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 2: SFMC Automation Tools

Every good SaaS worth its salt has automation capabilities. They have moved from being a cool feature to being necessary for success. Any good system will offer a variety of options to help optimize or create efficiencies in workflows. Whether they are baked-in and user-friendly or more developer-based and require technical skills and knowledge, there are almost always some automation capabilities. This could be a ton of different things, such as the following:

  • A drag-and-drop scheduling tool
  • A canvas-based pathing and logic tool
  • Server scripting capabilities
  • Widget functionality
  • API capabilities

Each one of these gives you the ability to interact with the platform outside of general UI capabilities, allowing for efficiencies and automation. This statement is pretty much true regardless of whether those platforms focus on data, messaging, or one of the million other services that can be offered.

For this book though...