Understanding How Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence Allows Email Marketers to Breathe Easy

A MarTech stack, part of every email marketer’s arsenal, often tends to sprawl across multiple verticals- SEO, CMS, social media, and, of course, email. Now, this essentially means that they have to juggle multiple data sources simultaneously on a daily basis; collating and churning the massive volumes of information yielded by these channels is, as you can well imagine, a Herculean task. And having to do so in the absence of a specialized tool can make this endeavor feel downright unassailable. Thankfully, the previous sentence is purely hypothetical, for we live in a world where we can easily employ the exemplary services of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence. 

A top-drawer analytics tool, Marketing Cloud Intelligence (earlier known as Datorama) helps email marketers with all aspects related to data management, analysis, and visualization, allowing them to enhance their decision-making (in real-time, no less!) and consequently power their businesses to the very upper echelons. Today, in 2023, it’d not be wrong to say that a brand’s performance in the market is a direct function of how efficiently it handles its data. Thus, in such a scenario, a tool like Marketing Cloud Intelligence that offers a unified platform for data storage, utilization, and modeling is invaluable, to say the very least. 

In today’s blog, we attempt to familiarize you with this potent Salesforce offering while also shedding light on the myriad ways in which it improves the functionality of email marketers. Curious to see what lies ahead? Dive in right away!

Understanding the Platform

In order to grasp the workings of Marketing Cloud Intelligence, we need first to wrap our heads around its organization. The interface comprises three tabs.

Connect and Mix

Over here, you can integrate and unify all your marketing data and insights across various platforms and data providers. Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, Adwords, Instagram, Twitter- Marketing Cloud Intelligence allows you to connect to any platform of your choice. Additionally, it can consume data either by ingesting flat files such as .csv, .xls, and .json or through technical vendors like Amazon, MySQL, MongoDB, and the like. Once the data has been fed, you can easily combine data from different sources and obtain a comparable view, a process known as harmonization. This, you can achieve using various tools available in Marketing Cloud Intelligence’s Harmonization Center, like Classification Files, Naming Patterns, and calculated measurements and dimensions.

Analyze and Act

This section allows you to accomplish a host of things, including reporting across all channels and campaigns, receiving actionable insights on your data, measuring KPI performances, and activating data on a third-party platform. This section contains two main features:

• Pivot tables: They help you generate patterns and comparisons, thereby enabling you to dive deeper into your data from several perspectives. Additionally, over here, you can design custom reports without employing query formulas. Once a pivot table is created, you can convert it into a scheduled report or export it locally. 

To create a pivot table from scratch, you need to execute the following steps:

1. Click “Pivot Tables” on the Analyze and Act tab.
2. Next, click the “+” icon.
3. Click “Add a Field”. Here, you need to specify the dimensions and measurements of your pivot table. Keep in mind that by default, measurements are placed in values and dimensions in rows. By manually dragging them, you can alter the format. 
4. Once you are satisfied with your configuration, you can close the Add Data window.
5. Now, choose the data range as well as the manner in which you wish to display dates. You have three options to select from- Period name, Period first day, Period first day (calendric).
6. If you wish to apply a filter, navigate to the Filters section. Here, click the “+” icon to choose one of your liking. For a more expeditious route, you can make use of the filter icon present in the relevant column header in the table.
7. Dimensions and measurements specified, and filters applied, the next thing that you need to do is name your pivot table. 
8. Set “Vizualize” to ON if you want to visualize your data in a chart.
9. Next to the Visualize toggle button, you’ll be able to spot the “Flat table” icon. By clicking on it, you’ll be able to see your pivot table as a flat table.
10. Click More Actions to save, download, or export your pivot table.
11. There’s an upper limit to the number of rows your pivot table can have- 8000. Once you reach that limit, you’ll be instantly notified. 

• Goals: With the help of goals in Marketing Cloud Intelligence, you can easily track your progress against metrics you have defined, derive actionable insights for your data, and obtain real-time notifications for your KPIs.

To create a goal in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence, carry out the following steps:

1. In the Analyze and Act tab, expand Goals.
2. Next, expand Goals List. 
3. Now, click Add New.
4. You’ll find yourself in the General section, where you’ll be required to specify the name of your goal, the measurement you wish to target in it, the type of your measurement, and the parameters that need to be fulfilled for the goal to be considered successful. 
5. Define your goal’s time period. By applying a target value to the time period, you can make it more granular.
6. Choose a dimension with which you want your goal to be affiliated.
7. Specify your goal’s granularity.
8. Next, you need to define the ranges for the success rate of the goal.
9. Choose if you want to specify the goal’s value automatically or manually.
10. Finally, select the goal’s success rate calculation- you can either choose to compare the number of impressions accomplished up to a point at a definite pace to your desired goal and obtain a percentage of the success rate or compute the rate by comparing the present status to your final target.

Visualize

This is arguably the section that holds the most interest for marketers, for it is here where they can design custom dashboards to spot as well as convey actionable insights and complex data relationships. The best part? All of it can be achieved on the platform’s user-friendly canvas with a simple drag-and-drop maneuver. Sky’s the limit regarding the possibilities one can manufacture with custom visualizations in Salesforce Marketing Intelligence Cloud. 

Navigating Marketing Cloud Intelligence Use Cases for Email Marketers

Now that we are familiar with the fundamental components of Marketing Cloud Intelligence, let us take a look at all the various objectives it helps email marketers fulfill. With the guidance of an experienced SFMC expert, you can leverage these use cases to strengthen your email marketing efforts. 

Collecting Data from Multiple Sources

When the number of your data sources is to the tune of a few hundred or thousands, collecting and filtering data on a regular basis can be a massive challenge. However, with a platform like Marketing Cloud Intelligence at your disposal that allows you to streamline and unify all your sources effortlessly, it can be an absolute breeze. What’s more, because the integration method is entirely automated, you won’t have to break a single sweat (The integration can be carried out by utilizing the Marketing APIs present in Marketing Cloud Intelligence’s library)!

Integrating Relevant Stakeholders

Campaign measurement is often a complex and multi-faceted process that involves the participation of several concerned parties (both from the business and the client’s ends) rather than a single entity. Recognizing this, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence enables you to connect all relevant stakeholders to the platform by leveraging its ML and AI capabilities, ultimately allowing you to foster a degree of transparency like never before. Subsequently, this leads to significantly enhanced decision-making and strategizing. 

Visualizing Data Effectively

Aggregating data, while vital, isn’t the final objective of email marketers. Churning it to identify unique patterns and mine valuable insights is what they are primarily concerned with. With the help of Marketing Cloud Intelligence’s powerful data visualization capabilities, they are able to do so with ease. Offering a plethora of customizations (with respect to reports and widgets), the platform empowers you to communicate complex information in a highly simple and organized manner. 

Sharing Data

Compiling data isn’t the only field where Marketing Cloud Intelligence excels; it is equally adept at exporting data, too. For the purpose of visualization, the platform enables you to export to either your database or another third-party platform. Besides, to promote improved interpretation, it also facilitates data export with additional graph sets and tools.

Analysing Data

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence offers a wide array of analysis tools, adaptable to diverse data sets, that can be deployed to derive actionable and real-time insights from your data. Consequently, they make it incredibly convenient for you to ensure that the performance of your campaigns remains optimized at all times.

Wrapping It Up

Being both feature-rich and user-friendly, Marketing Cloud Intelligence is just the type of platform that empowers email marketers to propel their campaigns into the realm of the extraordinary. We hope the insights shared above help you make optimal use of the platform and nudge you to explore its virtually limitless potential.