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 13: Exploring Custom Journey Builder Activities

In the last chapter, we highlighted some of the possible use cases and advantages of using event-based architecture. In addition to covering the concept of webhooks, including how they differ from a traditional API, we also outlined a sample use case that allows users to set up a GitHub webhook in order to automatically sync content between a repository and Content Builder in Marketing Cloud. Utilizing event-based architectures such as what we just described is important to allow us to create real-time functionality rather than having to utilize concepts such as continuous polling to ensure that data or the resource state is synced between two systems.

In this chapter, we're going to examine another concept around event-based functionality that is specific to Marketing Cloud, known as Journey Builder custom activities. You are likely familiar with the standard suite of activities available within Journey Builder for building...