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

Export data options

Although things were pretty straightforward and simple as regards importing data, exporting data from Marketing Cloud has tons of options. Even limiting it to just those export options that you can automate, you still have a couple of options:

  • Data Extract: Exporting data to a flat file from a data extension.
  • Tracking Extract: Exporting tracking data (open, click, and so on) into a flat file.
  • Other: There are many other options, including Convert XML, GlobalUnsubImport, and Zip Data Extract.

As a note though, we are not going to be diving too deep into the Other section as this is not really relevant to what we are discussing and we have found most of these options to be more niche case uses and not something you see utilized very often. Let's now dive into data extract and take a look at how this can be helpful.

Data extract

This Automation Studio activity extracts information from a data extension and places it in a delimited...