Salesforce Marketing Cloud - SFMC for Beginners

Triggered Send:  A triggered email is a message that marketing cloud sends to a subscriber in response to an action by the subscriber. For example, sending an invoice after a customer makes a purchase is a triggered email. User Initiated: In Email Studio, create a user-initiated email message to send to a subscriber List or a DE that has subscribers. Note: User initiated emails are manually sent, while a triggered message interaction occurs automatically in response to an action.

 The second setting of delivery profile is Header. If you select header as account default, then view email as a web page URL would be embedded inside the header of the email. Next component of the delivery profile is the footer. A footer section typically has,     Physical mailing address     Privacy policy     Legal number (if applicable)     Unsubscribe link Also, footer has other sections like social media icons, terms and conditions etc. Settings-->Company Settings-->Account settings In the account settings, you can find the default header and footer that SFMC provides. You can include custom designed header and footer as well. Under account settings, you will see an option for HTML header and footer where you can customize using edit option.

 As per Can-Spam law, you should be able to clearly identify between commercial and transactional email. For that, you have to enable one setting in SMFC, which is called as 'Send Classification'. Send Classification is a setting which clearly differentiate commercial and transactional sends. Examples for commercial sends are, promotional emails and newsletter emails. Examples for transactional sends are, forgot my password, invoice for an online transaction made by the consumer. What is a Sender Profile? Sender profile is a required element as per first CAN-SPAM law. You should mention a 'From Name' and 'From Email' in the Sender profile. Note: The 'from name' and 'from email' should reflect the company that is sending the communication. Verification of sender profile is required. The created sender profile should be included in the 'Send classification'. Creating a Delivery Profile: Setup-->Email Studio Features-->Delivery Profile...

 CAN-SPAM law is applicable to both commercial and transactional emails. There are five different laws in CAN-SPAM act. The first law is to have the sender information in the header section of the email sent. The second law is related to Subject line (SL). The SL should reflect the purpose of the email. The third law states that, if you are sending an email to a non-subscriber or the subscriber who was into legacy platform, then you have to define that the email is meant for advertisement purpose. The fourth Can-Spam law stated, we must have the mailing address of the business inside the email that is sending the communication. The fifth Can-Spam law says that you should provide the receiver of the email, an option (link) to opt-out.

 The various Subscriber statuses are listed below: Active: able to receive emails ( green ) Bounced: One or more bounces (soft/hard) of email sent to the subscriber ( yellow ) Unsubscribed: unable to recive emails due to an unsubscribe statis ( red ) Undeliverable / Held: deactivated due to repeated bounces. If the bounce was from a trusted domain, only one hard bounce is required. ( grey ) Bounce mail management: There are two types of bounces. Soft bounces: A soft bounce is an email that is rejected by an email server for a temporary reason. (example: Inbox full) Hard bounces: A hard bounce is a rejection of an email for a permanent reason. (invalid domain) Soft Bounce Considerations: In the case of a soft bounce, marketing cloud tries to resend the email to the subscriber every 15 minutes for 72 hours. i.e., 288 times. After this period, the subscriber's status is marked as Bounced. Once a bounce appears in the tracking, it cannot be changed.

 Email Studio is used to create: Promotional emails Transactional and triggered emails E-commerce emails In Email studio, contacts are identified by the subscriber key, which becomes the contact key in the contact builder. All Subscribers List: The subscriber key is the primary key for your subscribers, and it allows you to identify subscribers with a value that you choose. All subscribers list is the master list of all the subscribers in the marketing cloud (SFMC). ALL SUBSCRIBERS CONTAINS SUBSCRIBERS PRESENT IN THE LISTS AS WELL AS IN DATA EXTENSIONS (DEs). The data present in the List is also present in All Subscribers by default because a List contains only subscriber data. Whereas a DE can contain either subscribers' data or behavioral data. Hence SFMC won't add these DE records to 'All Subscribers' by default. Important: In order to send an email to a subscriber, the data must be present in 'All Subscribers'. If you have a DE with subscriber data to be u...

Contact Builder and All-Subscriber: Recap : List is only a feature of Email Studio which is not a centralized data model. DEs are part of relational data model and part of contact based data model and will be used in other studios and builders of SFMC. Contact based data model is centralized. DE can be created from Email Studio as well as using Data Extension option under Contact Builder. DEs are components of contact based data model. To create a data model, Contact Builder--> Data Designer Attribute Group: You can create attribute group in the Data Designer. There is a super object called 'Contacts' in SFMC which is system defined. To form a contact based data model, you have to create an attribute group. Once attribute group is created, you have to link DEs with 'Contacts' to create a contact based data model. Attribute groups helps to define relationships between DEs to form a contact based model.

Features of Contact based Data Model: Uses Data Extensions A Data Extension or DE is  a relational table DE uses a relational model Unlike Lists, DE can store multiple information of a Subscriber DEs can be related to each other based on a common field as we do in RDBMS. Note: There is no limit to store in terms of number of records. DE is stored in a centralized way so that it is available in all Studios and Builders of SFMC. Creating a DE in SFMC under Email Studio: Subscribers --> Data Extensions Types of Data Extensions: Standard Data Extension Filtered Data Extension Random Data Extension Points to remember while creating a DE: Choose and enter DE name. Create fields in the DE. Choose appropriate data types. Note: To store email address, you need to choose Email Address data type.  Choose a field which is unique to a subscriber as your primary key. Set a field as nullable, if data is optional. You can also set a default value for fields.  Apart from marketing comm...

 Under Email Studio, choose Email option in menu to create a new List. Email-->Subscribers-->List Under My Lists you can create a new Folder. Once new folder is created, use Create option to create a new List. List is created based on a template and no option is provided to add user defined fields while creating a List.  To customize the attributes, use Profile Management to add new attributes and/or select / deselect default attributes. Two mandatory attributes are: Subscriber Key and Email Address These attributes are non-editable and non deletable from the template in Profile Management. Subscriber key is a unique value (text or number) to identify a Subscriber. Marketing cloud (SFMC) won't generate the subscriber key. If SFMC is connected to other data source like Salesforce, chances are there that subscriber key is auto generated and then passed to SFMC. In case if SFMC is the first data source, you can use Email Address as the Subscriber key. You can manually add ...

 SFMC supports two types of data models. 1. List based Data Model 2. Contact based Data Model. List based data model is a single table model which means it does not relate to another table and stands out as a independent storage entity. Whereas contact based data model allows you to create multiple tables and you can relate them with each other to represent a relational model as you would do in any RDBMS system.  Just to recall, in SFMC we will call each table as a DE in contact based data model. While a list is simply identified as LIST. So we have LIST or DE which we can create in SFMC. When you have data of a Subscriber who can also be a consumer, we would need to store two types of data. - Behavioural Data  - Profile Data. Behavioural data can be a transaction data, an interaction in a website like 'Forgot password' etc. Profile data is the personal information of a Subscriber which is also known as PII. PII stands for 'Personally Identifiable Information'. List bas...

 Salesforce Marketing Cloud is often understood as Salesforce which is a CRM platform. SFMC is a marketing automation platform offered by the company Salesforce. So, when you mention this MAP tool, please use the term SFMC as to identify it with a unique name. Every MAP tool has a integrated back-end (database) in order to store Subscriber data and transactional data. SFMC too has an in-built data storage facility to store the data which is intended to be used for sending communications. Usual communication channel will be an email, but it can also be a SMS or push notification. Those who are already familiar which RDBMS systems like Oracle, SQL Server etc will know what a table is. A table is a object which stores the data in form of rows and columns. Here columns are attributes or fields and rows are called as records. In SFMC a table is referred to as Data Extension or DE in short. We will see more on Data models supported in SFMC in the following post.

 MAP is the short form for Marketing Automation Platform and throughout this blog we will frequently use this term 'MAP' for convenience.  Though you want to learn SFMC, you must also know that there are other popular MAP tools out there which is also equally important and used world-wide. So to begin with, I will list out some of the names of popular MAP tools. You can Google to find who is the provider and what are the basic features of each MAP tool listed below. This also gives you an understanding of what SFMC provides when compared to other MAP tools as you proceed. Popular MAP tools: Oracle Eloqua Adobe Campaign Salesforce Marketing Cloud - SFMC Adobe Marketo Oracle Responsys Hubspot 

 SFMC stands for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. SFMC is a marketing automation platform which is used to send communications to Subscribers in a automated way. If you are new to marketing automation, I would request you to explore a little on MAP tools. You will get an idea of what MAP tools are used for and SFMC is one of the cloud-based MAP tools available which is gaining popularity due to its ease of use and rich features. In this blog, I am aiming to address absolute beginners who wants to learn and understand the basics of SFMC. However, if you are already an experienced marketing automation professional, I would suggest you can learn SFMC in an elaborated manner using Salesforce official website. https://trailhead.salesforce.com/ All the very best and let's get started.