CUSTOMER JOURNEYS IN SALESFORCE

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The whole idea behind a CRM system is to understand the customer effectively throughout the process and manage him accordingly to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
Sometimes when there’s a drop in customer retention, companies wonder what went wrong when they thought they handled their customer relations well using their CRM. This is where the power of customer journeys comes in. Customer journeys are the building blocks of a good CRM system.

Lead Management

Customer journeys are the process of managing the touchpoints and milestones for a customer throughout the lifecycle. Customer Journey, in simple words, can be defined as all the interactions that a customer goes through with your company’s brands, products, and services across the channels throughout the customer lifecycle.

A few benefits of adopting customer journeys:

  • It helps in providing a personalized experience to customers throughout the interactions.
  • Provides a 360-degree view of customers to the sales and support teams
  • Presents opportunities to keep the user engaged throughout the lifecycle.

Salesforce being one of the best CRM’s of the world provides excellent capabilities to create and execute customer journeys. Not only in marketing but across the whole customer lifecycle, Salesforce provides capabilities to record all interactions, gather more information about the customer with each interaction, add relevant insights based on the data and provide a 360º view of the customer to your sales and other teams. At different stages of the customer lifecycle, Salesforce provides various modules to drive customer journeys.

A few processes where customer journeys can be implemented:

Marketing/Campaign Management

Salesforce supports customer journeys during this initial engagement stage where we plan to make customers aware of our company and enable them to engage. Salesforce tools like process builder and campaign management support in designing customer journeys. All the basic information of the customer is captured in this process and a Lead is created.

Example: A standard marketing journey would include a landing page to capture lead information and more importantly get ‘market consent’ from the lead to send promotional offers in the future. This page can be made accessible to customers visiting stores via QR code or can also be used in different promotional events the company conducts.

Marketing-Campaign Management

Lead Management

This process is usually supported by multiple modules of Salesforce. During this process, all the additional details of the customers are captured along with the interactions done with the customers. In terms of the customer journey, multiple touchpoints supporting Lead nurturing and opportunity creation are covered in this stage with the help of tools like process builder, journey builder, and others.

 

Opportunity to Order Management

This process of customer engagement is usually supported by Sales Cloud and Salesforce CPQ where with the help of multiple interactions with customers, his requirements are captured and in the end, an order is generated.

Opportunity to Order Management

Post Sales Service

Once a sale gets completed, then comes a critical portion where you need to satisfy the customer on his queries along with looking for cross-selling opportunities. In such scenarios, Salesforce Service Cloud provides a 360 view of the customer to the agents providing them the ability to resolve customer issues in minimum time. This 360 view is supported by the data gathered throughout the customer journey by other modules and hence also provides cross-selling opportunities. There are opportunities for engaging customers post-sales via different journeys like re-engagement journey, reactivation journey and others.

Post Sales Service

Customer Journeys are hence an important aspect of customer engagement as they provide you the opportunity to track the interactions happening and help to define an optimized experience for the customer and Salesforce supports customer journeys throughout the customer lifecycle.

HOW TO GET BETTER RESULTS BY SENDING AN EMAIL CAMPAIGN THROUGH SALESFORCE

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Email is still the most preferred and profitable communication channel for companies to run their marketing campaigns. Salesforce as a CRM tool for your business has all the customer data, customer communication preferences, customers interests, etc. Having the right data is important but the point lies in how you use it and design your email campaigns. In this article, we will be looking at how to improve emails and get better results out of the email campaigns that are sent through Salesforce.

For that let’s have a broad look at how the email goes through different hands. An email designed in Salesforce once sent goes through the ISP (Internet Service Providers) which checks for spam conditions, then delivers it to the customer’s email inbox. Based on the Email From Name (branding) and the attractiveness of the email subject and the email design, the customer decides to act on the email. And you track the results of the email engagement to know the results of your email campaign. So, to get better results out of an email campaign, every step in this process need to be improved i.e., the email design & content, the deliverability, and tracking.

Email Design

  • Build a responsive email design so the mobile users enjoy a great user experience. Use email templates and make them mobile responsive.
  • Also, make sure the emails render well in most of the email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, etc), web browsers(Chrome, Mozilla, etc), and mobile devices (iOS, Android, etc).
  • Maintain consistent branding and layout throughout all your emails with a header and footer that characterizes your brand style.

Email Content

  • Subject lines are the most crucial. Your subject lines have to be interesting for the customer to open the email. A non-impressive subject line takes down all the efforts you put in to build the entire email content.
  • The key thing in email content is “personalization”. Try to use personalization not only in the email body but also in the Subject lines. In the email include personalized offers, personalized recommended products, and related products based on their preferences. The data you have in Salesforce lists helps in personalization, targeting the right customers with the right message at the right time.
  • Have a clear call-to-action (CTA) button defined in your email.

In short make the email impressive, interesting, and beautiful.

Deliverability

There are certain rules to be followed in the emails so the ISPs do not treat your email as Spam. Failure to do so will result in your emails being marked as spam and eventually your email domain. It will impact your IP reputation.

  • Do not forget to include a mechanism for customers to opt out from your campaigns. You must process opt-out request promptly within 10 days. And the unsubscribe mechanism must be in place for at least 30 days after the mailing.
  • Most importantly have a consent (opt-in) from the customer.
  • Include your physical mailing address to give a sense of existence to your customers.
  • Make sure the From Name and From email address are correct and reflect your brand.

Tracking

Track the open rate and click rate of each individual email. Store them back in Salesforce to do your analysis – identifying what kind of campaigns are your customers interested in, which is the best and least performing campaigns. Track the key metrics as these factors help in designing your future campaigns as well. It is imperative to listen to customers, capture their preferences and use it to personalize the email messages which helps in getting better results from the email campaigns.

Email marketing is still the best communication channel in terms of ROI for companies. To get better results from an email campaign, every step in the email flow demands to be improved – right from email design, the actual email content, the deliverability of the email, the way emails are tracked and how the tracking details are put to use to design your future campaigns.

HOW MARKETING AUTOMATION CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS?

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We recently launched an innovative and very significantly capable – “marketing automation”. Automation, for those who don’t know, makes it possible to create behavior scenarios in advance. The system works like an autopilot – it listens to what is going on, decides how to react and then takes the necessary course of action. All of this depends on the scenarios you’ve set up in advance. However, the result is a more sophisticated and personalized reference and marketing activity for your customers – all automatically carried out.

A lot of hard work has gone down in creating this amazing sophisticated automation system, but we believe, it’s more important to make you understand how the system could be beneficial for you.
The real question still remains, Is marketing automation suitable for your business?

We’ve collected a few examples from different fields that might inspire you with your next automated marketing activity:

A jewelry designer who markets limited edition of work

This example explores a jewelry artist who enables online ordering and personal service in the business of unique and prestigious jewelry. From time to time, the store owner sends out mailings which includes photographs of the jewelry. These jewelry are sold in a limited edition. This enables the buyer to “save” the right to purchase the jewelry for a period of three days.
When a customer clicks on the “Save for me” button, they are invited to confirm the request on a landing page (Limited to a number of fillers). This is further confirmed by an incoming email that ensures that the product is indeed reserved for him/her. After exactly 3 days, if the customer has not exercised their right to purchase, they receive a personal SMS message that the product is no longer saved for them.

A company for Drinking water filters

Every year, the company sends out a reminder mail to its customers to replace the filter. Each client receives the reminder about 30 days before the renewal date of the previous year. By synchronizing the system with the company’s CRM software and integrating the automation system, the system checks whether a new filter has already been ordered. If an order has not been made yet, move towards a more direct method of marketing, the SMS.

“Abandoned cart” on an e-commerce site

An e-commerce site for toilet products uses an “abandoned cart” mechanism that identifies those customers who have added products to the cart but have not completed a purchase and are, therefore, considered “defectors”.
The marketing manager laid forward an automated email procedure for this. Two hours after the cart is left abandoned, an e-mail is sent to he client, with a reminder to complete the purchase. In case there is no activity for 48 hours, a sale coupon is sent to the relevant e-mail address to encourage the purchase.

Subscribe to a contact list via SMS

A Tel Aviv restaurant decided to encourage its customers to subscribe to the contact list. How to register? In the physical store, the customer sends an SMS with the “Join” code to a phone number and … that’s it. From that moment on, the user receives an SMS confirmation of the joining + an exclusive and tasty benefit that can be realized on the spot.

What else can you do? You can also ask the customer to send the email address so that it can be sent to both the SMS number and the E-mail address (we tell you that with inwise, there is support for this option too).

Identifying potential customers in a technological company in the B2B market

A B2B company in the field of information security technology sends a monthly newsletter to its customers. The newsletter contains 5-6 links to articles and news in various fields related to the company’s products. Almost every month, one of the items is aimed at a very limited audience.This is so marginal that the sales manager wants to be notified of each potential customer who is interested.
For this purpose, the company defined an automation that defines a click on a specific link as a trigger that triggers an email operation to the sales manager, which informs about the interest of a specific potential customer in the product.

These examples highlight that marketing automation is gaining a more central place as the “brain” of digital marketing. If this is a bit new to you and you want to learn some more about it, or if you need us to help you get it done, simply contact us (there is a “Contact” button above) and we will be happy to move with you to a smarter marketing era.

 

WAYS TO INCREASE YOUR CONTACT LIST THROUGH SALESFORCE

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Growing your email contact list is not an easy task. There are many ways to do it both organic and through paid advertising. First, you need to understand your target audience, do market research and understand where do your potential customers exist. Provide them with multiple opt-in chances at different places. Have a specific CTA everywhere for the visitors. In this article lets look at how to increase your contact list through Salesforce.

Website

The first place you need to look out to increase your contact list is your website. Here are a few ways of making your website visitors get into your contact list.

  • Popups: Popups are a very common way to ask visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. Offer incentives, sign up bonuses, discounts and your content for free be it weekly, monthly, quarterly newsletters or your product features. This is a great way to be in touch with them. But do not overdo with popups on every page. Offer popup messages only if the visitor has stayed on your page for a good amount of time. It shows that they are really interested in your product/services. They are more likely to subscribe to you.
  • Contact Pages & Other Landing Pages: The contact us page on your website should also be linked to your email contact list with a consent checkbox. Other landing pages like ‘sign up for the newsletter, blog updates’ are also a great way to increase your contact list.

It is also important to keep your website fresh with new content so your customers visit the site more often. Use Search engine optimization (SEO) other methods to make your website appear on the first page on search engines.

Social Media

After you have covered your website bases, its time to look beyond that i.e., into Social media.

  • Content: Publish and share your posts consistently. Interact with your viewers, comment, value their time and effort in interacting with you. New and informational content pulls in new visitors and potential customers. Add the signup landing page with every post to provide them an immediate action item to subscribe. New content will also improve your website to appear in search engines too.
  • Advertise: Before you start doing paid advertising, as mentioned earlier in the post, it is utmost important to understand your existing customers or your target audience – what are their demographics (age and gender), their interests, and locations. Without knowing these you won’t be able to target your advertisements to the right people. Use Salesforce marketing cloud’s advertising audience feature to advertise to your customers on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Use lookalike features of Facebook to find customers similar to your Top customers.
  • Others: You can also be active in a variety of online forums, groups like your users from the Salesforce community cloud. Conduct webinars to generate awareness for your brand, providing them with valuable information while collecting consent from them to add them to your contact list.

It is important to inform and be clear in what value proposition your customers get by subscribing to your email list. No matter how hard you try with different strategies or put in a lot of money and effort into advertising, they will be reluctant to sign up without knowing the value they get from this. have a master list of contacts in Salesforce where all these contacts from different sources would end up in – a single customer view. In this process, try to capture some of the basic customer profile details like DOB, gender, interests, location, etc which assists in creating data segmentations within Salesforce and in turn creating personalized communication with them.

INWISE & GDPR

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On May 25, 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which replaced the EU privacy protection provisions of 1995, came into effect. The purpose of this regulation (GDRP) is to ensure that the individual’s personal information is protected in accordance with the modern technological innovation, regardless of where it is stored or processed.
One of the major catalysts in implementing the regulation is the administrative fines (without the need for court approval) that are expected from members who violate the regulations – up to 4% of the annual (global) turnover of the business or company, or a fine of 20 million euros). Contrary to past regulations, which differed from one country to another, these regulations apply equally to all Union companies.

Since we at inwise provide services and technology in areas that include personal information, we bring you the information to help you familiarize yourself with the regulation, prepare for its implementation, as well as the company and inquiry’s reference to the regulations.

Note: The purpose of this post is for informational purposes only and should in no way be considered a piece of legal advice. We recommend that you consult with relevant legal experts and experts in the field to obtain qualified opinions.

What is personal information?

Personal information is any information by which a particular person is identified or identifiable. In fact, personal information comprises almost every detail (e.g. name, contact address, phone number, e-mail address, employ details, credit card details, etc.)

Highlights of regulation

The purpose of collecting personal information should be “logical”. For instance, if you market tennis equipment, there is no reason for you to ask a client for his or her genotype. This creates a suspicion that you intend to trade information, and that is why explicit consent is required. Hence, be sure to request only the necessary details for operations and marketing purposes, and announce what you intend to do with the information gathered.

  • The purpose of retaining the information should be specific to what you do with it: If you want to make further use of the user’s information beyond what you have stated, you will need to seek the client’s consent again. Maintaining confidentiality and information security: This is necessary for information leaks and information security against external threats.
  • The right to access information: Every person whose information you have has the right to know what information is stored about him/her. Report to local authority and users about information security breaches as early as possible
  • The right to be forgotten: Any entity about whom you have existing information has the right to “forget” (i.e. delete) all existing information about it.
  • The right to return you from an agreement that has already been granted: If consent has been given for any use of information, the customer can always change his mind and return it with his consent

The GDPR and inwise

Since its inception, inwise has been committed to respecting privacy and maintaining strict information security. As part of the company’s GDPR implementation assessments, we review and update internal procedures and documents in the field of information security and privacy, as well as update our privacy statement and terms of use.

How inwise system help you meet regulatory requirements

  • Registration forms and landing pages allow you to collect new registrants including a timestamp and an IP address. We recommend that you use an unmarked checkbox that confirms receiving mailings.
  • Proper disclosure of the purpose of collecting information is recommended.
  • Allow removal: inwise system automatically adds a removal option at the bottom of each mail.
  • Information updates and preference changes: You can do this for your customers at any time on your own, and you can also use a detailed update form that will allow your contacts to do it themselves.
  • Deleting Information: When contacting inwise support department, you can request the permanent deletion of your customer information. The full GDPR regulatory requirements document can be found here:
    https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:OJ.L_.2016.119.01.0001.01.ENG

EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS FOR SALESFORCE VIA INWISE

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If you are implementing Salesforce in your company, you had most likely come across its limitations in designing an email campaign. Right from email design, email build, delivering and tracking it – there are quite a few limitations. That’s when most clients look out for third-party tools in the Salesforce AppExchange to do the email campaigns for them.
Here are the key things to keep in mind while you looking for an app for email marketing cloud tool.

Data Integration

The first and foremost thing when you are working with a third-party app is how you will be going to integrate your data with the system from Salesforce. Doing so will help you to communicate with your leads, contacts, accounts, other customer groups etc. adding contacts from Salesforce to inwise is smart and easy. Ability to access subscribers or your customers list quickly without having to switch between the systems makes it easy and peaceful for the marketers.

Data Segments

With inwise, you can create smart contact lists. You can create and use customer segments of your customers in both Salesforce and inwise. That’s the beauty – it is 2-way sync of the contact lists. Having the data and the segments help you to send the most relevant and personalized messages and campaigns to each of your audiences. In this competitive digital world, it is critical to personalize your messages to gut above your competitors and inwise assists you in doing exactly that – creating personalized email campaign with personal data and dynamic content for each subscriber.

Email Content

The biggest drawback for many email marketing tools is the Email editor. Most of them can do drag and drop and templates but it just ends there are they are not the user-friendliest of tools. Designing the email content with inwise is clear, simple, easy and uncomplicated.

  • Drag & Drop Editor: The great thing about an intuitive drag & drop content editor is that it meets your needs whether your a first-time user or an expert.
  • Designed Templates: You just have to choose your designed and responsive template, and make it your own. The templates are distributed into various types of email campaign and newsletters to make it easier, in case you need some guidance in choosing the most relevant to your message.
  • Mobile First: Your email looks perfect but they are created using responsive campaigns that automatically adjust to any screen, whether your subscribers open it using their PC, tablet, or mobile phone.

Tracking

With integrating Salesforce with inwise, you get an extensive overview of your customer’s communication type preferences, channel preferences, likes, dislikes etc. Knowing these help you to understand your customers better and helps you to focus on your goal of serving them better. This also helps in segmenting your customers into groups which again help you in targeting them well. This is what great brands are made of.

Integrating inwise with Salesforce helps you to reach the right customers with the right offers at the right time and all of this is possible because of the ease of use of inwise.

DO YOU HAVE ANY EMAILS THAT YOU JUST CAN’T MISS? MAKE SURE THEY REACH YOU

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Most E-mail programs and services study our behaviors and deciding based on the data collected which E-mails will be shown the primary box, which E-mails will be shown in the secondary inboxes (such as “promotions”), and which ones will arrive in the spam box.

This helps your Email service to learn what interests you and what is less important to you so that you could see your favorite content.

What can you do about it? Your involvement is the key – open Emails, click on relevant links and remove irrelevant content by removing yourself from mailing lists.

Beyond that, there are some simple steps you can take:

For Gmail users:

  • Drag the relevant message from the secondary inbox it arrived to, to your primary tab.
  • Add the sender to your contact list:
    (1) Enter the relevant message, (2) click on the ellipsis menu button and select “Add X to your contact list”.

For Outlook users:

  • Enter the relevant message and click the “Not junk” button.
  • Add the sender to your contact list:
    Enter the message from the relevant sender. from the top ruler menu, click “Junk” and select from the flow menu “Never Block Sender”. Open a message box that will remind that the address was added to the safe senders list, and click “OK”.

For Outlook.com users (formerly “Hotmail”):

  • Drag the relevant message from the junk mail box to the inbox.Outlook - receiving emails to inbox
  • Add the sender to the contact list:
    (1) Enter the relevant message, (2) click on the ellipsis menu button and select “Add to the safe senders list”.

For Walla users:

(1) Mark relevant message (2) select on the top menu “Not spam”.

That’s it, now all that is left is to enjoy the content that matters to you.
Remember, the more you will be involved, click and open more Emails, the more your inbox will learn your preferences and adjust itself to its needs, so eventually, the information that really matters to you will wind up in your primary inbox.