Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a powerful digital marketing platform that helps businesses personalise customer interactions across multiple channels, such as email, text, social media, or ads. Marketing Cloud enables companies to:
- Automate marketing campaigns
- Engage customers via email, SMS, social media, and ads
- Analyse data to improve marketing performance
- Personalise customer experiences in real-time
Marketing Cloud, the overall suite of marketing tools, provides features that help businesses with email marketing, automation, analytics, customer engagement, planning, executing, and monitoring campaign performance. It listens to customer actions (like opening an email, visiting a website, submitting a form, or abandoning a shopping cart). It automatically responds with the right message at the perfect moment. Marketing Automation is valuable for any industry that requires customer engagement, lead nurturing, or sales automation. The best tool depends on whether your business is B2B or B2C.
-
Customer first
Knowing the customers is priceless.
-
Automation & AI
Reduce manual work by automating campaigns, using AI for recommendations, and sending messages based on customer behaviour.
-
Omnichannel Marketing
Reach customers on email, SMS, social media, and ads – all from one place.
-
Customer Journeys
Automatically guide customers through personalised experiences (e.g., welcome emails, reminders, promotions).
-
Analytics & Insights
Understand what works (and what doesn’t) with real-time reports and dashboards.
-
Journey Builder
Automate customer interactions based on real-time behaviors (e.g., abandoned cart emails, welcome series, loyalty rewards).
-
Email Studio
Send personalised, automated email campaigns with dynamic content.
-
Mobile Studio
Automate SMS, push notifications, and mobile messaging.
-
Advertising Studio
Automate ad campaigns across Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn to retarget customers.
-
Einstein AI
AI-driven insights to predict customer engagement and optimise content.
-
Data Extensions & Segmentation
Store and segment customer data for targeted automation.
Marketing Automation (MA) benefits almost every industry because it helps businesses streamline customer engagement, save time, and increase conversions. However, some industries gain the most value from MA due to high customer interaction, lead-nurturing needs, or complex sales cycles.
- E-commerce: send an automated welcome email when someone signs up, trigger abandoned cart reminders via email/SMS or personalise offers based on purchase history.
- Retail & Fashion: automate seasonal promotions and customer rewards, and use AI to recommend products based on browsing behavior.
- Hospitality & Travel: send automated booking confirmations and reminders, and trigger personalised travel offers based on past trips.
- Financial Services: automate policy renewals and investment updates, send personalised financial insights and offers based on customer profiles.
- Healthcare (patient communication): automate appointment reminders, provide personalised customer support.
-
Engagement Studio
Automate lead nurturing with drip email campaigns and follow-ups.
-
Lead Scoring & Grading
Scores leads based on their engagement (emails, website visits, form fills) and qualifies them for sales.
-
Forms & Landing Pages
Capture lead information via custom forms and dynamic landing pages.
-
Email Marketing
Sends personalised, automated email sequences to nurture leads.
- Software & SaaS Companies: capture leads with free trials and gated content (eBooks, webinars), nurture leads with educational drip campaigns, and use lead scoring to identify high-potential prospects.
- B2B Professional Services: automate event invitations and follow-ups, track prospect engagement before sending them to sales, and create targeted account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns.
- Manufacturing & Industrial: qualify and route B2B leads to the right sales reps, automate product demo scheduling based on lead activity and use AI-driven insights to predict sales opportunities.
- Financial Services (corporate clients): automate compliance-friendly client onboarding sequences, and investment updates, use AI to predict customer churn, and recommend retention strategies.
- Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals: nurture Healthcare Professionals (HCPs) with informational content and case studies, and use predictive analytics to score and segment leads.
- Travel & Airlines: automate booking confirmations, trip reminders, and personalised offers, send real-time flight status updates and loyalty rewards, use AI to suggest travel packages based on past behavior
-
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) is a B2B marketing automation tool that builds a valuable database of prospects (potential customers), lead generation, lead nurturing, and scoring to help sales teams convert prospects into customers. It integrates closely with Sales Cloud and is ideal for businesses with long sales cycles.
Benefits:
- Marketing automation in various channels (email, web forms, landing pages)
- Simple and intuitive integration with external tools (CRM, GA, Google Ads, webinar platforms)
- GDPR Compliance
-
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement helps companies implement an effective Marketing Automation strategy by consolidating customer data to create a comprehensive view of each customer, including customer attributes, behaviors, and purchase history. This allows marketers to understand their audience and enables personalised, multichannel communication across email, mobile, social media and ads. It also empowers marketers to design automated customer journeys triggered by real-time behaviors, ensuring timely and relevant engagement. With built-in AI and analytics, it optimises campaign performance and scales marketing efforts efficiently across the entire customer lifecycle.
Benefits:
- Customised, easy-to-report campaigns in the form of extensive paths
- Behavioral targeting based on artificial intelligence elements
- Integrated CX (Customer Experience), regardless of channel and customer lifecycle stage
- Building marketing segments that are coherent and adequate to the actual needs
- Targeting segments and customers, and selecting the best content for them accurately
- Automating activities and raising their efficiency using CRM data and an intuitive content builder (click not code)
-
Learn more
Data Cloud allows you to aggregate and unify customer data from various sources such as web, mobile, marketing automation, social media, CRM, POS and more. You can build a complete and consistent customer view available to all company departments working with the customer. The data are used to make ongoing decisions and manage campaigns.
Benefits:
- A current and complete customer view, regardless of the channel
- Even better personalisation of the customer experience, regardless of their stage in the customer lifecycle
- Segmentation, analysis, and the ability to quickly introduce changes in the implemented processes (also through native integration with such tools as Interaction Studio or BI – Tableau CRM)
-
Marketing Cloud Intelligence is a marketing analytics platform designed to aggregate, analyse, and visualise data from any marketing source, including ad platforms, social media, email, web, CRM, and more, to track campaign performance and ROI.
Benefits:
- Normalises & harmonises that data (e.g., aligning “impressions” or “clicks” across platforms).
- Builds custom dashboards & reports
- Gives you a centralised view of marketing performance
- Supports advanced KPIs, ROI measurement, and budget optimisation.
-
Marketing Cloud Personalisation is a marketing tool that allows you to manage customer experience in real time. The tool tracks the user’s current activity on the website and, based on this, displays the content, best offer, product, or message that best suits customer preferences at the moment.
Benefits:
- Delivering 1:1 personalised experiences across channels (web, email, mobile, etc.)
- Tracking real-time behavior (like clicks, views, scrolls)
- Triggering contextual, in-the-moment content based on what the customer is doing right now
Case study on Marketing Automation
-
Marketing automation in a nutshell [e-book]
-
BBK improves sales performance through Marketing Automation and Interaction Studio
-
Enhanced B2B lead generation thanks to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
-
How to improve customer care and increase sales with Salesforce CRM and Marketing Automation
-
Personalization in marketing automation (part of the e-book)
-
How to generate qualified B2B leads through various marketing channels with Marketing Cloud in MedTech company
