Learn to Segment in Salesforce Marketing Cloud With These Concepts

Salesforce Marketing Cloud, one of the most powerful marketing automation tools available today, offers robust functionalities for marketers to manage customer journey touchpoints. A key element of this platform is the ability to segment customers, allowing for highly personalized experiences.

This blog post will explain the fundamental concepts you need to understand about how to segment in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, specifically data extensions, segmentation, personalization, and deduplication.

Understanding Data Extensions

In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, data extensions are essentially your means of storing data. These can be thought of as tables of data, similar to a Google or Excel spreadsheet. A data extension includes several fields, often referred to as metadata. This metadata provides an overview of the type of data stored in the data extension. For instance, a data extension might have fields such as first name, last name, email address, and phone number, all of which will help categorize your contacts.

One key field that every data extension should have is an ID field. An ID is essentially a string of characters that helps identify a contact. Having a unique identifier for each contact ensures that even if you have two contacts with the same first name or the same email address, you can still distinguish between them and send them personalized marketing communications.

The Essence of Segmentation

So, in what context can you segment in Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Essentially, creating a segment is about creating a list of records with specific attributes or characteristics. This list is usually created based on certain filters applied to your data extension.

For instance, if you want to create a segment of contacts that live in a particular city, you would apply a filter to your data extension based on the city field. This essentially narrows down the data records to include only those contacts that live in the specified city. Segmentation is a powerful tool for personalizing your marketing campaigns, as it allows you to target specific groups of contacts based on their attributes.

Demystifying Deduplication

In the world of data management, it is common to encounter duplicates in your database. This can occur due to various reasons such as multiple form submissions by the same person or accidental data entry errors. Duplicate records are undesirable for several reasons, one being that they can inflate your Salesforce bill, as Salesforce charges based on the number of contacts in your database.

Deduplication involves identifying and removing these duplicates. To later effectively segment in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, deduplication is done using filters, SQL, or DESelect functions. The aim is to ensure that each contact in your database is unique, thereby improving the accuracy of your data and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Joining Data Extensions

If you’ve wondered about combining or enriching data extensions, you’re talking about joining. This process, most commonly referred to as a “join,” is a SQL command used for querying a database. Essentially, it’s a way of merging different sets of data for a comprehensive view.

But to make this happen, you need more than one data extension. For instance, consider a Mexican food delivery app that has two tables: “Customers” and “Orders.” The “Orders” table records every purchase, each given a unique ID, item description, and price.

However, to understand who’s buying what, we must associate these orders with specific customers. This is where joins come into play. Each order’s record includes the customer ID, linking it back to the “Customers” table. So if we want a comprehensive list of customers and their respective orders, we create a new table – a join of the “Customers” and “Orders” tables. This operation enriches our data and allows for better data analysis.

Segmenting Joined Data

Once the data is joined, segmentation becomes an important process. Often, we want to segment data based not only on demographic information but also customer behavior. For instance, we might be interested in those who order burritos frequently.

This is where a joined Data Extension comes in handy. It allows us to filter the data, letting us find everyone who ordered burritos, for example. In essence, the join operation enables more targeted and efficient segmentation by combining relevant data.

Deduplicating Joined Data

Data deduplication is a critical aspect of managing joined data. Since the process of joining can create multiple records for a single customer, removing these duplicates helps maintain a clean, accurate data set.

Typically, we might want to send just a single email to a customer, even if they’ve made multiple orders. Therefore, deduplication ensures that customers receive only unique, relevant communications. In our Mexican food app, for instance, deduplication would be based on the email column, ensuring each customer, regardless of their number of orders, appears just once.

The essence of joining, segmenting, and deduplicating data is about enabling us to understand and serve our customers better. With these processes, we can combine, analyze, and make use of our data effectively.

The Relationship Between Personalization and Segmentation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Finally, we’re bringing everything full circle. We’ve segmented lists, joined them, and deduplicated these joint lists to enhance our communications with customers. This process of segmentation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps us narrow down the right people we want to contact, but it also sets the stage for personalization.

Using the customer’s first name is the most basic form of personalization. However, when we enrich our data by joining different data extensions, like ‘Customers’ with ‘Orders’, our emails become more personalized and relevant. For instance, we can acknowledge specific purchases, saying, “Thank you for buying your [item] for [price].”

Conclusion

The essence of these data management strategies is to foster a more engaging and meaningful connection with your customers. By ensuring your data is accurate, targeted, and personalized, you communicate more effectively and provide a better experience. These techniques ultimately allow your data to work for both you and your customers.

Learn how to strengthen your segmentation skills without the need for SQL. Check out DESelect Segment Free today!

joe.morris

August 3, 2023

SFMC basics

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Sharing Data Across Business Units: An Overview and Best Practices

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful platform that enables marketers to create, manage, and execute campaigns across multiple channels.

As industries forever evolve, it has become imperative for organizations to stay agile and not fragile.

Growth, expansion, restructuring, and so many other factors often create the need for organizations to share data across various business units.

Today I invite you to join me as we explore the data-sharing capabilities SFMC offers and ways to counter the potential challenges that often come with sharing data.

But first, we need to understand the key data elements of SFMC, including how large organizations operate through business units and how they store their data.

Part 1: The What

Business Units

Many enterprise organizations, especially those with many brands under one umbrella, will operate with multiple business units under a parent account. Each is a separate Marketing Cloud environment with its own set of assets, users, and data.

By default, each business unit operates in a silo and cannot access data or assets from other business units.

Data Extensions

A data extension is a table-like structure used for data storage within SFMC. Unlike a static list, data extensions offer the ability to create more personalized and constantly updating data to suit organizational requirements.

You can use data extensions to store different data types, such as text-, number-, and date-based records; boolean (true/false statements), email addresses, and more. This data is used to create accurate and relevant marketing campaigns that target a subscriber base.

Audiences

Audiences are groups of subscribers (Contacts) used during campaigns. Audiences in SFMC can be created by combining various data sources such as customer purchase history, customer engagement, and demographic information.

Data gathered on audiences can be used to personalize communications. For example, targeting subscribers in a certain country with localized offers will drive better engagement rates than general mass marketing.

Publication List

A Publication list is a list of contacts/subscribers who have opted in to receive specific communication from your organization, such as a Monthly Newsletter. Amid tight GDPR regulations, maintaining robust publication lists becomes essential to today’s marketing teams reliant on explicit subscriber consent.

Part 2: The How

Now let’s look at the various ways to share data within SFMC.

Shared Data Extensions

Shared data extensions can be created in one business unit and shared with other business units. This allows for quick, painless sharing of data across various business units.

Shared Audiences

An audience can be created in one business unit and shared across others, enabling all business units to target the same contacts.

Shared Data Sources

Data sources are external applications or databases which can be connected to SFMC. For example, addingSalesforce CRM as a data source connects that data to all Marketing Cloud business units.

Shared Publication List

A shared publication list can be accessed and used by multiple business units or accounts within your organization.

Part 3: The Why: Best Practices for Sharing Data Across Business Units

When planning your data strategy, carefully map what data needs to be shared, with whom, and how this will be shared. Consider the following.

Shared Data Extensions: While these are powerful means of sharing record data, sharing data extensions across business units require proper management. Primary items to consider would be:
- Naming Conventions – Create a naming standard which can be used across all business units. This makes it easier for teams to search for and quickly find requested data.
- Data Structure – Utilize a data blueprint which can be shared with all relevant stakeholders. Mapping out nested data ensures ease-of-access for both marketers and admins.
- Data Map – Have admins determine how mapped data fields and objects with relationships can be used for segmentation at each business unit.

Sharing Permissions: SFMC allows you to define granular permissions for sharing data across business units. Define roles and permissions carefully and ensure that users only have access to the data they need. This prevents errors from inexperienced users and protects customer data from improper use.

Shared Audiences: Sharing audiences across business units allows for quick data share but does need alignment with Marketing/Campaign strategies. This requires management to ensure that audience data is utilized correctly. For example, if we have an audience that all business units share and market to, then without a group strategy, this audience may get flooded with communication.

Monitor your Sharing Strategy: Monitor your data sharing across all business units to ensure users adhere to your sharing strategy. A few key points for a monitoring strategy:
- Users should only have access to the data they need.
- Campaign/Marketing Strategies should be aligned to ensure that contacts are not oversaturated.
- Maintain a data blueprint and ensure your landscape is mapped.
- Frequently review your user permissions and sharing rules.

Sharing Frequency: Data sharing can occur on four primary frequencies:
- Real-time – data is synced as soon as an update occurs.
- Daily – data is synced once a day.
- Weekly – data is synced once a week.
- Monthly – data is synced once a month.

As part of your sharing strategy, it is imperative to align your shared data to the correct frequency, e.g., we do not need to update a data extension on a real time basis if it only receives data once a week.

Ensure that your frequency caters for the needs of your organization and is aligned with the type of data you are sharing.

Conclusion

Sharing data across business units offers a powerful way to streamline marketing, increase efficiency, and ensure users have access to the data they need.It is, however, extremely necessary to ensure that you have a proper sharing strategy, and that sensitive information is fully protected.

Jay Slinger

Jay is a Technical Architect with over two decades of industry experience. He has worked with several fortune 500 companies and spearheaded many multi-million projects.

joe.morris

May 24, 2023

SFMC basics

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Data Extensions or Lists: Which is best to store data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Storing subscriber data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be trickier than most marketers expect. As a versatile and powerful tool, SFMC offers more than one way to store subscriber lists or data within data extensions. This article intends to help you determine the best method for storing your data in the Marketing Cloud.

What kind of data can be stored?

Just about anything! Purchases, accounts, orders, types of products, and even personal data such as birthdays, email addresses, etc. These specific pieces of information can be combined to craft highly personalized points of communication, ensuring optimal customer engagement. While Marketing Cloud can be much more than just a data warehouse, its storage capabilities should not be overlooked for your future marketing campaigns.

Before looking for data storage solutions, marketers should first define which type of data model their marketing campaigns and operations require: 1-to-1 or 1-to-many. For example, if there is one email address and one Subscriber ID that relates to this email, it’s 1-to-1. On the other hand, if there is the need to relate this Subscriber ID to the purchase information, it would be 1-to-many, given that one subscriber can make several purchases.

However, it might be the case that the subscriber information relates to their other activities, further increasing the complexity of the 1-to-many data model. This would require a more flexible way to store that data so that it can be manipulated later.

Understanding Salesforce lists

Lists are the most basic way to store your subscribers’ data in SFMC. They are most useful when:

Working with 1-to-1 data models
The number of subscribers is below 500,000, and
Customer segmentation needs are of low complexity.

In the case of a more extensive list of subscribers or a more complicated data model, businesses should opt for data extensions (DEs) for closer control over their marketing practices.

What are Salesforce data extensions?

Data extensions allow for more flexibility when it comes to data management and are the preferred method for dealing with 1-to-many data models. In simple terms, DEs are tables capable of containing a greater multitude of data than Salesforce lists.

Usually, they are utilized for storing data above 500,000 rows. They are also frequently used to import and store data from other systems through Marketing Cloud Connect (to send data from Salesforce Core to Salesforce Marketing Cloud) and similar tools.

Due to the variety of the types of information they can hold, DEs can be used for both transactional and commercial communication.

Data extensions also grant additional control over segmentation, although their setup can be more time-consuming than lists. Salesforce Marketing Cloud possesses built-in filters for simple requests, while more advanced segmentation requirements call for SQL queries. Tools such as DESelect Segment can help marketing teams work around the inconvenient and time-consuming task of SQL writing. This user-friendly app, available as a Chrome Extension and in the Appexchange, allows marketers to enjoy all the powerful functionalities of SQL queries while eliminating the need to write even a single line of code.

What is the difference between lists and data extensions?

Lists are only able to store basic subscriber data, such as email address, first name, last name, and so on, using the standard profile and subscription center. Alternatively, Data Extensions have minimal rules when it comes to storing data – they can be set up in whichever way best fits your org’s needs.

It is worth noting that setting up DEs may take some time, given that users should know what type of data is added to which field and follow a previously defined naming pattern (otherwise it becomes difficult to use the data when it comes to segmentation, for example). Data extensions do not require an email address (unlike lists) and can also store more advanced data such as product catalogs, sales representative information, and even behavioral data such as abandoned carts and site interactions.

When it comes to segmentation best practices, data extensions are preferred for 1-to-many data models. Critically, they allow marketers the option to create granular segments of their audiences through SQL queries, a process not possible with lists. In order to segment their audiences using lists, marketers would need to take the time to create several different lists.

In short, lists are best used for specific email sends lacking advanced data, whereas data extensions can be used for basically any type of communication or data management need. If the goal is to organize data with simplicity, go for lists. If you require fast import speed and support multiple subscriber datasets, use data extensions.

Conclusion

Using data extensions in Salesforce Marketing Cloud has many benefits for companies that store large quantities of data.

It is recommended to define the specific needs of your data model in advance and to determine how it will be stored in SFMC, as this will determine when and where to best use lists and/or data extensions. Also, keep in mind that Marketing Cloud is not a data warehouse, so there is no need to add all your data there just because you can.

One of the main advantages of using DEs in Marketing Cloud is data segmentation. Marketers can rely on SQL (if they have the technical knowledge), use filters for simple segmentation requests, or take advantage of a drag-and-drop alternative like DESelect Segment to make the process quick and intuitive for everyone.

Discover how to leverage the power of automated market segmentation. Explore DESelect’s product offerings now!

What data are we talking about?
What are Salesforce lists?
What are Salesforce data extensions?
What is the difference between lists and data extensions?
Conclusion

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Alina Makarova

January 11, 2022

SFMC basics

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How to personalize your marketing campaigns with data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

A survey created by Think with Google mentions that 90% of marketers think that marketing personalization significantly contributes to business profitability. Yet still, 58% of consumers say brands send them items that they don’t want. When it comes to personalization, it takes time to recognize the problem and act upon solving it. The question that marketers can ask themselves is where to start? And our answer will always be — start with data. Let’s find out how to leverage big data for personalization at scale and be ahead of the game.

First, define what data you need to collect. There are all sorts of data out there that your company probably already collects. You most likely track the data about your website visitors, collect data about your customers, store their personal information in your CRM, and probably create email marketing campaigns where the engagement of your subscribers is monitored. If you do all of that, that’s a great start, but how to use all that big data for personalization in Marketing Cloud? That’s something you’re about to find out now.

Focus on different aspects of data

Guillaume Cabane, former VP of Growth at Drift and Segment, recommends using data to enrich your marketing personalization strategy and confirm visitors’ information to create a frictionless experience. However, not all data you collect from visitors and customers is actionable.

To generalize, we can put data into two categories: quantitative and qualitative. Under quantitative the following types of data can be found:

Demographic data – a collection of all the data points about a person, such as their name, email, title, income, location, marital status, and more.
Firmographic data – a collection of all the data points about a business, such as company name, industry, number of employees, annual revenue, and stage in the sales cycle.
Behavioral data – in the context of interaction between a website user and an app user, this reveals the data collected from your website or app visitors, such as pages visited, links clicked, average time on site, and a count of visits.
Contextual data – collection of data related to a visitor’s unique properties while providing context to their behavior on a website or an app, such as device type, browser type, location, and time of the day. Collecting demographic and firmographic data requires your visitors to fill out and submit a form. This may include a newsletter subscription, a demo registration, a live chat transaction, or a lead magnet download. This data typically ends up in your CRM, where you also get some automatic date and time stamping, lead source tracking, and lead activity insights.

Qualitative data, on the other hand, can be collected via questionnaire-style scenarios so that the customer’s attitudes, motivations, and opinions are collected. Some of the information that can be collected includes:

Opinion (e.g., their favorite journey destination for a holiday)
Motivations (why service was requested)
Attitudinal information (e.g., customer satisfaction reviews)

All the data you collect falls into one of these boxes. Later, you need to enable the process that allows creating a single view of a customer. Marketers tend to use CRM to access customers’ information. However, since data comes from different sources, it’s more common to operate between multiple platforms, which complicates the process of managing data and using it for later personalization. Ideally, all data points should connect and create a 360 view of a customer to tailor the communication based on their individual needs and position in the purchase cycle.

Another way to store and create a 360 view of an individual is to acquire a CDP (Customer Data Platform), which aims to create a single customer view. This solution can be convenient for those professionals who receive ample amounts of data and want to manage it outside of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Recently, Salesforce announced their CDP. Read our What is CDP article to find out more about Customer Data Platforms.

Connect data dots

Different data types come from various sources, but how would you know which ones to focus on? Or which one is the most valuable? Here’s a quick overview of different data sources SFMC marketers need to take into consideration.

First-party data

First-party data is the relevant information that your company gets from your customers, prospects, and subscribers. It’s essential to have this information since it enables you to identify individual customers and deliver highly relevant experiences. Common first-party data sources are:

Data collated from native app or website behavior
Data from your CRM
Social data
Subscription data
Behavioral data
Purchase data
Attitudinal data

Second-party data

Second-party data is like first-party data, but it comes from a source other than your own. It’s first-party data for other entities. Its value lies in its scale, as it can be pretty expansive, allowing for more data analytics insights on customer behaviors, new audiences, and relationship-building exercises. Second-party data sources are:

Social media
Customer surveys
Activity on websites
In-store purchase information

Third-party data

Third-party data is usually what entities acquire from external sources, where the sources are not the original owners of that data. These sources collect data and sort them together to sell them to potential clients. It is also not 100% consensual data, which makes it less reliable and likely to use. Examples can be:

Demographic data
Interests
Firmographic data
Website activity

Looking at different data sources, first-party data is the most important, reliable, and valuable data for any business. Second and third-party data can fill in the gaps but are not always relevant or valuable. Usually, small and mid-size companies benefit from purchasing third-party data when their first-party data pool is relatively limited. In the end, your first-party data is all about your customers or prospects, and that’s the group that you need to focus on.

That is why it’s so important to scale your first-party data and make the best use out of it. To do this, marketers need to have data in one place, and what place can be better than Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Nonetheless, it’s not that easy for marketers to leverage big data that ends up in the Marketing Cloud. Firstly, marketers need to inject data coming from Salesforce CRM or other acquisition sources. Indeed, tools like Marketing Cloud Connect are there to connect Salesforce CRM with Marketing Cloud; however, it’s quite a technical thing to do for a non-data-savvy marketer. You can rely on external help like an IT team in your company or system integrators to do this for you. That’s because it requires understanding the data model and knowing how to build the connection. In general, it can be considered a separate project that, if not asking for external help, can take up a lot of marketing time. As a result, the time that marketers can spend on the actual campaign creation and building customer journeys will be absorbed by establishing the connectors between Salesforce CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Declutter your data for better marketing personalization

The secret to using big data effectively is identifying which metrics are relevant to your audience, disregarding the rest. Such focus allows you to develop and execute campaigns quickly that address your users’ needs.

Remember that not all data you collect needs to be used or stored in Salesforce Marketing Cloud since it’s not a data warehouse. Ensure that you ingest only the data that can be used to create meaningful communication with your subscribers, customers, and prospects. There’s a steep learning curve to doing marketing personalization right; mastering it requires time, patience, and interdepartmental collaboration.

Then you can move on to segmenting your data. Marketers’ work doesn’t stop with just identifying your core customers. You need to segment your audience into smaller groups for more accurate targeting. How? One way to do that is to go through the available data to find repeating patterns in behavior or user engagement across different touchpoints. Then, divide your audience into segmented groups based on which pattern they represent. This will help you personalize your campaigns more effectively. There are different types of market segmentation and it’s important you have a clear understanding of segmentation strategies, that can help you better segment your audience in Salesforce Marketing Cloud for highly targeted campaigns.

It’s worth mentioning that segmenting data in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud requires learning SQL query language. Marketers either need to have SQL knowledge or rely on their colleagues with better data management capabilities or third-party service providers to create segments. Fortunately, there is an alternative for marketers working with SFMC who want to segment efficiently and independently without writing a single line of code. This is an intuitive no-code segmentation solution called DESelect Segment that creates advanced audience segments in Marketing Cloud easy to use for personalization later. Schedule a live demo with one of DESelect certified consultants already now to improve your segmentation game.

Let’s start personalizing in Marketing Cloud

Now you have all the data you need in one place — Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and you’ve created your segments; well done, you made it! Now it’s about time to personalize it.

Real-time personalization with Interaction Studio

On-site personalization has become a buzzword in the marketing world, and that can be partially attributed to the existence of Interaction Studio in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You can leverage this tool to create live, personalized experiences for your website visitors. Based on the segments you created earlier, you can tailor your website visitors’ experience using the insights of their needs and interests to personalize the communication and create a 1-to-1 relationship with every customer and prospect visiting your website.

Interaction Studio overview example (source: https://www.salesforce.com/eu/products/marketing-cloud/customer-interaction/)

Leverage AI insights for better customer experience

A great method to create advanced personalization on the go can be incorporating AI mechanisms like Einstein Recommendations in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. These recommendations allow you to create personalized suggestions enabled by AI to deliver the best-personalized results for every customer by creating customer profiles for your audience. To leverage Einstein Recommendations for Marketing Cloud, you need to understand some underlying and somewhat technical aspects that come along. You can have an overview of what Einstein Recommendations are in this Trailhead module. Einstein features are accessible for Salesforce Marketing Cloud clients starting from the Corporate tier.

Learn AMPscript and optimize your email marketing

Another option to create personalized experiences for your Salesforce Marketing Cloud audience is to leverage AMPscript. This is another language that technical marketers use in SFMC to create personalized experiences in Email Studio. However, this may mean that you need to invest in learning how to code. Leveraging this language can help you automate certain marketing activities like cleaning and formatting data and personalize emails based on subscriber and contact data. It’s good to become familiar with the AMPscript basics, which you can find in this helpful Trailhead module. Getting acquainted with it will be an asset to understand the best way to personalize your communication with your audience.

AMPscript example (source: Trailhead)

Deliver personalized experiences with Journey Builder

Journey Builder is truly a multipurpose tool that can help you build advanced journeys and meaningful 1-to-1 connections with your audience. For instance, you can insert audience segments you created with DESelect Segment in the journey’s starting point and create a tailored experience that will be valuable specifically for this segment. Based on website activity, interaction with the emails, purchases, and leaving feedback, you can deliver a personalized experience to every contact.

Conclusion

There are many ways to personalize your marketing campaigns and communication with your customers or prospects in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but that is first and foremost dependent on getting your data right and knowing how to use it. According to the Salesforce 7th State of Marketing Report, 78% of marketers say their customer engagement is data-driven. There’s no personalization without knowing the data you have and how to use it to your benefit. You have to start leveraging Marketing Cloud to where all data-puzzle pieces come together in order to be able to start segmenting your audience. Thanks to SFMC solutions like DESelect Segment that becomes easy and accessible to all marketers. After that, when your segments are defined, you can personalize your communication and create highly personalized journeys that will speak to every individual and build trust between you and your customers. Good luck!

How to personalize your marketing campaigns with data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Focus on different aspects of data
Connect data dots
Declutter your data for better marketing personalization
Let’s start personalizing in Marketing Cloud
Conclusion

Back to top

Alina Makarova

October 27, 2021

SFMC basics

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Guide: 32 Industry-Specific Email Marketing Templates from ChatGPT

We tested how well ChatGPT could craft common email campaigns for nine industries. While this AI provides some very useful templates for email marketers to mold, we found it ultimately needs a human touch to get just right. However, this isn’t the entire story.

Rather than replace marketers, knowing what types of questions to ask ChatGPT enhances the marketing experience with quick, modifiable email copy that lays the groundwork for engagement and clicks.

Industries covered:

Insurance
Retail and eCommerce
Banking
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eBook: Data driven personalization

Get your copy of our eBook and find out how you can improve customer experience with personalized data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Download the eBook

We’ve been collecting data for years, and while more recently, there’ve been considerable advances in data science and marketing, we still continue to gather data en masse, often because “we can.” The truth is that companies collect too much data. 18% of companies are using 20 or more data sources for decision-making. Our survey results indicate that this figure will grow in the future. The questions to consider here are why are we collecting the data we collect? Have we truly defined its purpose, or is it a “just in case” scenario? Or do we simply not know?

Organize your Salesforce Marketing Cloud to improve your ROI

According to the Salesforce State of Marketing Report (7th Edition), marketers expect a 40% increase in the number of data sources they use between 2021 and 2022. This is a whopping increase that will bring new challenges to companies' data strategy. It will also naturally lead to companies holding inconsistent data problems with data governance and management that may well result in security breaches.

Pro tip: Count the data sources your company is collecting. We guess it's more than 20. Then take a moment to ask three fundamental questions:

Do you utilize this data to its full potential?
What is your goal in collecting all of this data?
Are you satisfied with the state of your data collection at this point in time?

If you can quickly answer all these questions, you might not need this book, but if these questions resonate with your own doubts and concerns, we invite you to read further — we'll try to find a solution together.

Types of data you need to collect

Perhaps we should start by breaking down types of data into basics. In general terms, we can put data into two categories: quantitative and qualitative.

Quantitative data

Under the classification of quantitative data, the following types of data can be found:

Demographic data – a collection of all the data points about a person, such as their name, email, title, income, location, marital status, and more.

Firmographic data – a collection of all the data points about a business (a 'firm'), such as company name, industry, number of employees, annual revenue, and stage in the sales cycle.

Behavioral data – data on the interaction between website users and app users. This reveals the data collected from your website or app visitors, such as pages visited, links clicked, average time on site, and a count of visits, retention rate, churn rate, daily & monthly active use, and more.

Contextual data – data related to a visitor's unique properties while providing context to their behavior on a website or an app, such as device type, browser type, location, and time of the day.

Collecting demographic and firmographic data requires your visitors to fill out and submit a form. This may include a newsletter subscription, a demo registration, a live chat transaction, or a lead magnet download. This data typically ends up in your CRM, where you also obtain some automatic date and time stamping, lead source tracking, and lead activity insights.

Qualitative data

On the other hand, qualitative data can be collected through questionnaire-style methods to garner the customer's attitudes, motivations, and opinions. Some of the qualitative information that can be collected includes:

Opinion (e.g., their favorite journey destination for a holiday).

Motivations (why they requested a particular service).

Attitudinal (e.g., customer satisfaction reviews).

All the data you collect falls into one of these boxes. Later, and as you'll see, you need to design a process that allows you to create a single customer view.

Data you need to improve personalization

It'll come as no newsflash to you to hear that personalization is the key to successful data marketing. And with so many incredible sales & marketing automation tools at our disposal, there are myriad ways for us to interact with customers (and potential customers) in creative and engaging ways.

80% of consumers are more likely to purchase from a brand that provides personalized experiences.

— Epsilon

All data you collect - why do you need it and what to do with it?
Segmentation using the data you gather
What about cookies?
Getting to know the customer in a non-intrusive way

Personalize customer experience in SFMC with data.

Sign up to get your free eBook now.

Checklist: Do You Need a Frequency Capping Solution in SFMC?

Evaluate if it's time to consider implementing frequency capping into your marketing strategy.

Download the checklist

Before implementing any new marketing strategy, it’s essential to ensure it aligns with your goals and needs. In the world of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, understanding when you may need a frequency capping solution can make a significant impact on whether your campaigns resonate with consumers or end up in the junk folder.

This checklist will help you evaluate if it’s time to consider implementing frequency capping into your marketing strategy.

Find the right move for your marketing strategy.

Download your free checklist below

The ultimate health checklist for SFMC

Get your copy of our Customer Engagement Scoring Implementation Guide

Download the checklist

Organize your Salesforce Marketing Cloud to improve your ROI

Did you know that a spectacular 94% of businesses suspect their customer and prospect data to be inaccurate (according to Zoominfo)? A messy Salesforce Marketing Cloud account can lead to problems in all sorts of shapes and sizes. So what does that look like in reality? Well, a ‘small’ issue could be as simple as a marketer struggling to find a correct data extension to segment an audience. In contrast, ‘big’ problems lead to direct losses for your company. Don’t forget that, like any other marketing automation platform, Salesforce costs correlate directly with the number of contacts an account has and how many messages (‘SuperMessages’ in Salesforce-lingo) you consume.

So with that in mind, useless data equals additional expense! If that’s not enough to encourage you to clean your data, then perhaps also consider the legalities. Inadequate maintenance of sensitive data can lead to hefty legal charges and could ultimately damage your company’s reputation. Don’t get us wrong; we’re not here to put a downer on things and know how ominous the prospect of data maintenance can be. The upside is that 66% of organizations with clean data reported boosted revenues (according to Zoominfo). With this in mind, making a Salesforce Marketing Cloud audit a regular practice is somewhat of a no-brainer. Cha-ching!

15 steps to improve your data hygiene in Salesforce Marketing Cloud now

These are the actionable steps you can take to improve your data hygiene in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

1. Manage users via roles

Give and restrict data access to the right users. It’s ABC in terms of data protection and in preserving your Marketing Cloud account. Pay special attention to users who have access to ‘All Contacts’ within Contact Builder. With this permission, users from any SFMC business unit can see the contacts in any other business unit. Sometimes, that’s not ok.

2. Keep a list of your data sources

It’s important to keep a list of Marketing Cloud account data sources within your team so everyone understands what’s feeding the platform. Bonus points for those who also list data subjects and data categories, given privacy regulations. Check out this article to learn more about data storage and integration in SFMC.

3. Make sure your data is complete

If you’re missing data, run an Automation to retrieve it. Remember not to download and save all the data you have in Marketing Cloud.

4. Data extensions may require a data retention policy

This is an old feature, but in light of privacy regulations, actually very useful. What should the retention period be? Also, check which data extensions have one?

5. Determine a storage strategy for your data extensions.

What will you do with outdated or test data extensions? Define your internal policy and add it to the checklist!

6. Use Subscriber and Contact Keys consistently

If this sounds new to you, we recommend getting our eBook, ‘Your Data and Salesforce Marketing Cloud’, to understand how these keys work.

7. Create a primary key for data extensions that require updates

This will help you to have a unique field to identify and manage existing records.

8. When using automations, only update or add records to data extensions and avoid overwriting data unnecessarily

This results in better processing times and can help avoid overwriting the wrong records.

9. Check your subscribers for duplicates

Either run an automation with the necessary SQL queries or leverage DESelect deduplication features to identify potential duplicates in your subscriber list. This way, you can stop paying for useless additional contacts.

10. Make sure to connect your Salesforce Core through Marketing Cloud Connect

Check Salesforce Core for redundant data or data that should no longer be retained, so it doesn’t sync unnecessarily to SFMC. (This is a checklist in itself and will depend heavily on what data you collect and your internal data retention policies.)
Check the Contact key.
Only sync contacts or other Salesforce Core “objects” (data extensions in SFMC) required for Marketing Cloud campaigns. Remember, Marketing Cloud isn’t a data repository, so store helpful information only.

11. Create a naming convention and implement it with your team

Be consistent and make sure all the team members are acquainted with it. For instance, group the data extensions in folders per campaign like .

12. Limit the amount and content types of stored data

This way, your SQL performance improves, as do data processing times. Another reminder to add only relevant data to your SFMC account 🙂

13. Verify that data extensions use the right data types

For instance, ensure that stored dates use the ‘date’ type and not the ‘text’ type. Doing so can avoid mistakes in content personalization and longer processing times (or even timeouts) of SQL query activities.

14. Limit column lengths to what’s necessary and the overall table size of your data extensions

This way SQL queries will run faster, enabling you to work in a more agile way.

15. Review and document the findings after your audit, ensuring all team members have access to the information

We recommend keeping a log which you update every year.

Actionable Checklist to improve your data hygiene in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

These steps are a good starting point for your Salesforce Marketing Cloud audit process. However, more steps must be taken to keep your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account up to date. We have divided our checklist into different categories for different parts of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, to help you manage your Salesforce Marketing Cloud even easier. We have created a dedicated section for Journey Builder, Automation Studio, Data Audit, and Admin setup.

Keep your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account organized. Sign up to get your audit checklist now.

By clicking the "Get the checklist now" button, you agree to the DESelect Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Keep your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account organized.

Sign up to get your audit checklist now.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data Model Part 3: How to manage data in Contact Builder

Introduction to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Contact Builder

What is Contact Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and what is it for? Contact Builder is a Marketing Cloud app that you use to manage contacts and related data. You use Contacts to store demographic and behavioral information about individuals. The main purpose of Contact Builder is to organize your contact data into a single view of your customer.

Why would you use Contact Builder?

Leverage information from any Marketing Cloud app for any contact as mentioned in this Trailhead;
Design, map and link data about your customers;
Add synchronized data sources from Salesforce CRM to Salesforce Marketing Cloud using Marketing Cloud Connect (if applicable).

With this single view of your customer, you take an important step towards creating personalized and targeted campaigns. In other words, you can deliver a better customer experience.

Who defines access to Contact Builder?

There are several roles that can be assigned to users that grant them access to Contact Builder. Normally, Marketing Cloud admins assign these roles. These roles vary from having access to the app to permissions for more specific functions within Contact Builder. It is a best practice to create a custom role for marketers (or other groups of users) who need access to Contact Builder, so you assign them specific permissions that are relevant.

Why should you give someone access to Contact Builder?

It is important to provide access to contact data in Contact Builder for various Salesforce Marketing Cloud users. For instance, for a marketing agency that you hired to create templates in Content Builder, you would probably like to restrict access to features like contact deletion in Contact Builder. On the other hand, you would like to provide admins with permissions for Marketing Cloud Connect and data deletion in Contact Builder.

How can you provide access to Contact Builder?

To administer access to Contact Builder, you will need the necessary administrative permissions and navigate to Setup. Within Salesforce Marketing Cloud, click on your name (top right), and then click on ‘Setup’. There, under ‘Users’, you can assign roles to define access to Contact Builder. As recommended earlier, you can also create customer roles. To do so, click on ‘Roles’, and click on ‘Create’ to define a new custom role.

What are “contacts” in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Contact Builder?

A “contact” is a data record that contains contact information (like email address or phone number) and to which other relevant data may be related (like personal details, demographic information, behavioral data). A contact ideally refers to a single person, although there may be situations where you may actually end up having several contacts that represent the same person. For instance, you may know a person by two email addresses, for which two “contacts” are created.

However, one of the advantages of Contact Builder is that it can help you build a single view of your customer. So ideally, your contacts represent persons one to one. This means you may need to connect different pieces of contact information (like email address or phone numbers) to the same contact in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Because of this, it is a best practice to use a unique identifier, defined by a system or potentially by the business, as the Contact Key.

How to identify contacts in Contact Builder?

Each contact in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Contact Builder can be identified by both a unique Contact Key and Contact ID. The Contact Key and Contact ID are two sides of the same coin: You can define the Contact Key while the Contact ID is automatically generated by Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Using Contact Keys

A contact is managed across different channels (like email or SMS) using a single Contact Key. Let’s say you have a contact in Email Studio that you identify using his email address, and in Mobile Studio you use his mobile phone number. Without the Contact Key, it would be difficult for Salesforce Marketing Cloud to be able to relate these two pieces of contact information. The Contact Key identifies a contact within a Salesforce Marketing Cloud account across business units, and ties together different pieces of contact information across channels through which you interact with that contact. Ideally, a given contact has the same Contact Key regardless of the channel you use to communicate. Make sure you are consistent across all channels when assigning a Contact Key to a contact. The Contact Key is essentially a Subscriber Key in Email Studio. So to be consistent, use the Subscriber Key value in Email Studio as your unique Contact Key in Contact Builder. Note that a Subscriber Key is generated the moment you would send an email through Email Studio to the subscriber.

Contact Keys across different Studios in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

A Contact Key is used across different channels in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which means you will find it across different “studios” in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. For instance, when importing contacts in MobileConnect, you use the Contact Key as well. If you want to import data in Mobile Push, you also need to specify the Contact Key. You might use a mobile number as a Contact Key for MobileConnect or email as a Contact Key for Mobile Push. However, the best practice is to create a Contact Key using a unique digit code ( unique Id/ customer id) that you can use throughout different studios in SFMC.

Where can I find my contacts?

It is possible to find contacts through the All Contacts tab within Contact Builder. Here, you can choose to view your contacts coming from different sources and channels. Contact information is also stored in data extensions. These are basically tables that contain a variety of data. Data extensions are used in Data Designer within Contact Builder, which we will explain further down this article. You can read a lot more about data extensions in our previous article about Email Studio. Note that, in Contact Builder, data extensions are also known as attribute sets.

All Contacts and All Subscribers: What’s the difference?

Differentiating between contacts and subscribers is important when using multiple Marketing Cloud channels. A contact is a person you send messages to through any marketing channel. A contact appears in the All Contacts section.

(The ‘All Contacts’ tab in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.)

Keep in mind that all subscribers are contacts, but not all contacts are subscribers. For instance, if you send an email to your contact, one becomes a subscriber. Remember that when you create a sendable data extension, you need to define a Subscriber Key. Later it will become your Contact Key in Contact Builder. However, you can also have contacts, whom you’ve never sent an email. Those individuals are still your contacts but not your subscribers.

The All Contacts list includes all contacts in a Marketing Cloud account across all Business Units. The All Subscribers list specifically refers to subscribers created in Email Studio. Email Studio contains the All Subscribers list to prevent sends to unsubscribed email addresses. However, this action applies only to Email Studio information and activities. A contact can unsubscribe from a subscription in Email Studio and still receive messages from other apps, such as MobileConnect or MobilePush.

By default, Contact Builder uses a different demographic source of information for each channel. The different demographic attribute groups displayed in Contact Builder contain this information. However, the unique Contact Key value used to identify a specific contact remains consistent for all channel apps. To use a single set of demographic information for all channels, create an attribute group in Contact Builder. Use that group as the source of information for your marketing activities.

How can you export All Contacts?

You can create a support ticket to extract All Contacts to a data extension. They can include the attributes that are part of the central Contacts table (system attributes).
You can then use this data extension for queries to isolate contacts you want to delete.
Make sure to clear the All Contacts data extension, give it a data retention policy or make it sendable if you want to completely clear out all data about the contacts you want to remove.

Where does the data about contacts come from?

Firstly, define where your data comes from and what you really need to store in Marketing Cloud. There are several options here. For instance, your data source can be an external preference center or leads collected through your website or it can be your WhatsApp audience. It can also come from POS if you use retail purchase data or from product catalog CSV. You can check out this previous article about the SFMC data model to learn out more about what data to store and how to integrate it in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

(‘Data Sources’ overview page in Contact Builder)

Manual Contact creation in Contact Builder

Imagine that you need to test an email for a future campaign, and you would like to send a test email to a test contact. At this point you might wonder if it is possible to manually create contacts in Contact Builder? The answer is “Yes!”: When you create a data extension in Contact Builder, you can later manually add records to that data extension. It is a quick way to create fake contacts that can be later used for various tests. This is one of the main (and sometimes the only) reasons that non-admins need access to Contact Builder.

Import activities in Contact Builder

You use import activities to add new data in data extensions to use in the Contact Builder. There are several opportunities to import data in Contact Builder. For instance, if your file exceeds 20 MB you need to use the FTP option to import the data. Alternatively, if your files are smaller you don’t need to rely on FTP servers. You can choose a CSV file from your computer or choose a data from an existing data extension. Some more instructions on how to use import activities in SFMC can be found here.

How to add a CSV file to a data extension in Contact Builder?

The process of adding new data in a data extension in Contact Builder is very similar to the one in Email Studio. Watch this video to learn how to import a CSV file with contact information in a data extension.

Data Designer

Data Designer is probably the main tool in Contact Builder. You use this tool to view and manage contact data. You need it to aggregate a contact’s demographic and behavioral data, and define how that data relates to a contact record. Businesses use the combined data to enrich the customer experience and serve customers better.

(An overview of ‘Data Designer’ within Contact Builder.)

Within Data Designer, data is stored using populations, attribute groups, attribute sets, and attributes. Attribute groups can be related to one another as well as your contacts using data relationships.

(Attribute Group overview in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.)

Populations in Contact Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Populations are used to categorize distinct various audiences in Contact Builder. Think of a population as the subset of the master list of people who could enter a journey. It is recommended to have no more than three populations. A population should never be sent directly, it is a database and they aren’t sendable. That means that the data you store in populations cannot be used for sends immediately. Firstly, it needs to be sent to sendable data extensions. For instance, populations are beneficial for a company that has a different model or structure for communicating with customers vs. employees. Other Marketing Cloud apps, such as Journey Builder, MobileConnect, and MobilePush, can use the populations you create in Contact Builder. For example, in Journey Builder, you can create an abandoned cart journey for a customer. You can use the Customers population as the journey’s entry contacts. Configure the journey to filter contacts by location. As explained here on Trailhead, if you’re using the most up-to-date Journey Builder functionality, you won’t need to use populations most of the time. Instead, it’s best to save populations for specific use cases where you need to create complex queries, such as if your account uses field-level encryption or when you’re using API Entry Sources in Journey Builder. There is also a notion of populations in Journey Builder, which is actually unrelated to the populations in Data Designer. When you use a population in Journey Builder, it simply refers to all the people who have entered that journey, don’t be confused by it.

Attribute Groups in Contact Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Attribute Groups are data sources that are logically grouped together, and they allow you to organize data and configure relationships in Contact Builder. Let’s say you’re a retailer and you need to build a journey that sends an email to people who haven’t made a purchase while they were in a journey. Usually, you’d have two different tables of contact data. You’re going to have one table that contains all your customers, and another table that contains all the purchases. An attribute group connects these two tables to each other based on a particular field, such as Customer Id. Think of an attribute group as a “mini data model” that contains attribute sets (data extensions) and attributes (fields). To most effectively organize your data in an attribute group, link a data extension to the contact record. Then, link all other relevant data extensions to the contact record or, to build complex relationships, link them to other data extensions in the attribute group.

Link Attribute Groups and Populations

Link attribute groups and populations using the Contact Key value. It is a best practice to not link using an email address field when the Contact Key or Subscriber Key value is available. Use populations to create distinct subgroups of your contacts, then segment contact records from there. For example, a healthcare company can create separate populations for staff, patients, and vendors.

Attributes in Contact Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Attributes represent a single piece of information about a contact or related information. A good example of an attribute can be an email address or gender. Even the number of email opens can be an attribute. A contact can contain two types of attributes:

Profile attributes describe who the contact is. Some of this data may be provided by the subscriber, such as gender, state, or interest (do they like hiking or running?).
Behavioral attributes describe what the contact has done. For example, a contact indicates some related interests or clicks links when reading a newsletter.

Think of an attribute as a field in a data extension or a table cell.

Data relationships in Data Designer

Data relationships can be created using a Data Designer. There are 4 main ways to define the relationship between data extensions in Contact Builder: 1:1 Relationship, Population, One-to-Many Relationship, Many-to-Many Relationship. They are also referred to as cardinalities.

A 1:1 Relationship uses a primary key to map a single record within a data extension to a contact or another record. For example, it can be a mobile number or an email address of a subscriber.

Populations help to create a master segment of the audience. They represent a set of contacts that are joined by an overarching theme. For instance, if you work in the education industry you might have a master list of contacts that include information on alumni and freshmen. You can create two populations based on that with alumni and students separately.
A one-to-many relationship uses the value of a primary key attribute on the contact record and relates it to one or more instances of that value on another data extension. For example, you can use the email address as the value related to multiple orders contained in a data extension to connect a contact record to the products ordered from a specific retailer.
A many-to-many relationship can match several different values between two data extensions. For example, you could link one data extension containing multiple instances of customers who completed orders, including repeat values for some customers, with a data extension containing information on those orders.

Deleting contacts in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Why is contact deletion important?

At some point your customers may ask to delete their personal information from your records which you are obliged to in order to comply with GDPR or CCPA regulations. Hence will need to know how to delete the relevant contact information in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which also happens in Contact Builder.

How to delete contacts in Contact Builder?

Firstly, you need to enable the feature of contact deletion in Contact Builder. You can do it by accessing the Contacts Configuration tab.

(‘Contacts Configuration’ tab in Contact Builder.)

Different accounts require different approaches for contact deletion. For example, if you have an Enterprise 2.0 account, the enablement occurs at the parent account level for the entire organization. It is important to note all contact deletion processes are final, and Marketing Cloud cannot restore deleted contact information.

What are the steps that you need to take to delete contacts in Contact Builder?

There is a 2-day default suppression period, during which the contact information remains in your account, but you cannot view or access it. You can change the suppression period if you like.
Then manually delete the Contact. For instance you can delete a contact from the All Contacts tab.

Then Marketing Cloud will completely remove the contact from your account, which is final.

Marketing Cloud deletes contact information from lists and sendable data extensions. You can delete up to one million records. This process does not apply to any non-sendable data extensions not included in a population via Data Designer, and you are responsible for deleting applicable information from those sources on your own.

Contact deletion best practices: Use Contact Key or Contact ID values to delete contacts.

If you linked multiple Subscriber Key or Contact Key values to the same contact, perform the Contact Delete process for all values.

Apart from the individual contact deletion, you can also delete all contacts in a given data extension. In order to do that, navigate to the data extensions tab and select a data extension containing contacts you want to delete. Then click delete.

(The ‘Data Extensions’ tab in Contact Builder.)

Marketing Cloud Connect and Contact Builder

What is Marketing Cloud Connect (MC Connect)? MC Connect helps you synchronize your CRM data coming from Sales Cloud or Service Cloud to your Marketing Cloud. You do this through synchronized data sources, where you define which CRM “objects” (accounts, contacts,…) need to sync to Marketing Cloud. These objects will then show as “synchronized data extensions” in Marketing Cloud. All the CRM’s standard and custom data is synchronized with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. However, the best practice would be to sync only the data you need.

Have a look at this Trailhead on how to implement MC Connect.

Why is it useful for you? This feature allows creating highly interactive and personalized messages to send to your customers using synchronized data sources from Salesforce CRM.

Where can you find the synchronized data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud? In Contact Builder, Under ‘Data Sources’, you can choose ‘Synchronized’. Then, you can choose to ‘Set up Object’, and choose what data you would like to synchronize with your Marketing Cloud account.

(Here you can choose entities to synchronize with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.)

After you choose CRM objects that you would like to synchronize with Marketing Cloud, you will see the CRM data in the Contacts overview.

(Synchronized Leads in Contact Builder.)

What about deleting synchronized Data Sources?

For Synchronized Data Sources, delete the information from the original data source in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or another cloud. This deletes the corresponding record in the Synchronized Data Extension, but it doesn’t delete the contact record from Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud recommends that Marketing Cloud Connect users delete information from Sales or Service clouds first, then delete information from Marketing Cloud. Use API calls to delete contact information from triggered send lists, Salesforce legacy lists, or Microsoft Dynamics CRM lists.

How to leverage your synchronized data extensions?

The Salesforce CRM objects you sync to Salesforce Marketing Cloud as synchronized data extensions are not “sendable”. What this means, is that you cannot immediately use them for campaigns. Instead, you must create a new data extension and populate it with data from the synchronized data extension using for example a filter, SQL query, or a DESelect selection. The newly populated data extension can then be used for your campaign. You may also want to use data from synchronized data extensions across business units. Typically, you will have Salesforce CRM data sync with your enterprise business unit (the main business unit in your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account). To share the data from the synchronized data extensions also with child business units, a common approach is to:

Set up an automation that queries the synchronized data extensions on a regular base and populates data extensions that are sendable.
Share these data extensions across business units.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Contact Builder: Key Takeaways and Next Steps

With Contact Builder, you can organize your contact data into a single view of your customer. In fact, Contact Builder provides you with the tools to define ‘contacts’ in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and relate useful data to these. In Contact Builder, Data Designer is the main tool that you can use to build data models around your contacts. Within Data Designer, you can leverage different data sources, including – but not limited to – data from Salesforce CRM.

With all this, you have taken an important step in your Salesforce Marketing Cloud journey. Congratulations! Now, you need to make good use of your contacts by targeting them effectively and personalizing your communication. To target your contacts effectively, you need to understand how to best segment your contacts and send them relevant messages. To personalize your communication for your contacts, you need to gather information from across different data extensions and bring this information together into a single campaign.

While targeting and personalization can be challenging, you will find they become easy with intuitive drag-and-drop segmentation. That is why we created DESelect, so you can easily leverage your contacts data and deliver targeted and personalized campaigns. Your data model will be unique, so we are happy to show you how exactly DESelect can help you. All you have to do is simply get a demo here.

Continue reading Salesforce Marketing Cloud Data Model Part 4: How to work with Automation Studio.

Introduction to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Contact Builder
Who defines access to Contact Builder?
What are “contacts” in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Contact Builder?
How can you export All Contacts?
Where does the data about contacts come from?
Data Designer
Deleting contacts in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Marketing Cloud Connect and Contact Builder
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Contact Builder: Key Takeaways and Next Steps

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July 7, 2020

SFMC basics

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How to exclude customers who have been targeted recently in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

When it comes to email marketing through Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you sometimes need to exclude certain customers from your mailing lists. This could be because they have a history of spam complaints, or have not responded to previous campaigns, or they’re email addresses from your competitors. Whatever the reason, you can keep these contacts strategically separated from your wider audience by creating a suppression list.

When to use Suppressions Vs. Exclusions

While suppressions and exclusions are often used interchangeably, SFMC’s documentation on suppressions gives some perspective on the difference. Essentially, you should only create a suppression list for addresses you simply do not want to receive any of your emails. In contrast, subscribers on an exclusion list may have an active status and can still receive marketing emails, if you so choose.

Subscriber records on suppression lists do not have a subscriber status and aren’t counted in the All Subscriber count. They are available if you use sendable data extensions. However, both suppression and exclusion lists have the same filtering logic at send time.

There are good reasons for using the “do not contact” style of a suppression list. While it may seem a drastic step, there are times when you’ll have certain addresses who simply cannot receive your communications. Therefore, it’s important to know how to create and manage suppression lists in SFMC.

Suppressions in send definitions in Email Studio

Subscribers are put onto a suppression list when they unsubscribe from any of your mailing lists. The unsubscribed person remains on the list or in a data extension or publication list with an Unsubscribed status.

You can exclude suppressed subscribers from guided sends, user-initiated, or triggered emails by selecting the suppression to opt-out of the email, when you select an audience in Email Studio. Selecting suppressions for guided sends, user-initiated, and triggered emails in Email Studio is simple. Whichever method you opt for, choose the suppression list from the audience menu before you hit send.

Using Suppressions in Journey Builder

The most effective way to suppress or exclude contacts in Journey Builder is through use of a script.

For example, let’s say you have a contact added to a nurturing Journey; however, the contact has already moved past this stage of the marketing funnel. It wouldn’t make any sense to send nurturing emails to someone already close to becoming a customer. In this case, you can exclude the customer from such emails using the process below:

Note: You may need to ask Salesforce Support to enable this feature for your SFMC account.

In Journey Builder, click the “Delivery Options” box and manually check “Suppress From Send Report” at the bottom of the page. The exclusion script can be written in the box of the same name, and must be written in AMPScript.

Any record (of your journey DE) that matches these criteria will be excluded. Below is a script that checks if the record exists on another DE based on a single criteria:

SFMC provides a short guide on how to create an exclusion script on their website. This is an optional step if you’d like more control over the process.

How to exclude contacts from a certain campaign using DESelect

If you want to avoid the hassle of scripts and save time while creating campaigns, DESelect offers a simple way to suppress certain subscribers.

First, drag the Subscribers data view to the Selected Data Extensions section. Then, drag the Emails to Exclude DE on top of the Subscribers data view in the Selected Data Extensions section.

Create the relationship:

Subscribers field: SubscriberKey
Subscribers WITHOUT MATCHING Emails To Exclude
Emails To Exclude field: Email

Next, you can specify a target data extension for your selection. You can actually create a DE in DESelect on the fly. After you choose a name and select if the DE is sendable/testable, you can drag and drop the necessary fields from the source DEs. For instance, you can choose the SybscriberKey field from _Subscribers data view for your target data extension.

If you’d like a visual overview, check out our YouTube video on this subject.

How to exclude Contacts using SQL

If you have some familiarity with SQL, you can use the database language to exclude from your email list. If not, the following example won’t make much sense to you – be sure to ask IT support for help, or use one of the other methods listed above.

The following example shows how to use exclusions in SQL:

First, select the Subscriber Key fields from data view _Subscribers
Then create a LEFT JOIN relationship between the data extension “Emails to Exclude” and data view _Subscribers
Finally, make sure the WHERE Email field in data extension “Emails to Exclude” is NULL
If you have some familiarity with SQL, you can use the database language to exclude from your email list. If not, the following example won’t make much sense to you – be sure to ask IT support for help, or use one of the other methods listed above.
The following example shows how to use exclusions in SQL:
- First, select the Subscriber Key fields from data view _Subscribers
- Then create a LEFT JOIN relationship between the data extension “Emails to Exclude” and data view _Subscribers
- Finally, make sure the WHERE Email field in data extension “Emails to Exclude” is NULL

Marketing pressure: An advanced use case

The frequency and timing of your marketing emails has a strong effect on your open rate. Exclusions can help you avoid sending too many emails at once to a prospective customer, making them less likely to unsubscribe. For example, a welcome email has an 82% open rate for new subscribers, yet if you send the same message to a long-time customer, you’ll only cause confusion, perhaps even an unsubscribe. Exclusions ensure you don’t make any errors in delivering the right message.

Also, frequency and cadence are extremely important in email marketing. If you’d like to learn more about marketing pressure, and how it relates to suppressions and exclusions, check out our in-depth blog guide for more information.

Wrapping up

You won’t need to exclude subscribers on every email campaign; however, by taking a fine tuned look at your email lists, you’ll be better able to decide who’s receiving your communications, and how often.

Don’t overlook the importance of suppressions. Some email addresses can harm your compliance with spam laws or put your information into the hands of competitors. Once you find a harmful email address, use one of the methods above to suppress communications. By maintaining a refined email list of only the customers you want to reach out to, your marketing efforts remain focused on your most effective strategies — all through Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

When to use Suppressions Vs. Exclusions
Suppressions in send definitions in Email Studio
Using Suppressions in Journey Builder
How to exclude contacts from a certain campaign using DESelect
Marketing pressure: An advanced use case
Wrapping up

Back to top

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May 19, 2020

SFMC basics

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The DESelect Marketing Optimization Platform

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Understanding Data Extensions

The Essence of Segmentation

Demystifying Deduplication

Joining Data Extensions

Segmenting Joined Data

Deduplicating Joined Data

The Relationship Between Personalization and Segmentation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Conclusion

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Part 1: The What

Business Units

Data Extensions

Audiences

Publication List

Part 2: The How

Shared Data Extensions

Shared Audiences

Shared Data Sources

Shared Publication List

Part 3: The Why: Best Practices for Sharing Data Across Business Units

Conclusion

Jay Slinger

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What kind of data can be stored?

Understanding Salesforce lists

What are Salesforce data extensions?

What is the difference between lists and data extensions?

Conclusion

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How to personalize your marketing campaigns with data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Focus on different aspects of data

Connect data dots

First-party data

Second-party data

Third-party data

Declutter your data for better marketing personalization

Let’s start personalizing in Marketing Cloud

Real-time personalization with Interaction Studio

Leverage AI insights for better customer experience

Learn AMPscript and optimize your email marketing

Deliver personalized experiences with Journey Builder

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