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

To SDK or not to SDK

So, you might be asking yourself: what is an SDK anyway? SDK stands for software development kit, and it's a set of tools, programs, or guidelines that are used to develop applications for a specific platform (such as Marketing Cloud). SDKs can include APIs, developer environments, documentation, code samples, libraries, and many other resources that can reduce the complexity and time necessary to construct applications for a given platform or service.

A good way to visualize the utility of an SDK is to think of a piece of furniture being shipped to your home from a retail outlet online. When it arrives, the pieces are neatly assembled and grouped by their functionality or position and will likely be easily marked. In addition to this, you may receive a set of simple tools that are specific to the piece of furniture and allow you to construct the product much faster than you otherwise would.

Now, compare that with having to go purchase or chop wood...