When Should You Start Your Marketing Cloud Implementation? Immediately.

It’s clear that Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the top choice for marketers. Once you’ve made the choice to invest in this powerful tool, it’s important to hit the ground running with implementation. Why shouldn’t you waste any time? Because you can start putting activities, automations, and analytics in place today to impact your business and start delivering ROI. 
 

Capitalize on the Desire for Digital

Marketing Cloud empowers marketers to deliver the experiences today’s customers expect. Whether you’re thinking about patients, consumers, members, or subscribers, they all want the same thing: digital-first experiences. On top of that, those experiences carry a lot of weight with customers. 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. That means that customers expect experiences that are both digital and seamless.  

With Marketing Cloud, marketers can orchestrate every touchpoint across digital channels. From email and SMS campaigns, to social media engagement, to digital advertising, Marketing Cloud gives marketers the tools to manage customer experiences from a single social post to the most complex of automated journeys. 

Don’t let “the art of the possible” hold you back from diving into your implementation, though. The best way to approach Marketing Cloud is with a crawl-walk-run approach, like we’ve seen with Iovate and American Savings Bank. Starting with a few key campaigns—a customer onboarding journey or a reactivation campaign—are excellent building blocks to advance to more complex digital experiences in the near future. 
 

Get Your Data House in Order

Marketers sit on a treasure trove of valuable data. This data can help businesses better understand their customers, their interests, and their engagement patterns—but only if it’s accessible, understandable, and actionable. Marketing Cloud, alongside tools like Datorama and CDP,  gives marketers the ability to centralize and harmonize data from across their business (not just the data Marketing owns) and then leverage that data to deliver improved customer experiences, drive decision making, and build towards more innovative marketing tactics. 

Marketing taking the lead on data management can have major positive impacts beyond powering marketing campaigns. According to Salesforce’s Digital Trends Report, 79% of service professionals say it's impossible to provide great service without full customer context.  With harmonized data, all parts of the business can operate more effectively, and actions taken within one part of the business can influence actions, touch points, or next best actions within another part of the business.

Data organization can feel like a major hurdle to tackle, but with the right partner guiding you through the process, you can uncover the data you have, identify the gaps, and start getting that valuable data in the hands of your teams to impact the business. For example, we helped one professional sports team increase their click-through rate by 147%, directly impacting revenue from ticket sales. A regional grocer was also able to leverage data to deliver personalized birthday offers, which resulted in a 1.6% increase in sales and  2.4% increase in margin.
 

Get Even More out of Salesforce

If you’re already leveraging other Salesforce products, like Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, integrating Marketing Cloud can be a game changer. 56% of business leaders report that the silos within their organization negatively impact the customer experience, and bridging the gaps between systems is a critical tool in bringing disparate parts of a business together. 

Prioritizing the integration between Marketing Cloud and your other Salesforce systems puts your business on the path towards unified data, collaborative decision making, and more cohesive customer experiences. And by bringing all your systems together, you’re able to get even more value and functionality out of each of them. From automations based on trigger points within your sales cycle or getting customer engagement data in the hands of a service rep, every team is better set up for success and the customer enjoys a more integrated experience with your brand. 
 

At the end of the day, potential revenue is being left on the table when Marketing Cloud isn’t yet being leveraged. A happy, engaged, and loyal audience is cultivated through digital experiences driven by relevant data and interconnected systems, and that audience is at the heart of a successful business. So what are you waiting for? Start tackling your implementation today.