Book Image

Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud

By : Greg Gifford, Hanshaw
Book Image

Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud

By: Greg Gifford, 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

Requests and protocols – a deep dive

We've walked through the various API types that are commonly used in web application development, so we should now have a deeper understanding of what each is used for. In this section, we will dive into the world of requests and protocols. However, before we begin, it might be helpful to clarify what we mean by a "protocol" in regards to what we've discussed in this chapter.

In essence, protocols are defined rules that are agreed upon by all parties to define the way a service can communicate with other services on the web. As Marketing Cloud developers, we are likely very familiar with the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), which is a protocol that defines how we can send files between machines on the internet. Another might be the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), which defines how we can send emails to a given customer or defined audience. Within the context of this chapter, we will largely use the term "protocol...