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

Technical requirements

While we will go through important aspects of the code base in this example, it is expected that you have some rudimentary knowledge of the Node.js environment in order to understand the content of this chapter. In addition to this, it is recommended that you have some knowledge of jQuery, which we will also utilize within our activity, along with a basic familiarity of how to utilize the GitHub Command-Line Interface (CLI) for management and deployment. In addition to this, we will be utilizing the hosting service, Heroku, to host and serve our application that integrates with Journey Builder. Heroku is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud that allows us to build, host, scale, and deploy our application, which will interact with Journey Builder to deliver end-to-end functionality. Before getting started, let's take a high-level view of how the overall flow will work in our example.

Figure 13.1 – The custom activity flow

As...