Who doesn’t love a meme? You certainly won’t hear us saying that here at SFBen! One app-enterprenuer-meme-creator who is giving us a ‘run for our money’ is Mounir Nejjai, who has captured a range of Marketing Cloud (mis)conceptions. As various people work together to make Marketing Cloud a dream marketing automation platform, there are misunderstandings and reflections that make for comical memes.
There’s an objective here, though. Not only is Mounir making statements about Marketing Cloud best practices and team collaboration, but also that memes are highly engaging image assets to use in your own marketing. We picked our favorite 10 memes from his collection that we thought were just too good not to share.
1. Journey Builder Vs. SFMC Consultant
Patience you must have my young Padawan…
Journey Builder is designed for creating 1:1 personalized marketing journeys for your prospect and customer communications.
However, the more power you gain, the greater chance you’ll need to troubleshoot. Perhaps a contact isn’t entering the journey, or has exited the journey before they should have? Or, maybe records are failing to update as expected?
Marketing Cloud Consultants are often the ones people call upon to diagnose a malfunctioning journey. There’s a long list of Journey Builder errors you could come across from email activities, data binding, custom activities, and contact update.
2. Looking Back at Your First Journey One Year Later
It takes some time to build great Journeys…
There’s plenty of options to design and continually tweak your journeys, including entry sources, the ability to use Sales Cloud data, different types of decision splits, testing functionality (Path Optimizer), and more.
Naturally, you’d start with the classic journey use cases to get it up and running. However, we’re all in the game to improve, and so looking back, you may get the feeling that what you initially created is pretty rubbish. Look at how far you’ve come!
3. Mobile Studio Will Change Your Life
Go omnichannel they said…
SMS campaigns have greater, proven success in terms of higher open rates and response. However, adding another channel into your marketing mix can seem daunting. Going from only email marketing via Email Studio to also using Mobile Studio comes with considerations for how your data is structured. Mobile customer data can be stored in three ways in Marketing Cloud, and you need to ensure that a unique contact key can be used across all channels for all new subscribers (and update existing subscribers to that new key).
Mobile Studio comprises of three different offerings:
- MobileConnect: Send SMS/MMS messages.
- GroupConnect: Opt in from a messaging app like LINE.
- MobilePush: Create and send notifications to encourage use of your app.
4. Einstein GPT for Marketers
The unbearable weight of Generative AI.
Marketers have already been tapping into the power of GPT to write email and landing page copy, marketing plans, and advice for data breaches. Now, the power of GPT is brought into the Salesforce interface, so marketers can get those tedious tasks done even faster.
Einstein GPT brings this right within the Salesforce interface. Dynamically generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising. For example, ask Einstein GPT to create a landing page template and campaign messaging – which they then ask to be made shorter – even surface images that fit the description the marketer gives, plus titles and forms (including an action to amend the form fields).
5. We Used Email Address as a Subscriber Key
First thing you’ll see when auditing a SFMC instance…
The subscriber key is used to identify one individual in Email Studio with a value that you choose. So, what’s the issue with using an email address as the unique identifier (key) for every subscriber? Isn’t that how email marketing platforms work?
Yes, and no. Yes, it was traditionally the case that email address was the unique identifier – after all, email address is easy to work with when it comes to identity mapping. However, there are two issues:
- Email addresses can change. The subscriber key forms the relationship with data extensions, so if the subscriber’s email changes, you’re in for a nasty mapping headache.
- When it comes to Marketing Cloud, the subscriber key gives you the flexibility to cater to different use cases. One email address can be used by multiple people (e.g. a shared household email address), which means that each member of the household can have their own subscriber key to be individually identified despite using one email address. Another case could be if one individual, with one email address, should receive more than one email (e.g. a separate message for each car owned).
6. Content Builder Approvals
Content Builder Approvals in SFMC suck… but use them!
A common need for marketing teams: a new email template requires approval from management before sending. Instead of an ad-hoc, manual process (which is prone to disorganization and error), automate this process with Content Builder approvals.
While you may not gel with them, it’s better to ‘cover your back’ than be responsible for sending out an email to millions of contacts with the wrong information, link etc.
7. How’s the IP Warm-up Going?
And don’t get me started on Outlook…
IP warming is an essential period of time when starting to use a dedicated sending IP (private domain). As opposed to using the shared IP (with all other Marketing Cloud customers), when using a dedicated sending IP, your sending reputation is your responsibility.
IP warming involves building up approximately 30 days of desirable sending history – not too much to make spam filters suspicious of the new domain, and not too little (you need to build a positive or neutral reputation). It’s a careful process, tip the balance the wrong way and you’ll damage your deliverability, making it hard to recover.
8. Don’t Use Transactional Email for Marketing Communication
Tough week, let’s get back to common issues…
Following on from deliverability and sender reputation, one of the biggest no-nos is to abuse the transactional email functionality. Transactional emails are designed for critical alerts, such as order confirmations, service down-time, or product recalls.
Contacts who are opted out of messaging are still able to receive transactional messages (being critical in how you deliver your product/service).
It’s key to be strict with the line between transactional and marketing email content. Fail to do so, and you’ll be in breach of CAN-SPAM.
Send classifications distinguish between transactional and marketing email sends by setting, for example the ‘from’ name and IP address.
9. Trying to Learn Marketing Cloud Without a Sandbox
Getting a certification with Trailhead only…
There are no dev orgs (i.e. practice environments) available for Marketing Cloud, unlike all other Salesforce products, where you can request developer orgs on demand. So, how do you get into the ‘nuts and bolts’ of Marketing Cloud?
Trailhead is an obvious answer, but in my experience, you’ll struggle to get the right level of detail to ‘safely’ administer Marketing Cloud. If you have access to a Marketing Cloud account, you’re at an advantage – and if not, you have your work cut out to dive deep into the documentation, and map out concepts on paper. Whatever you do, don’t just learn the facts without attempting to contextualize it, or you’re essentially blindfolding yourself!
10. The Life of a Marketing Cloud Developer
Marketing Cloud Developers are a rare breed of Salesforce professional. Sometimes, it can feel like Marketing Cloud Consultants, Architects, and Project Managers get all the glory.
With a platform like Marketing Cloud where you a) are spending a significant amount on the license, and b) have the power to extend its functionality, developers who are specialized in Marketing Cloud become indispensable.
Marketing Cloud Developers extend Marketing Cloud beyond declarative (point-and-click) configuration – including building integrations, and developing dynamic/personalized experiences utilizing HTML, CSS, and AMPscript. While they’re not commonly in a stakeholder/client-facing role, let’s not forget about what they bring to the ‘table’.
Summary
As various people work together to make Marketing Cloud a dream marketing automation platform, there are misunderstandings and reflections that make for comical memes. Not only is Mounir making statements about Marketing Cloud best practices and team collaboration, but also that memes are highly engaging image assets to use in your own marketing.
That’s why Mounir started MemeZ, a Marketing Cloud add-on that was started with ‘tongue and cheek’ that (to his surprise) gained interest from marketers using Marketing Cloud. Simply put, Memez is an Email Studio content block where you can add text onto a background image.
Want to make your subscribers smile? You can start your MemeZ 14-day free trial now.