Marketing + Sales/Service = ❤ on the Cloud

Why You Should Build Processes Around the Salesforce Marketing Cloud + Sales/Service Cloud Integration

This article is for those considering expanding their marketing automation capabilities and looking into purchasing Marketing Cloud.

We often encounter situations where we are offered add-ons with our main purchase, whether it’s an extra accessory for a gadget or alien invasion insurance (as if insurance would help in such a case). Usually, these are items that are rarely used or not used at all. But today, we will discuss a completely different scenario: I will be offering you an entire ecosystem as an add-on to the main product, one that you won’t want to refuse.

And although I may write like a bad salesperson, trust at least my implementation experience:

If you want to build your automated marketing on the Marketing Cloud, consider purchasing Sales and/or Service Cloud for storing master data and setting up advanced integrations with the rest of your system ecosystem.

Benefits of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud + Sales/Service Cloud Integration

Setting aside the inherent advantages of Sales/Service Cloud, the benefits of using these tools together include:

Unified Ecosystem = Unified Support

No need to assemble multiple teams to investigate the causes of incidents and resolve even complex problems, leading to reduced support costs. The same applies to system development.

Higher Quality Data for Campaigns

Data validation during manual entry or bulk upload occurs on the Sales/Service side, reducing the risk of using incorrect data (in terms of types, formats, and custom Validation Rules) in Marketing Cloud campaigns.

Native Integration of Sales/Service Cloud with Marketing Cloud

The native integration between Salesforce Core and Marketing Cloud is simple and straightforward.
After the initial setup of Marketing Cloud Connect, additional data from Sales/Service can be loaded with just a few clicks in Contact Builder. Marketing Cloud Connect automatically determines the data types in Salesforce and creates the necessary tables and attributes for loading data into Marketing Cloud.
This native integration even allows filtering the loaded data without additional development.
Marketing Cloud can create or modify any records in Sales/Service based on events, allowing, for example, the creation of call tasks when an email is opened by a client.

More Flexible Integration of Third-Party Services

Integrating third-party services with Sales/Service is much more flexible than with Marketing Cloud.
Sales/Service offers more options for processing incoming and outgoing data flows, including the ability to develop custom data exchange interfaces.
The capabilities of the standard API are much broader.
The API documentation for Sales/Service is more comprehensive.

Advanced Analytics

The built-in analytics in Marketing Cloud is quite limited, so it makes sense to build analytics in a system that already has advanced tools, namely Sales/Service.
On the other hand, Marketing Cloud features full-fledged SQL, which can be adapted to export resulting reports to Sales/Service or send them to required addresses on a schedule.

Complex Processes Made Simple

Triggered campaigns can be launched by someone without specialized knowledge (API and SQL) using Salesforce Data Event, which allows clients to be entered into campaign journeys when any records in Sales/Service are created or modified.

Conclusion

By the way, it’s not necessary to transfer all processes to Sales/Service immediately. Initially, it’s enough to organize the stable data flow into Sales/Service, link it with Marketing Cloud, and then gradually migrate processes to the new system.

Doing this integration after implementing Marketing Cloud separately will be much more costly. For example, you would have to rewrite all SQL queries for new data sources, edit all dynamic personalized content, and discard the work done on integrating third-party services with Marketing Cloud. Therefore, it’s worth considering the purchase of Sales/Service Cloud as a core system in advance, on which to build processes and integration later.