How Data Cloud (formerly CDP) is becoming the new status quo for marketing

How Data Cloud (formerly CDP) is becoming the new status quo for marketing

Briefly in advance: This post will help you to understand the workflows and capabilities of Data Cloud for Marketing if you have no or just little experience with Salesforce Data Cloud or Customer Data Platforms. I will use the terms CDP (Customer Data Platform) and Data Cloud here as synonyms as I am looking at it from a marketing perspective and the features that are available today. The power of Data Cloud While there is a good understanding of the…

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Use Emails as Custom Activities in SFMC

Use Emails as Custom Activities in SFMC

When I saw Journey Builder Custom Activities for the first time, I asked “Can I build it only with Marketing Cloud?”. The simple answer was “No.”. You cannot build a whole custom activity just in Marketing Cloud. At least as long as you think about the standard way using the installed package, JWT, config.json and so on. You find a short explanation why you need an external web server in this thread on stackoverflow. As the title suggests I want…

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securing cloudpages in sfmc
Securing Cloudpages in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Securing Cloudpages in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

In this article I will show a few ways to secure a Cloudpage from external access using AMPScript and SSJS. This can be seen as an addition to my last post about checking if a user is logged in to Marketing Cloud. I will touch on this solution again but add two more. I also recommend reading the popular post by Markus Slabina about securing Cloudpages. With my article I want to go in a slightly different direction. The following…

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SFMC User Validation on Cloudpages
Marketing Cloud User Validation on Cloudpages

Marketing Cloud User Validation on Cloudpages

In this article I will explain how you can check if the user that is opening a Cloudpage is logged in to Marketing Cloud and restrict access if there is no active session. Therefore we will route users via the SFMC authorization server to get a user specific code. Then we will validate that code using the API to restrict Cloudpage access for users that are not logged in. In the next step we will create a session key that…

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How good is Journey Builder?

How good is Journey Builder?

When you think of working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud you typically think of Journey Builder. Over the years the tool for creating visual marketing automation flows became the main module in Marketing Cloud. At the same time other ways of sending messages in SFMC lost their relevance. Although it is possible to get Marketing Cloud without Journey Builder in Basic and Pro editions, I wouldn’t recommend any customer to do so. If you look at the developments of the latest…

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You can gate it if you really want – but should you try?

You can gate it if you really want – but should you try?

Straight up: there is no simple answer to this question. If that annoys you or not, you should read on anyways to understand why that’s the case and how you might answer it for your organization and business case. It’s a rather long read but hopefully worth your time.  Asking website visitors to leave contact data in exchange for a piece of content is a long tradition in online marketing. Lately this sort of data paywall, sometimes referred to as…

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ABC analysis in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

ABC analysis in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

In my last post I showed how an ABC analysis can be used to target customers with specific marketing initiatives. Read this first if you do not know what an ABC analysis is and why you should use it. In this article I show how to implement an ABC classification in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 1. Define the goals As always when we create a new process the first step is to think about the goals we want to reach. Like…

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ABC Analysis
Get to know your customers with ABC Analysis

Get to know your customers with ABC Analysis

Do you know the Pareto principle? Maybe you know it more as the 80/20 rule. It says that 20% of our efforts (or 20% of our customers) are responsible for 80% of our success or revenue. At the same time, it also means that 80% of our customers are only responsible for one fifth of our revenue. Let’s be honest: No matter if this ratio applies to us or not. The fact remains that there is a small number of…

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5-StepsBeforeVisualization
Process visualization can save your project – start drawing today!

Process visualization can save your project – start drawing today!

You have an idea for an awesome new customer journey, take some basic notes and get to work straight away. Then, while building it you realize there’s an issue or even more than one and it suddenly doesn’t work anymore as you sketched it out! One all too likely reason is that you didn’t make the effort of visualizing the process to get a complete picture of it. Lucky you if you came across the problems before the process went…

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Email Report Cloudpage App
How to create a customizable Email Performance Report as a Marketing Cloud App

How to create a customizable Email Performance Report as a Marketing Cloud App

As we all know the reports are not one of the better features in Marketing Cloud. In my opinion, they are not particularly beautiful, powerful or user-friendly. So I decided to create my own email performance report using a cloudpage and make it accessible as an Marketing Cloud app via the AppExchange menu. Here is what I have done: 1. Prepare a cloudpage to show the email performance report 2. Create a process to update the data extension with email…

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