio in Marketing Cloud:

• How to access Automation Studio in Marketing Cloud
  
• How to create a new automation in Automation Studio, and
  
• How to build an automation workflow in Automation Studio

Having served over 800 SFMC customers, and performed iterative fine-tuning for over a decade now, we are deeply acquainted with the ins and outs of Automation Studio. We’ll take it one step at a time, beginning with how to access Automation Studio. So, let’s get started!

How Do You Access Automation Studio in Marketing Cloud?

• Log in to your Marketing Cloud account. If you are not familiar with how the Marketing Cloud dashboard looks, here’s a screenshot of the same. 

• In the Marketing Cloud dashboard, go to the Journey Builder tab.
  
• Click Automation Studio under Journey Builder. That’s all!

What Is The Difference between Automation Studio And Journey Builder?

Both Automation Studio and Journey Builder are applications within Marketing Cloud. But they serve different purposes:

• Automation Studio focuses on data management, whereas Journey Builder is associated with multichannel customer journeys.
  
• Automation Studio automates repetitive tasks and processes customer data by the gross. Journey Builder personalizes customer interactions and adapts to ever-evolving behavioral trends in real-time. 

In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Automation Studio and Journey Builder are distinct tools working together to streamline a campaign. For instance, Automation Studio cleanses and organizes customer data for creating segments. Based on these segments, Journey Builder will create targeted campaigns. 

We’re ready for the next steps. Before we move on, you need to know about folders in Automation Studio. Folders are basically used to store your automations. They’re primarily for organization and improved visibility. You can create one very easily from the Overview dashboard as shown below.  

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How Do You Create a New Automation in Marketing Cloud?

• On the top-right corner of the Overview dashboard, click the New Automation button. Enter a name for the automation. 

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• You should see the following dashboard now. To get started with automation, you need to choose one of the starting sources, Schedule or File Drop. (More on this in just a while)

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• That done, you can now drag and drop ‘activities’ to build an automation workflow. In the following screenshot, the workflow consists of five undefined activities. 

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• Once you’re done building the automation workflow (more on this in a separate section), click Save. 

And that’s all! We have successfully created a new automation in Automation Studio.

Understanding Schedule And File Drop 

Schedule and File Drop are two different kinds of triggers available in Automation Studio. 

If you want to run your campaign at specific intervals, you can choose Schedule. For instance, in the case of a welcome campaign, you can schedule your first welcome email to be sent at appointed intervals after signup. 

File Drop, on the other hand, triggers the automation in the event of a file having been uploaded to an appointed folder in Marketing Cloud’s enhanced FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

Example: your CRM system generates a daily sales report. You set up a new File Drop automation. So every time a sales report is uploaded to a folder in Marketing Clouds’ enhanced FTP, the automation is triggered. This automation now processes the fresh data, updates dashboards, or triggers campaigns. 

The benefits are obvious. It eliminates any manual intervention, streamlines campaign workflows, and enables faster responses to incoming new data. 

How to choose between Schedule or File Send as your ‘starting source?’ Well, it depends on your immediate needs. If you’re building a pre-planned campaign, such as welcome series or weekly/monthly newsletters, go for Schedule. But if you want to create triggers based on updated sales data, choose File Send. 

Interestingly, you can also combine both triggers. For example, you schedule an abandoned cart campaign to run every Saturday night. Within this trigger, you can set up a secondary File Drop trigger; this automation will access the file containing real-time cart abandonment data. 

Now suppose there is a waiting period after the scheduled run, allowing for a new potential cart abandonment. The File Drop trigger is active now, and it will fire as soon as a file containing updated data (latest cart abandonments) is uploaded to the concerned folder in the FTP location.  

The automation then processes the updated data, and triggers a cart abandonment email just for those newly abandoned carts. Learn how to configure a new File Drop automation. 

How Do You Build an Automation Workflow?

We’ve already introduced you to the drag-and-drop interface where you will build your automaton workflow. Now, take a look at the following activities once again. 

We will configure these activities to build our workflow. Feel free to go through the principle automation activities in Automation Studio. In the meanwhile, let’s view automation in action. 

Suppose you want to process product survey data. Your goal is to trigger a Thank You email after every customer submits their responses via a form that saves the data to a CSV file. 

You know the first step? That’s right! We create a new automation in SFMC automation studio. Next, we need to build the automation workflow in the drag-and-drop interface. Accordingly, we can define the following activities, and drop-and-drag each one onto the workflow sequence:

1. File Transfer: We drag the File Transfer activity onto the interface. Then, we configure this activity to transfer the survey response file to a secure folder within Marketing Cloud.
   
2. Import File: Next, we drag the Import File activity onto the emerging sequence. Once configured, it will now import data from the archived file, and store the data within a designated Data Extension in Marketing Cloud. Your survey responses are now stored within this Data Extension.
   
3. Wait Activity: We want the automation to wait for 12 hours after the CSV file is imported. Why? Because this ensures that the email is sent at the right time and the system has ample time to process new/updated data. So we will add a Wait activity next. The automation is now paused.
   
4. Send Email: We complete the sequence by adding the Send Email activity. We configure it to trigger a Thank You email to the participants who took the product survey i.e. whose data was just imported.

Here is how the current automation workflow looks. 

Source

Is that all? Well, for a high-level overview of Salesforce Automation Studio, this guide can be your reliable go-to from time to time. We have provided the entire framework of Automation Studio. 

But hold on! It’s one thing to know, even to know well, and quite another to execute. Since you’re familiar with the basics of Automation Studio now, including the terminology, processes, logic, etc., you may want to go through Marketing Cloud’s own exhaustive Automation Studio implementation guide. 

Or, Better Still…

Get in touch with the Salesforce partners i.e. Email Uplers! Our Salesforce Marketing Cloud automation specialists will help you implement results-driven marketing campaigns for your brand.

By now, we have served 800+ SFMC customers across more than 60 countries. Talk about consistent upskilling, risk assessments, mid-campaign contingencies, fine-tuned executions, nonstop monitoring, timely stakeholder reporting — that’s what we’ve been doing for over a decade now. 

So connect with us and let us know your requirements. 

But before that, make sure to read the implementation guide shared above, so whatever decision you make, it’s an informed one. 

The post Trailheader’s Guide: What Is Marketing Cloud Automation Studio? appeared first on Email Uplers.

Cart abandonment is a major worry for all the e-commerce business owners right now as it creates a major dent in their revenue. The average cart abandonment rate stands at 69.99%. 

So it is important for business owners to implement an abandoned cart automation / workflow / journey in their email marketing platform.

Nowadays, most of the email marketing platforms provide the functionality to let email marketers connect their ecommerce platform with their ESP to set up abandoned cart automation. This helps email marketers to avoid revenue drain. 

However, SFMC (Salesforce Marketing cloud) has been a little different in terms of managing the abandoned cart Journey. Until July 2020, it wasn’t possible to set up dynamic abandoned cart emails / Journeys in SFMC directly. You would need to use third party apps like Workato to connect your ecommerce store with SFMC in order to set up abandoned cart Journeys.

In the July 2020 Release, SFMC announced Behavioral trigger – a functionality which allows SFMC email marketers & Admin to build dynamic abandoned cart Journeys within SFMC by doing few setups internally. In one of our previous blogs, we discussed how you can set up a personalization builder – Einstein email recommendations to manage abandoned cart Journey.

In this blog post, we will go one step further and see how we can build Marketing Cloud abandoned cart emails and Journeys once the Einstein email recommendation is configured properly.

Abandoned Cart Emails And Journeys

Once the code provided in Einstein email recommendation setup is added on your products & checkout page, you can go into Einstein email recommendation setup and click on Status.

There you would view a settings icon, click on the settings icon and then choose Data extension Settings. You would need to enable it in order for Einstein code to pull the data and store it in the data extensions.  After you enable the Data extension settings, you would need to move back to the Behavioral Trigger option on the SFMC Dashboard under the Journey Builder icon. 

In Behavioral Triggers, you would need to click on New Trigger. There you get 3 options to Abandoned Cart, Abandoned Browse, and Abandoned Wishlist. All the 3 options give you the feasibility to store records of those who have either abandoned cart, who have browsed products but didn’t purchase and records who have added product to their wishlist. Here, we will choose the Abandoned Cart Trigger, as we are setting up abandoned cart automation.

Here you will get an option to suppress records who were already triggered in the last 24 hours or records who purchased within the last 24 hours. You have the flexibility to choose anywhere from 1 to 14 days.

Moreover, here you would also be able to see the name of the data extension where all your records would be stored.

Now that the setup is done, we have stored the records generated from that set up in a target DE. The next step for us is to build emails in the content builder.

Building Emails in the Content Builder

Go to Content Builder, create a new folder for Abandoned cart under Transactional emails folder.

Click on Create message, select your base template and give a name to your email message.

Once you are done with the basic information, in the Add content area, you would be able to see your base template and blocks available for you to customize your email message.

In the Blocks section, scroll down to the custom sections. There you will find the option of Behavioral Triggers. Drag it to the content area of your email message.

After you drag the Behavioral Trigger block to the content area, you get the flexibility to choose the number of products you want to display, the layout (single column, 2-column, 3-columns), sort by activity or price, and provide horizontal or vertical layout to the items.

Along with the product images, you get the option to choose information you want to display along with individual products – Added date, Description, Image link, Number of reviews, Product link, product name, Regular Price, SKU id, Sale price, etc.

It also gives you an option if you want to update the abandoned items – if the subscriber’s abandoned item has been updated since the trigger event. This will include the updated items from their cart.

The only limitation you have with the default Behavioral trigger block is the non-editable HTML structure code. You only have flexibility to play around with the styling and not HTML code.

Once the email message is ready, you can preview it with Live data. In order to preview the email message, go to the Preview & Test section, click on the Data Extension folder and there you will be able to find the Abandoned Cart DE.

Select the DE and then select any record from the DE to preview the email which would be specific to that individual record.

After you have reviewed and updated your email messages, you would need to go to Journey builder, create a new Journey from scratch.

In the entry source, you would need to select Data extension as entry source and select the Abandoned Cart DE as your entry point of the Journey.

Once you have selected it, you would need to go ahead and build the flow to add all the email messages you have created for your abandoned cart journey (anywhere from 1 to 3 email messages) with a certain wait period between each email.

Update the rest of the Journey settings and then you are done with the setup of your cart abandonment Journey. Validate & test the Journey before activating it.

Wrapping Up!

The process of setting up a Salesforce abandoned cart journey may seem a bit confusing at first. But if you need help, feel free to get in touch with our Salesforce Marketing Cloud experts. So far, we’ve served over 800 SFMC customers across 60+ countries.

The post How to Implement Cart Abandonment Journey in SFMC? appeared first on Email Uplers.