Book Image

Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud

By : Greg Gifford, Jason Hanshaw
Book Image

Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud

By: Greg Gifford, Jason Hanshaw

Overview of this book

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) allows you to use multiple channels and tools to create a 1:1 marketing experience for your customers and subscribers. Through automation and helper tasks, you can greatly increase your productivity while also reducing the level of effort required in terms of volume and frequency. Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud starts by discussing what automation is generally and then progresses to what automation is in SFMC. After that, you’ll focus on how to perform automation inside of SFMC all the way to fully running processes and capabilities from an external service. Later chapters explore the benefits and capabilities of automation and having an automation mindset both within and outside of SFMC. Equipped with this knowledge and example code, you'll be prepared to maximize your SFMC efficiency. By the end of this Salesforce book, you’ll have the skills you need to build automation both inside and outside of SFMC, along with the knowledge for using the platform optimally.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
1
Section 1: Automation Theory and Automations in SFMC
5
Section 2: Optimizing Automation inside of SFMC
11
Section 3: Optimizing the Automation of SFMC from External Sources
17
Section 4: Conclusion

Putting pen to paper

We've spent time documenting our current flow, speaking with key stakeholders to find points well suited for automation, and we've got a process selected that we can automate. Now, we need to start thinking through the possible mechanisms and design patterns that will power the automation solution behind our selected process. This can be a tricky undertaking, as every solution comes with a different set of circumstances and challenges.

Often, just the concept of getting started or knowing where to begin can be overwhelming and might discourage some developers from continuing their efforts, particularly if the solution primarily benefits their development processes or if the team working on the solution is small. To that end, let's create a sample solution that shows how we can leverage Marketing Cloud in order to automate some functionality in an effort to both build confidence and get those creative wheels turning!

Defining a use case

For...