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

Import data options

For this section, we will be concentrating on just the import options that can be automated and not discussing the UI import options. The main option for this is Import activity. Import activity requires the use of a Marketing Cloud File Location to ingest data, so there will be some considerations when utilizing it. You can create this File Location inside the Administrator tab in Email Studio or inside the Setup section.

Essentially, this activity will take a flat file (CSV, TXT, and so on) from the SFTP and then load it inside a data extension or list, separated by a specified delimiter in the file. This process can be automated inside the Import activity in Automation Studio and can be completed via a schedule or via a file drop trigger.

There are other options that can be used to ingest data, such as the manual import wizard in the user interface, but these are not capable of being automated. Due to that fact, we are not going to be covering them.

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