Using Marketing Automation tools, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, allows you to streamline sending emails both externally and internally.
Timely communications across your company’s ecosystem are more important than ever. From safety information and company policy updates to general state-of-the-business communications, email remains one of the top methods of delivering critical company information.
But beyond just delivery, how can you be sure recipients open, read, understand and engage with your message?
Consider Your Marketing Automation Options
That is where marketing automation solutions such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), Pardot, and Marketo (to name a few) come into the picture. Traditionally, organizations have used distribution lists to send emails to large stakeholder groups over enterprise email systems such as Outlook. However, developers didn’t mean for these tools to send multi-part communications in an automated and orchestrated manner. The functionality of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other marketing automation platforms, while often only associated with external marketing communications, are great tools for communicating with employees, partners and vendors.
Putting It into Play
Below are some things you can do with a platform such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud that you can’t do with your traditional internal email system:
1. Track email opens and engagement metrics to understand recipient behavior.
Certain emails may contain sensitive or timely information. Having data to understand if recipients opened the message and then took action, as a result, can help prioritize the next type of communication.
For example, you can understand who opened (or didn’t open) an email communicating an operational change like updated hours for an office location, and it can then automatically send a follow-up communication based on that behavior. The next automated communication could be another email or a text with content based on each recipient’s previous behavior.
You can also use the engagement data available to inform decisions regarding other courses of action you want to take outside of the system (such as a follow-up phone call). Understanding if your message is getting through is a primary step in any communication.
2. Schedule emails to arrive at a time most relevant for the recipient.
For example, maybe you aim to be at the top of the recipient’s inbox when they get into the office to improve the likelihood that they open your message promptly. You can base the ideal sending time on geographic location or historical email open patterns. If your company works across time zones or has vendors or partners with contacts outside of your time zone, this functionality is especially important. Top of inbox is top of mind for many people.
3. Create and deliver pre-defined automated series of messages (journeys) to a specifically defined audience to increase your email’s effectiveness.
It is more effective to send multiple shorter emails of 400-500 words each than to send fewer long ones. You can set up a journey with logic to identify what email content each recipient has already engaged with (and when) and then send them a follow-up message with the content most relevant to them, automatically.
This step saves you time by eliminating the need to manage multiple email sends, and it delivers tailored content to communicate your message best. A great example of this is when you onboard a new employee and send them the most relevant content in “bite-size pieces.” You can send these in a prioritized order based on enrollment periods, as well as based on the actions and enrollments they have already completed.
You can also create audience segments based on any data you associate with the email recipient and place them into journeys designed explicitly for them. You can do this with data fields related to a contact in Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or any data associated with a vendor, partner or employee.
This feature allows you to target your communications more accurately, and it will enable you to personalize messages to contain more relevant information (which increases engagement). The tool automatically updates the segments as data associated with the email recipient may change, further improving efficiency.
Conclusion
The use of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other marketing automation platforms for non-marketing purposes can provide great benefits in communicating with everyone in your organization’s ecosystem of employees, vendors, partners and customers. Now, more than ever, communication is crucial for everyone. Explore the advantages that Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other marketing automation platforms have over your regular enterprise email system for these and similar use cases.
