After successfully leading several large-scale projects to help medical technology company Outset Medical evolve key capabilities within Salesforce Service Cloud, Ad Victoriam Solutions (AdVic®) was recently invited to participate in an RFP to help them migrate from another third-party marketing automation platform to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

Regarding the process, Outset’s Senior Director, Information Technology Isaac Stockwell remarked, “AdVic demonstrated clear domain expertise throughout the RFP process and embraced a true partnership approach to meet Outset’s needs relative to scope, schedule, and budget.”

Challenges Faced

Before implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Outset’s legacy marketing automation platform lacked key capabilities around multi-channel digital marketing campaigns and the ability to build highly engaging customer journeys.  Additionally, integration between Outset’s marketing automation platform and Salesforce was limited, creating challenges with lead management, scoring, and nurturing, as well as limitations around digital engagement with existing customers.

Building Trust and Confidence

From the initial setup, AdVic’s leadership and expertise fostered trust. 

Specifically, Stockwell stated, “As we exited our acceptance testing and it became clear we had achieved a truly integrated solution (with Salesforce CRM), the team felt reenergized and confident heading into the last mile.”

Solution Impact

AdVic delivered a comprehensive solution encompassing lead capture, Salesforce CRM integration, robust automation, and engaging customer journeys. This resulted in:

• Efficient lead management: Intelligent lead routing streamlined processes and supported handoff to sales.
• Enhanced customer experience: Outset gained the ability to create highly segmented, engaging customer journeys. 

Exceeding Expectations

Outset’s Stockwell gave AdVic glowing marks on expectations, commenting, “AdVic worked diligently, sometimes seemingly around the clock, to meet a highly aggressive timeline.” He went on to highlight how we:

• Met tight deadlines: The team worked diligently, ensuring a smooth launch despite a demanding timeline.
• Combined technical and business expertise: The lead consultant’s unique skill set proved invaluable for the project’s success.

Knowledge Transfer and Adoption

The AdVic Team’s knowledge transfer approach was crucial for Outset’s long-term adoption and success. 

Stockwell added, “AdVic’s depth of expertise on the platform and thoughtful approach to knowledge transfer was apparent in training curriculum and sessions that were well organized and highly effective in conveying technical information appropriately for both technical and business resources.”

Enjoyable Collaboration

Asked what Outset appreciated most about its collaboration with AdVic, Stockwell pointed to:

• Accountable Team: AdVic took ownership and met commitments throughout the project.
• Transparent Communication: Clear and open communication fostered a positive working relationship.
• Efficient Process: The project management framework provided clarity and transparency.

Summary:

Outset Medical’s partnership with AdVic resulted in a successful migration to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, addressing challenges that included a solid data security plan and driving positive business impact. The experience was highlighted by trust, expertise, and a collaborative spirit, making it a true success story.

How AdVic Can Help

In the dynamic landscape of healthcare technology, Outset Medical sought to enhance its capabilities through a strategic partnership with AdVic, and our team can start helping your business today too by crafting the right Salesforce technology solution. Schedule a free consultation now.

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What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud? It’s the email you received from a retailer that presented products they already know you personally have interest in. Or a text message alerting you that the item you viewed, but didn’t purchase is now on sale. Marketing Cloud can do this, and so much more. 

In a nutshell, Marketing Cloud really has become an essential tool for businesses looking to build brand awareness and grow their customer base. So, in this AdVic® Salesforce Blog, we’ll explore some of the most important things to know about Marketing Cloud, including its benefits and how it can help your business.

The Benefits 

1. Personalized Messaging

One of the biggest advantages of using Salesforce Marketing Cloud is its ability to create personalized messages for each recipient. By collecting data on individual users’ interests and behaviors, you can customize your message to resonate with each person on your list. Whether it’s through email marketing or social media ads, customizing your messaging will lead to higher engagement rates and more conversions.

• Email Marketing: Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach customers today, but it’s only effective if you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time. With Marketing Cloud, you can use data like past purchases and browsing history to create personalized emails that are tailored specifically to each user’s needs.
• Social Media Management: Social media is another powerful tool for reaching customers where they spend their time online. However, managing multiple social media accounts can be tedious and time-consuming. With Marketing Cloud’s social media management tools, you can schedule posts across all major platforms from one central location.

2. Integrated Analytics

Analytics are an essential part of any marketing campaign because they help track progress towards goals and identify areas for improvement. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, analytics are built into every tool so you can easily track key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

• Email Analytics: With email analytics in Marketing Cloud, you can track opens and clicks in real-time as well as monitor overall campaign performance over time. This makes it easy to optimize your campaigns for better results.
• Social Media Analytics: By tracking engagement metrics like likes, comments, shares, and followers across all major social media platforms in one place with Marketing Cloud’s social media analytics tools make getting insights easier than ever before.

3. Mobile Messaging

Mobile messaging has become an increasingly popular way for businesses to reach customers on-the-go through SMS or push notifications. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s mobile messaging tools integrated with other marketing channels such as email & social media allows businesses seamless communication with their customers wherever they are.

• SMS Messaging: SMS messaging through Marketing Cloud lets businesses send targeted messages directly to their customer’s phones based on behavior triggers or demographic information like location or interest groups

• Push Notifications: Push notifications work similarly by sending targeted messages straight into a user’s mobile device home screen without being limited by traditional phone numbers unlike SMS messaging.

Summary

Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides a wide range of benefits that make it an essential tool for businesses looking to grow their customer base while creating personalized connections with them in real-time across multiple channels including email marketing campaigns along with social media management tools which include integrated analytics capabilities allowing tracking progress towards set goals effectively as well as seamless communication through mobile messaging channels such as SMS or push notifications when appropriate triggers arise, thus improving overall customer experience and satisfaction rate helping increase revenue generation opportunities while keeping costs low ensuring success in today’s competitive digital landscape.

Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud can benefit businesses of all shapes and sizes if correctly implemented into your organization, and AdVic’s certified consultants will learn your business, and skillfully guide you through the entire implementation process. Let’s get to work today!

Related Resources:

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Marketing Cloud Intelligence Reports: A Deeper Dive

Marketing Cloud Interactive Email: Form Content Block

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Which is why Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers interactive email content blocks, including the Interactive Email Form. Yes, you can create forms and place them directly into an email so subscribers can complete and submit the form without ever leaving the email.

Marketing Cloud interactive emails eliminate additional clicks or the need to navigate to a separate page. You’ll most certainly have more engagement when placing this content block in your emails that are at the “top of funnel.”

Marketing Cloud Interactive Email Forms: Use Cases

There are many use cases for using the interactive form content block in emails. A few examples include:

Capture Reviews, or Feedback:
Sending a post-purchase email and asking customers to review your product. Capturing feedback for an event or service are great ways to leverage this content block – you can have the form include multiple questions, or even just a single response. Leverage images such as stars or happy/sad-face emojis to make it visually appealing.

Progressive Profiling:
A great way for customers to provide additional information. You can create a form and, using AMPscript, pre-populate the form with the customer’s information you already have and then ask them to fill in the blanks. A great example is to follow-up after a customer signs up to your website using their email. You may only capture an email address and (maybe a name) at first, but you can then use the same form in an email in your welcome journey to fill out the customer’s profile and subscription preferences.

Surveys:
Similar to capturing reviews and feedback, you can use the Interactive Email Form to survey your customers regarding any topic. Make the survey a few quick questions – and since your subscriber doesn’t need to leave their email to provide feedback, you’re more likely to receive a higher response rate.

Creating Customer Service Cases:
When following up on a renewal or soon-to-be expired service, consider including a form with a checkbox in your email; if the customer would like to be contacted by a company representative, they may request the service using the form. Then, using Salesforce Journey Builder, create a Case Record for your service team to follow up with.
The customer can get almost-immediate assistance just by submitting your form and they don’t need to leave your email to do so!

Interactive Form Considerations

To use this content block, you must meet a few prerequisites:

Licensing:
– Interactive Email Form content blocks are available in Marketing Cloud Pro editions or higher.
– Your user license will need data extension permissions to create, view, and update data.

Email Rendering:
The Interactive Email Form content block will only render in certain email providers. These include:
– Apple: iPhone, iPad, and Mail
– Gmail: Webmail and App
– Yahoo/AOL Webmail

Consider Your Audience:
When determining whether this functionality is right for your email message, consider:
– If your customer segment is largely made up of personal email addresses.
– If your customer segment is made up of business email addresses (most likely using Outlook), it most likely doesn’t support the Marketing Cloud Interactive Email functionality.

When setting up the block, you have three options:
– Provide a link to a form landing page
– Create a different content block
– You may choose to show nothing so it can be used as an alternative or fallback should the block not work properly.

Create an Interactive Email Form Content Block

Now that the content blockchain has boosted your Marketing Cloud emails, let’s take a look at the steps involved to creating an Interactive Email Form content block.

Start in Cloud Pages: Set up the “thank you” page subscribers see once they submit the form:
– Navigate to Cloud Pages – you may use an existing collection or create your own! Once decided, click on the Add Content button and select Interactive Email Page.
– In the Cloud Page editor you’ll see a content block called Email form. Create your content here or select Redirect to a URL to send your subscribers to a different page. Do not add any additional content blocks outside of this section or your Interactive Email Form content block won’t function correctly.
– Once your “thank you” page is completed, be sure to save and publish it.

Create the Interactive Email Form: Navigate over to Content Builder and click Create > Content Blocks > Email Form. You can also drag and drop the Email Form content block from the left hand side menu into an existing email.

Choose Your Template: Marketing Cloud has preset templates for reviews, progressive profiling, cases, and leads! These templates are customizable – but you may also choose to create your own customized form.

Form Setup: Once you’ve created your template, find and select the “thank you” Cloud Page you created in the Cloud Pages Destination box. Select the extension you’d like your data to be saved to from the Response Capture box. You can also have the data extension created from your form. Other steps include:

– Selecting and ordering which fields to display – edit the fields by clicking on the pencil icon next to the field name.
– TIP: You can use AMPscript in the Value box to pre-populate data from your sending data extension. This is great for progressive profile forms and will save your subscriber time when entering their information into the form.

You can also pass on hidden values as well.
– TIP: Use hidden value fields to pass on data points such as Subscriber Key to identify subscribers.

– Use the design tab to set your fallback content. This could be another content block, nothing, or a button linking to a form (you’ll need to recreate your form in Cloud Pages).
– You can also change the input labels, button text, and overall design using the various drop options under the design tab.

Testing: Since Marketing Cloud Interactive Email Forms can render differently from client to client, testing your email is more important than ever! If you don’t have test accounts for Gmail, Yahoo, or Outlook, it may be a good idea to set one up.

You may also use tools like Litmus or Email On Acid to ensure all of your customers receive the best version of your email.

Summary

Capturing data and feedback from your customers can provide meaningful insights into their interests and perception of your brand. This can be a tough task, but eliminating barriers for your subscribers like extra clicks, or having forms pre-filled with their information, will encourage customers to provide feedback. The Marketing Cloud Interactive Form content block will support your marketing team’s efforts and create a dynamic experience for your customers.

Looking to gain a competitive advantage over the competition through automation? Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud can benefit businesses of all shapes and sizes if correctly implemented into your organization, and AdVic’s certified consultants will learn your business, and skillfully guide you through the entire implementation process. Let’s get to work today!

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Interaction Studio is Salesforce’s real-time personalization and interaction management solution that’s part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. But what does that mean? 

For starters it means giving organizations (especially marketers) the ability to promote relevant products and services to their customers and prospects across channels like web, email, and mobile in real-time with offers specifically and uniquely for them. 

For example, as customers browse your website and navigate to different pages, those interactions can be captured and then used to change the product suggestions, offers, home page imagery, and other content suggestions they see in real time as they continue to travel through your website. Imagine your website being dynamic to each individual customer!  

Not only is Interaction Studio a powerful promotional platform, the ability to harness data and use it to gain insights into your customer’s behavior is incredibly valuable. Understanding website behavioral trends at an individual level and at a macro level will provide insights into what offers and products are driving customers to your website and ultimately converting them into sales.   

This data can also be used for customer follow up with relevant emails, SMS messages, or push notifications. Being a Salesforce product, contacts can be placed seamlessly into customer journeys (via Journey Builder) to receive these marketing communications, or data can be surfaced in information in Sales Cloud so that sales reps can know which content the individual customer was interested in.  

So why do organizations need to have this type of customer personalization in today’s marketing landscape? Capturing and keeping a customer’s attention is the goal of all marketers and if content, products, and messaging are static or not aligned across channels your customers will feel that you don’t know them or what they are interested in and will abandon your site, email,  or message.   

What Does Salesforce Interaction Studio Do?

To showcase Interaction Studio, let’s cover website and email use cases – plus data and analytics capabilities. 

Personalized Website Experience: Rather than have static web pages with the same offers for every prospect or returning customer, imagine if your website could show a specific home page image or blog content based on that customer’s past page view history or past purchases? 

With Interaction Studio this is possible, you can surface up relevant next best offers based on past purchase history, promote blog content based on product pages visited, even create pop ups to capture sign ups as a customer navigates towards the top of the page to exit.  

Personalize Emails at Open-time: Email messages can adapt with recommendations based on a customer’s latest actions, product purchases, or browsing history – all current at the moment they open the email!

These recommendations can be leveraged in Marketing Cloud emails, but if your organization doesn’t use Marketing Cloud there are HTML code snippets that can be created and used in other email service providers as well.  

Additionally, you can export customer segments from Interaction Studio and use the data in Marketing Cloud Journey Builder to place your customers into journeys based on actions or behaviors.  

Data and Analytics

Interaction Studio collects data on several factors including time spent on site, actions, purchases, browsing history, and many others. 

This data can be used in creating Einstein “recipes” to create those meaningful experiences mentioned above based on customer profiles. Plus, with all of this data it gives marketers the ability to really drive A/B testing and take it to another level. Results can be seen in real time and then leverage those results in real time. 

Customer Service Interactions: Integrating Interaction Studio is not limited to digital channels. Using the Interaction Studio Connector for Sales and Service Cloud, organizations can use the Interaction Studio Console to provide agents with the customer’s profile, the web pages last viewed, and can recommend the Next Best Recommendations including content, offers, or product information. Providing customers with a feeling that the company understands their needs.  

Getting Started – Interaction Studio Projects

The benefits of Interaction Studio sound great, right? In order to take advantage of Interaction Studio, just like any other platform, your organization needs to have a plan in place and do some prep work in order to implement Interaction Studio efficiently.  

Gather Your Project Team: Identifying the key roles in your organization will allow your project to move smoothly as expectations will be set in terms of responsibilities and decision making. 

Interaction Studio touches several different channels and data platforms potentially so it’s a good idea to make sure all relevant stakeholders are aware of what will be needed from their teams or departments. This list of team members includes: 

• Marketing Team: You’ll need to collaborate with them on content, campaigns, promotions and customer segments. Being able to provide customers with a unique experience is great, but will require content for each experience. This could include images, written articles, and offers. It’s a best practice to start to gather these elements so that they are ready and can be tested prior to launching any campaigns.
• CRM Team: The Salesforce Admin and Marketing Cloud Admin will know what is available in terms of customer data, unique identifiers, and possibly how to extract that data to use in Interaction Studio. This will inform the Data Analytics Team (mentioned below). 
• Web Team: Implementing Interaction Studio requires some modifications to your website so you’ll want to work closely with your web team. It will be important to understand how to test your campaigns in a dev or sandbox environment. Find out if there are release cycles or blackout dates where changes to the website are prohibited so you can plan your campaigns accordingly. They will also be key in creating a site map, which will help guide where the dynamic content is displayed and how to identify those sections in your website’s code.
• Data Analytics Team: This team will work together with the CRM team to figure out what data is available for reports generation and other analytics. 

While the service and sales teams teams will need to be aware of the campaigns that will be active, they won’t necessarily be directly involved in the implementation/set up phase that we are  referring to.  

Get to Know Your Website

You’ll have to become familiar with the layout of your website. This doesn’t mean knowing every page that exists. Instead, start by identifying the pages and sections where your organization feels it can improve the customer experience. 

These regions are where you will use dynamic content and offerings. For example, the home page. This is the general landing area for customers, having specific imagery or relevant blog articles for different customer segments will help keep customers engaged and continuing down the funnel.  

Another area may be product pages that have dynamic product recommendations based on previous products purchased or previously viewed products. Making these recommendations more relevant will help upsell additional products and improve conversion rates.  

Data Collection Points: Another recommended exercise is to identify any page or section of your website where a customer can fill out a form (provide their email address), so that you can use these data capture points to make unknown prospects into known customers. 

Their email address or other relevant data is what Interaction Studio uses to “stitch” together different pieces of information across your Sales, Service, and Marketing Cloud platforms to create a unified customer record.  

Feed Your Assets into Interaction Studio: In order for Interaction Studio to surface relevant product recommendations and content it needs to know what those products or services are, what blog articles exist, and how to identify customer data points. In order to do this a feed (or several feeds) of data need to be imported into Interaction Studio. These include: 

• Product Catalog: A file of product specs, descriptions, measurements, pricing, and other relevant information.   
• Content Catalog: If you’re planning on providing dynamic content recommendations a file that contains the descriptions of that content will need to be imported. 
• Customer Identity Data Points: To effectively map your existing customer data to Interaction Studio you’ll need to identify what data points can be used to link customers back to your CRM. This can include email address, Salesforce ID, phone number or other unique identifiers. 
• Campaign Logic: Determine the business rules or logic in terms of what product categories should be shown together, which customers should see which offers, as well as what exclusions should there be to any of the rules. These will help support the creation of the Einstein Recipes that are used to show the right campaign, product, or image. For instance are there products that shouldn’t be grouped together, or a segment that should not see a specific offer?

Success with Salesforce Interaction Studio 

Now that you have a good understanding of what the capabilities and requirements are to implement Interaction Studio it’s time to determine your organization’s goals and vision for this platform and how it will work alongside your other marketing initiatives. 

• Goals: Work with your team and organization’s stakeholders to lay out what problems you’re looking to solve using Interaction Studio. What the benefits are to your business and your customers by leveraging this technology. How will this improve your current customer experience?

• KPI’s: Once you’ve determined your goals, how will those goals be measured?  How will your organization know this implementation was successful? Determine which indicators you’ll use to measure success, such as increased conversion rates, improved cross sell or upsell activity, and of course increases in revenue.  
• Customer Journey Map: Determine what your typical customer’s journey may look like when engaging with your website, or other marketing channels. Then determine which points along that journey Interaction Studio can improve to provide a better customer experience. Which interaction could see the best improvement from utilizing Interaction Studio’s capabilities?
• Content Creation: Once you’ve identified the points in the customer journey where Interaction Studio will play a part, start to develop the content and business logic that will be needed in order to make that touchpoint unique to that individual.
• Crawl, Walk, Run: Taking this approach is key to a successful implementation. Many times an organization sees all of the capabilities of Interaction Studio and wants to implement them all at once. This is usually a setup for failure.  Focus on one or two key improvements in your customer’s journey and start with those initiatives. Through testing and data analysis you’ll be able to determine if there’s been an improvement and build on your success.  

Summary

In today’s marketing environment it’s important to provide your customers with the best experience possible when interacting with your brand. The days of mass marketing and using one promotion, channel, or message to speak to all of your customers have become a thing of the past. Tools like Interaction Studio can support your marketing team’s efforts to create meaningful interactions with your customers across multiple channels so that your brand’s message is unique to them and their interests. Implemented correctly Interaction Studio will improve your customer’s experience for both new and existing customers and in time create a more loyal customer base.  

Want to explore how a Salesforce Interaction Studio solution will benefit your business? The AdVic Interaction Studio Team can start that conversation today! Reach us here.

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• Adding a loyalty program to an e-commerce platform can increase average order quantity by 319%. 
• 79% of consumers say loyalty programs make them more likely to continue doing business with brands. 
• 39% of loyal customers will spend more on a product, even if there are other less-expensive options available. 

These are some of the reasons why a manufacturer – that develops and sells market-leading brands to consumers globally – was desperate to create a comprehensive, efficient, effective, and revenue-generating rewards program. 

Their Top Barrier?

They lacked the technology to support their initiative. They knew it was time to abandon their laborious and unproductive processes – and integrate more tools with their only system (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) so they could fulfill their vision. This is when they partnered with Ad Victoriam’s Manufacturing Consulting Team, who guided them toward the data and system solution that now delivers the rewards program experience they wanted (and needed) for their customers. 

Team AdVic’s Solution

In our quest to meet this client’s growth needs, the AdVic Team implemented Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, numerous apps, and re-configured Marketing Cloud. Here are the specific steps taken: 

• Implemented and integrated Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Conga, 8×8 phone system, Facebook, Star Points, ZenCraft, and more, with their Marketing Cloud platform, which also replaced their homegrown CRM.
• System replaced the utilization of a six-seven member team from a third party call center with three new hires, significantly reducing cost.
• Integration with the Clients website replaced Merkle, a batch data processor, which was expensive, cumbersome and provided week-old data.
• Coupon redemption management created through flows to monitor and reject coupons based on duplicate utilization and when custom reached coupon limits.
• Designed and integrated store location functionality to provide customers with “store nearest you” information based on their exact location.
• Implemented with Star Points ZNY Rewards to track points based on rewards points rules such as “add 15 points for birthday.”
• Built flow-based inventory system, supported by FIFO, creating picklists configured based on warehouse layout (Conga), and shipping labels (ZenKraft).   
• Custom-built journey through Marketing Cloud triggering emails during the product purchase lifecycle and to drive rewards program engagement.
• Tailored Service Cloud and Lightning Component to manage product claims expediting case resolution.
• Replaced Excel spreadsheets and sticky notes with attractive and actionable reports and dashboards.

Looking to build loyalty? Let’s talk about setting up a rewards program focused on multiplying product purchases and repeat customers – based on your business model. Ad Victoriam’s certified Salesforce® consultants are ready to take the journey to success with you. Let’s talk today! Just fill out the quick form below and we’ll get right back to you!

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Marketing Cloud Connect gives marketers the ability to utilize the Standard and Custom Objects for Salesforce right within Marketing Cloud. Some of the top Use Cases for utilizing your Salesforce Data within Marketing Cloud are via the use of Journey Builder. Journey Builder within Marketing Cloud allows for amazing customization and automation of guided messaging and updates for the benefit of your target audiences.

Journey Builder Example Use Cases

Once you have connected your Marketing Cloud instance with Salesforce utilizing the Salesforce best practices seen here, you are set to fully utilize the Salesforce Journey specific activities and entry sources.

Pro Tip: If after you successfully set up the Connector to Salesforce within Marketing Cloud, and you do not see the Salesforce activities in the Journey Builder Canvas, submit a support ticket with Marketing Cloud support and they will enable it.

Salesforce Data for Journey Builder Entry Source
One of the biggest Use Cases for using Salesforce Data as a Journey starting entry source is for a Welcome Journey. Since Salesforce Data Entry looks for any new records created and or updated from Salesforce, it is a perfect trigger point to send newly created Leads down a series of welcome emails to introduce them to your story.

Salesforce Campaign Entry Source

Does your company use Salesforce Campaigns to drive marketing goals? The Salesforce Campaign Entry source for Journey builder will allow you to send newly created Campaign Members down a journey when they are created/or added to a specific Salesforce Campaign.

Decision Splits

Within Marketing Cloud Journey Canvas there are some very powerful flow controls and one that really helps tailor your journey to target specific leads or contacts is the Decision Split. When Marketing Cloud is connected to Salesforce, the Decision Splits have all new power to look at the related Objects based on your Journey Entry Source.

If you are sending new Leads created in Salesforce down a Welcome Journey, and you want to split the Leads into paths based on the live Lead Status in Salesforce, you can do so with the Contact Data > Salesforce Data.

On the Decision Split, select the Contact Data Attribute and drill into the Salesforce Object you are looking to reference. Once on the Object, such as Lead, select the field to make decisions from. The Lead Status is a great field to send different emails based on their status in the sales path. Using Decision Splits to effectively route your subscribers down targeted paths is a great way to personalize their communication journey.

Sales and Service Cloud Journey Activities

Once Salesforce is connected to Marketing Cloud within the Journey Builder Canvas, you should see nine Sales and Service Cloud Activities. These Activities directly update or create records in Salesforce. These Activities are an extension of the workflow automation found within Salesforce and they leverage similar wizards to set up powerful automation options.

Additionally, some of the Top Sales and Service Cloud Activities are the Task, Object Activity, and Campaign Member.

Task Activity
A top Use Case for the Task Activity is to use it to notify a Sales rep or Salesforce user to take action based on interaction within a Journey. For example, you can send a subscriber an email using the email send option in Journey Builder, then set up an Engagement Split to monitor if the subscriber opened or clicked on a certain call to action in the email. If the subscribers did click or open the email, you can place a Task Activity to create a Task in Salesforce on the Salesforce Record to have a sales rep give the contact a call to follow up on the sale.

Object Activity
The Salesforce Object Activity Journey Builder Activity allows marketers to create new Salesforce Objects right from a Journey Path. These Objects include Standard and Custom Objects. An example of how this could be impactful is that you could create a scoring system based on if a subscriber opens an email. Create a Custom Object to track points and create a point record on the Contact or Lead and use Salesforce to summarize these related records. There are many other Use Cases to create Salesforce Objects from marketing, and the possibilities are endless or maybe just limited to the Salesforce Objects you have.

Campaign Member Activity
Marketing Cloud does not have a native way to link Journeys together. However, insert Salesforce Connector and you instantly have the ability to add the Salesforce Activity: Campaign Member. When you add this Activity to a Journey Path, it allows you to create a Campaign Member and assign that subscriber to a Salesforce Campaign. You can then use the Salesforce Campaign Entry Source to send that newly created member down a new Journey, thus connecting Journeys for even more automation potential.

Looking to gain a competitive advantage over the competition through automation? Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud can benefit businesses of all shapes and sizes if correctly implemented into your organization, and Ad Victoriam’s certified consultants will skillfully guide your business through the entire implementation process. Let’s get to work today!

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In the marketing and sales world, CRM helps in nurturing leads and build better long-standing relationships with customers even before interactions with the sales team happen.

Ultimately what matters is the quality of leads that matters, not the quantity. So, instead of populating your database with unqualified leads, focus instead on how you can use CRM for lead generation and conversions by incorporating different techniques and integrating with different platforms and applications.

Let’s explore four different platforms/applications you can integrate into a Salesforce® CRM that will go a long way toward improving your lead generation process to attract – and convert – the quality leads you are seeking.

1. AI-Powered Lead Generation

Lead generation tools powered by AI (artificial intelligence) are assisting marketers to understand and find new leads and convert them. AI has enabled them to select the most valuable accounts and even decide on suitable marketing communication based on lead characteristics.

Typically, a marketing campaign could include digital ads, along with an email blast, social media posts, and possibly an event. If the campaign is effective, customers and prospects respond by generating activities such as website visits, shares, and clicks. They might also wind up filling out a form or doing something else that effectively turns them into a lead.

Today, with an AI-powered CRM using Salesforce’s Einstein, you can not only monitor that kind of engagement but use the data to adjust campaigns even once they’re already underway. This could mean tweaking the copy in an email to appeal more to a particular segment, or boosting the reach of a digital ad because one is performing better than the others.

The big takeaway about AI working for lead generation is that it draws out the most critical insights from the Salesforce Customer Success Platform and helps deliver recommendations that power all kinds of marketing activities that will lead to conversions.

2. CRM and Marketing Automation

Lead generation is an extremely important step in any business’s growth and goals toward conversions. Automating the many steps between marketing and sales gives your team more time to focus on overall strategy and nurturing the leads that show real promise. That means more prospects and more customers.

A CRM marketing automation tool, such as Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, can also give you a richer, more detailed picture of potential customer behavior. For instance, you can initiate behavioral tracking methods such as following a user’s path through your website. Marketing automation software can also help your marketing team understand prospects’ interests and where they are in the purchasing lifecycle. Following up can then be customized around those specific insights.

Learn How Ad Victoriam Helped a Customer with a Marketing Cloud Solution

3. Integration with Social Media

Social media is one of the best tools for businesses to generate highly qualified and sales-ready leads that you can turn into conversions. It is a perfect place for businesses to find their targeted audiences, as well as turning them into the new sales-ready leads.

Baked into Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is a social media tool known as Social Studio. Here you can connect your marketing, service, and sales teams with your customers through social channels to build meaningful relationships. You can also discover what your customers, prospects, and competitors are saying about your brands.

4. Email Marketing Tool

One of the ways to fill your sales funnel with high-quality leads to close more deals is to implement an email campaign tool into your CRM. With a tool such as Salesforce’s Pardot, you can initiate lead nurturing campaigns by automatically sending emails and perform marketing tasks based on triggers including time, user interactions, and other custom parameters.

In addition, you can respond to prospects when it matters, learn what’s happening between sales calls, and get alerts about prospect actions.

So, are you frustrated with populating your database with unqualified leads and want to better focus on how you can use CRM for lead generation and ultimately conversions? The Ad Victoriam consulting team can help you incorporate different techniques and integrate different platforms and applications that will put your business on a successful path toward more lead conversions starting today. Just click here and we’ll get right back to you immediately.

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Rethink Your Approach to CRM Integration

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At this early point here in 2020, you might be asking yourself several questions, including:

• What can my company do now to attract new customers for the next Open Enrollment period later this new year?
• What new tools and processes can we implement in the coming weeks and months that will make our internal operations and systems work more efficiently for the next open enrollment period and beyond?

Your 2020 Focus

As you begin to think about attracting new customers for your next Open Enrollment period later this year, it’s important as a payer that you also focus on guiding members along their entire care journey. Offer them a personalized, relevant, and timely marketing experience. And if you focus on those critical member experiences you are guaranteed that you will be delivering overall member satisfaction as well as retention.

Let’s explore some ways you can accomplish those goals.

Attracting New Customers

If you’re like most payers, you invested heavily in digital ads for the next Open Enrollment period in an effort to attract new customers. Use this time now to look at how your company’s ads performed and then make the necessary adjustments for when your ad campaigns will start later this year.

In evaluating your 2019 ad campaigns for 2020 adjustments, keep these Salesforce suggestions in mind:

• Use your current member profiles to model the next ideal member. Create look-a-like audiences based on first-party data, as that can have a massive impact on ad spend for the 2020 Open Enrollment period.
• Consider using a single view of your customers. On average, Salesforce says most marketers use 15 different data sources, yet only 47 percent of marketers say they have a unified view of their customers.
• Target the right people for programs you want to expand. The goal here is to not miss out on reaching your key employer customers because you didn’t set up the right audiences.
• Connect your databases with a data marketing platform (DMP), which can help you quickly identify customers and prospects and personalize content for each audience. This unified view will also help you understand who has already seen your content, so you can maximize your ad budget by making sure they don’t see it again.

AdVic Extra: Watch our recent related webinar: “Connecting Data to Transform Payer-Member Relationships”

The Connected Patient Journey

In 2020, your customers – present and future – expect more from you than just transactional emails, they expect a great brand experience. Just as important as your company’s products and services, the brand experience you offer must differentiate you from your competitors.

So, what have you done to establish a great connected patient journey? You know, those seamless customer experiences that go beyond email and happen across other critical touchpoints including mobile, advertising, the web, direct mail, sales, commerce, and service.

And one often neglected, yet important cog in the connected patient journey wheel is onboarding. The Open Enrollment period provides payers a great opportunity to understand what and does not work in the process. As an example, new members will surely have questions about your offerings and helping through the onboarding process goes a long way to keeping them happy enough to stay with you into the next season.

And don’t forget to re-engage with your existing members with your offerings as part of a continued connected journey. Communicate program changes and give them educational materials to make their healthcare journey even more personal and productive. Doing so helps them to feel confident that they are in the right program.

From attracting new customers to creating and implementing connected patient journeys, Salesforce Marketing Cloud for Healthcare Payers can help you accomplish those strategic goals and more. Want to know more? Ad Victoriam’s consulting team is ready – right now – to help you implement your secure and scalable Salesforce CRM for Healthcare solution. We will make sure you are ready to flawlessly execute throughout the 2020 Open Enrollment season later this year and beyond.

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If your business has yet to tap into the power of the cloud, these eight benefits of cloud computing should change your mind.

Reduce Expenditures, Increase Efficiencies

Migrating to the cloud reduces – and in many cases – eliminates the need for your business to purchase equipment and operate out of a data center. Now, you are seeing significant savings on hardware, facilities, utilities, and other expenses required from traditional computing. You will also reduce the need for on-site servers and expensive software, trimming your IT budget further.

Flexibility

The cloud gives you and your employees the flexibility to work from any location. Employees can complete their tasks at home or from the field. This is particularly valuable in an era when employees desire flexibility in their schedules and work environment. You can also reduce the number of workstations in your office and allow some employees to work from home, further saving costs.

Increase Collaboration

Cloud-based workflow and file-sharing applications give your teams the ability to work together more easily and efficiently. Employees can make real-time updates, see what other team members are doing and communicate effectively. This level of collaboration speeds up projects and improves customer service.

Disaster Recovery

Hosting systems and storing documents on the cloud provides a safeguard in case of a disaster. Man-made and natural disasters can damage equipment, shut off power and paralyze critical IT functions. Supporting disaster recovery efforts is one of the important advantages companies attain when they move to the cloud.

Data Security

It’s just a fact that storing data on the cloud is safer than storing it on physical servers and in data centers. Think of it this way, a breach of security on your premises can lead to compromised data security if laptops or computers are lost or stolen. However, if you have data on the cloud, you can immediately delete any confidential information remotely or move it elsewhere. It’s also a fact that breaching security protocols on cloud platforms is difficult.

Document Control

The more your employees and partners collaborate on documents, the greater the need for tight document control. Prior to the cloud, you and your employees sent files back and forth as email attachments to be worked on by one user at a time. More often than not, that ended as a mess of conflicting file content, formats and titles. However, when you move your business tasks to the cloud, all files are stored centrally and everyone sees the one up-to-date, true version of the file or document.

Automatic Software Updates

With your servers off-site and in the cloud, your hosts take care of them for you by taking charge of regular software updates – including security updates – so you don’t have to worry about wasting time maintaining the system yourself. That leaves you free to focus on the things that matter, like growing your business.

Compliance Needs

If your industry, for instance, is healthcare or financial services, ensuring data compliance is essential for your business. Moving operations to the cloud ensures that your business is using cloud-based tools and services that are already compliant, helping to remove some of the burdens of compliance from your IT team.

No doubt there are many more benefits of moving to the cloud that are not listed here, but these are some of the big ones.

Ad Victoriam has helped bring big changes to businesses all across the country. Contact us today to learn how we can help your business migrate to the cloud with little-to-no impact on daily operations, but a serious boost to your bottom line.

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“The challenge was finding a solution that would scale to their level and allow Hi-Rez to have diverse contact management and marketing capabilities,” says James Rogers, Principal at Ad Victoriam. “The team quickly identified Salesforce Service Cloud and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud as the ideal solutions for Hi-Rez. The key was to approach Hi-Rez Studios’ requirements in two stages, first customer service, then marketing.”

Salesforce Service Cloud
For customer service, Hi-Rez needed to provide customers with a way to submit tickets regarding billing, technical and game play issues; it also had to have a single system for processing that information so cases could be resolved quickly. Hi-Rez already had a portal in place through which customers could fill out an online form to start cases, but it lacked a streamlined way to work with that information efficiently. The Ad Victoriam Salesforce consulting team decided that Salesforce’s Email-to-Case solution was the perfect option because it could integrate easily with Hi-Rez Studio’s existing user portal. Ad Victoriam partnered with Hi-Rez to build out the integration of the portal with the Salesforce Service Cloud, and now the two systems work together. “When a customer submits a case, it is captured and pushed into Salesforce,” the Ad Victoriam Salesforce Consultant explains. From there, customer service reps can communicate with players to get issues resolved in a timely manner. What’s more, Salesforce can help Hi-Rez make sure that the system is not creating duplicate users from one person who plays both of the company’s main games; each player remains as a single contact regardless of which games in which they participate. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The same customer-centric thinking was applied when Ad Victoriam built out the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to enhance Hi-Rez Studio’s marketing efforts. In the past, Hi-Rez used Oracle’s RightNow service for its marketing initiatives. However, it was expensive and difficult to use, and Hi-Rez needed another option that would fit its specific needs. “The nature of gaming is that people will play for a bit and then never play again. They need an incentive to play more often and play up to higher levels of a game,” James notes. He added, “Hi-Rez wanted to be more interactive and engaged throughout the marketing process. So, within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, we wanted to do a couple of things. The client wanted to teach their players on an ongoing basis by providing sessions about how to do everything from store the images they create to how to create journeys within the games. They also wanted to be able to send follow up emails to contacts about new features, discount codes and more.”

One of the biggest challenges was ensuring that players who enjoy both Smite and Paladin are not inundated with e-mails from the company, making the ability to look at each player as a single contact that much more important. On the flip side, if players only play one of Hi-Rez’s games, they need to be segmented out and receive communication about their preferred game alone. The customizable nature of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud lent itself to this requirement beautifully. And now that Hi-Rez has seen Salesforce’s—and Ad Victoriam’s—capabilities, the work to improve its processes continues.

Game On
“Hi-Rez now has game play information at their fingertips that is critical for their customer service and marketing strategies. And once we got going, the client realized all of the different things they could do, so we are working with them to prioritize their new needs and functional requirements,” James says. “We are now in phase two and helping them to continue refining their abilities.”

“One of the best parts of this project has been the ability to work with multiple platforms and integrate everything into a single solution,” James concludes. “For both customer service and marketing, data is now flowing through a single platform. We’ve implemented a system that works seamlessly for the client.”

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