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

Filter activities and data segmentation

So, not all of us have the development and technical knowledge to write SQL and that is more than OK! Marketing Cloud helps account for that with things such as Filters, Groups, and filtered mobile lists. There also are things called Measures, which can be used inside filters and are intended to be Drag and Drop SQL, but, in our opinion, they are too unstable and potentially inaccurate to be useful. To that extent, we will not be mentioning much about them here.

As you may or may not know, each of the three options is specific to a data source; for example:

  • Filters: Data extensions
  • Groups: Lists (in Email Studio)
  • Filtered mobile lists (in Mobile Studio)

To that extent, you will notice that the UI tools and options are all specialized and, in some cases, Groups and Mobile Lists, are not possible in SQL queries. The closest option to SQL queries would be Filters, which is where we will start our discussion.

Filters

...