Salesforce Marketing Cloud and the customer lifecycle

For any brand, effective customer communication is the cornerstone of building strong relationships, driving sales, and fostering loyalty.

And in the modern digital landscape, where customers interact with brands through multiple touchpoints, maintaining consistent and personalised communication throughout the customer journey is essential.

In fact, McKinsey reports that 70% of the customer journey is based on how the customer feels they are being treated.

Fortunately, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform, offers a comprehensive suite of tools and capabilities to help businesses communicate with their customers at every stage of their journey.

In this blog post, we will explore how Salesforce Marketing Cloud empowers businesses to connect with their customers both seamlessly, and meaningfully.

Awareness

Consideration

Decision

Post-purchase

Customer service

Measurement and optimisation

Getting started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Awareness: Reaching and engaging the right audience

The start of any customer journey is awareness; ensuring that your brand is well-known to your target audience and potential customers.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud excels in building this stage through a variety of channels.

Through email marketing, brands are able to create and execute engaging campaigns that target specific segments based on demographics, interests, and even behaviours. Emulating a personalised experience even before the recipient has engaged significantly.

And for those potential customers who have yet to hand over their email addresses, SFMC’s social media integration supports targeted advertising and content distribution across all the main social platforms. Ensuring maximum exposure to the right audience, without the need for data.

Consideration: Providing relevant and timely information

During the consideration stage, potential customers will be actively evaluating multiple options and seeking relevant information to help them make informed decisions.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud empowers brands to deliver the right content at the right time to help customers in their decision-making process.

By leveraging SFMC’s automation technology, businesses can utilise the data they have on recipients to send highly personalised emails and notifications, triggered by specific user behaviours, actions, and milestones.

Additionally, SFMC’s Content Builder enables brands to create and distribute valuable, cross-channel content to support this process. Such as white papers, case studies, product videos, and demos, all tailored to address potential customers’ pain points.

Decision: Facilitating conversions and transactions

At the decision stage, customers are ready to make a purchase or complete a desired action with the brand.

Key to this stage is facilitating conversation and transactions, making this process as smooth and straightforward as possible.

By integrating SFMC with eCommerce platforms, brands can deliver personalised offers, discounts, and product recommendations to potential customers. Based on their demographics, behaviour, and browsing history.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s integrations also enable seamless transactional messaging, ensuring that customers will receive order confirmations, shipping updates, and post-purchase communications with perfect timing.

These highly personalised integrations create an engaging customer experience, improving the chances that they will purchase with the brand again and again.

Post-purchase: Nurturing and retaining customers

Great news! Your customer has made a purchase. But we’re afraid the hard work doesn’t end there.

Customer loyalty is key to ongoing, predictable revenue. So to encourage repeat purchases, brands must continue engaging on a long-term basis.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables businesses to nurture and retain customers through their targeted communication capabilities. For instance, by automating a personalised welcome series, brands can provide a seamless experience for new customers, ensuring they feel valued and supported at every step.

Additionally, SFMC’s dynamic content capabilities enable brands to send emails that can increase in personalisation the more customers engage. This can include product recommendations based on past purchases, product guides or suggestions, and loyalty and referral schemes.

Customer service: Addressing queries and resolving issues

For customers, products aren’t the be-all and end-all. Customer service also plays a crucial role throughout the customer journey. From offering a helpful and engaging experience pre-purchase, to offering support post-purchase.

Furthermore, 43% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand after a positive customer service experience.

Thanks to the omnichannel approach that Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables, brands are able to engage with their customers across the channel that best suits them. Such as email, social media, SMS, and more.

This ensures that customers can reach out for support on their preferred channels, all of which brands can monitor and respond to quickly and efficiently.

SFMC even boasts a partnership with leading social platform, Sprout Social, which allows brands to monitor and respond to customer feedback, queries, and complaints across social media platforms in real time.

Additionally, SFMC’s extensive automation capabilities enable brands to streamline often complex support processes. By automating repetitive tasks, such as routing inquiries to the appropriate department, sending automated responses to common queries, or asking for feedback, customer support agents can focus on more complex and high-value interactions.

With a 360-degree view of customer interactions and preferences, brands can provide personalised and efficient support, addressing customer concerns promptly, and before they turn to a competitor.

Measurement and optimisation: Analysing communication effectiveness

No matter what the industry, product, or service, ongoing measurement and optimisation of campaigns are essential for long-term success and growth.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers robust analytics and reporting capabilities that help brands to gain actionable insights into the effectiveness of their communication efforts.

Brands can track key performance indicators (KPIs) such as email open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction scores. And by analysing these metrics, they can identify areas of improvement, refine communication strategies, and optimise future interactions with customers.

This data-driven approach enables brands to deliver more relevant and impactful communications, enhancing the customer journey in the process.

Getting started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

If you’ve felt inspired by this blog post and are eager to get up and running with SFMC, then we can help.

As a leading email marketing agency that specialises in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we can help you with every aspect of the system. From initial set-up and training, through to full campaign management and execution.

So, why not get in touch for a chat with our Salesforce Marketing Cloud experts?