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

Chapter 11: Exploring SDKs, APIs, and Specs

In the previous chapter, we went through a sample solution to extend our business capabilities, as well as to highlight the importance of structure and test-driven development (TDD).

Now, let's focus on two other aspects of development that form the core functionality that will become the backbone of any integration into Marketing Cloud: application programming interfaces (APIs) and software development kits (SDKs). It goes without saying, but external solutions to automate certain processes within your flow aren't exactly useful if they don't have some mechanism for actioning on data across systems. Knowing how and what capabilities or support your platforms have is going to dictate the exact nature of the integration and what method you choose to adopt in your solution.

We've covered substantial ground in understanding exactly what APIs are and how they can be utilized in Chapter 7, The Power of the In-Step APIs...