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Episode 12 | Transcript

Genna Matson: Technical Architecture in SFMC, Email Marketing and SFMC Learning Resources



Anthony Lamot: Genna, welcome to the show!

Genna Matson: Hello, thank you.

Anthony Lamot: It’s such a pleasure to have you here. How have you been since the last time we spoke at Connections?

Genna Matson: Good. Busy, but very good. I like to keep things busy.

Anthony Lamot: That’s awesome. Well, I really appreciate the time you’ve taken off your busy schedule to be here with us today. And talking about being busy, you had a very active career up to this point. I see you’re currently engaged in multiple projects, which is pretty cool. Can you tell us a little bit about your trek and what drove you to establish HowToSFMC?

Genna Matson: I’ve been doing this my whole life. I grew up with my dad owning a trade bindery. They work in the printing industry, and I started selling his folders when I was 11, collecting direct mail pieces that were being shipped all over the country. So I feel like I’ve come to this naturally and organically.

Next in my career, I did a short stint in college and dropped out. I claim that now, though I was embarrassed about it for a long time when I was younger.

Anthony Lamot: There you go! I love the confidence.

Genna Matson: Eventually, I ended up back in direct mail and wound up doing data architecture for direct mail, using systems to pull targeted audiences for direct mail, architecting databases that are being used in direct mail, doing mail marches and all that good stuff.

Anthony Lamot: What technology was it back then?

Genna Matson: Microsoft Access and XMPie were what we were using for print at the time. XMPie power is great. It was a Xerox product that allowed for dynamic images to be created and put on direct mail pieces. We were using a technology called Easy Pearl, which would allow personalized URLs. It was honestly not that different from what we use today.

In 2007, we had a client that came to us and said, “We want to try this new thing called email and see if it’s productive for us.” My boss assigned that client to me and I got to work.

Spent a lot of sleepless nights trying to figure out how to make that work. We were using XMPie and Easy Pro to actually send emails.

However, in 2011 XMPie was just not fitting our needs anymore. We needed timeliness in reaching the inbox, and it would take 24 hours for a million records to go out. So if you were trying to do it at the last minute, that’s a problem. So I started kind of poking around the backend of XMPie to fix that, and I saw the term “ExactTarget” everywhere. I did some research on it and that’s how I discovered Salesforce Marketing Cloud. And I was like, “Wait a second, XMPie is just sitting on top of ExactTarget!”

Anthony Lamot: But this was before Marketing Cloud AppExchange was even a thing!

Genna Matson: Yeah, we’re talking before Salesforce.

Anthony Lamot: I didn’t know there were apps that were even layered on top of that. Was it some kind of white labeling?

Genna Matson: Yeah, it was. I don’t know exactly how to describe it because I’m not a web developer and I’m not an app developer, but they had built an application that only used the relays. XMPie had built their own platform, and they were using ExactTarget’s relay. So I don’t know if that’s white labeling exactly … it’s more like an app sitting on top of another app.

This reminds me of a project that I worked on not too long ago. I remember developing one of these back in like 2005. It was horrible. It was a web-to-print solution that allowed marketers to just go in and select, like, a postcard background, layout, etc, and choose the geographical area. But if this was an app for print products, it took me back to my old days. But anyway, email is much more complex than web design.

Anthony Lamot: Interesting, so you kind of stumbled into ExactTarget by exploring the backend of XMPie. What made you say, “Oh, I’m going to make a career out of this thing?”

Genna Matson: I just rolled with it. I say that I’ve done most of everything by accident. That’s why I’m here, you know. We talk about being leaders, and I like to say I’m a reluctant leader. I’m kind of nomadic by nature, and I like to go where I’m curious. It’s because I’m curious that I have this career that was established by accident. I guess you could say I’m not very goal-oriented.

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Anthony Lamot: Yes, curiosity is definitely a characteristic that I look for when I bring people into my team.

Genna Matson: I say I’m kind of a reluctant leader because I might decide to jump over a cliff, and I don’t want people to necessarily follow me because they might not see the parachute I’m holding.

Anthony Lamot: Would you say you have a high-risk appetite?

Genna Matson: I think it depends. That’s contextual. I say this after having just left Vegas and only lost $17. I set a budget to gamble only $20 and I was there for 4 days. I’d say I’m risk-averse when it’s not statistically possible for me to win. So, for instance, gambling, it’s too much of a risk – the house is always going to win. They are there to take your money. But as far as careers go, in terms of pushing the boundaries of the platform that we work on, I would say that I’m a risk-taker. I’ll jump over that cliff!

Anthony Lamot: Is that what brought you to HowToSFMC? 

Genna Matson: Kind of. HowToSFMC was not my idea, but we are all co-founders.

There are six of us who started it all. It was born out of an email conversation where we were complaining about the lack of support and documentation for Marketing Cloud. We had so many complaints from folks who were promised a lot, but then realized it was not as easy to use the platform as it was described to them in the sales process.

We decided that we wanted to change this. We didn’t want to just make another document repository or blog site, so we started creating these challenges. Cam Robert came up with most of the challenge ideas, including the “Baby Shark” challenge. At the time, he was in our team’s leadership before he joined Salesforce. I also need to give a shout-out to Leslie Higgins. She actually wrote the lyrics for “Baby Shark” in the shape of a shark using AMPscript. It’s on our website, go see it!

Anthony Lamot: Wait, what is this “Baby Shark”? Can you elaborate a little bit on that? 

Genna Matson: Baby Shark was the most popular coding challenge we did. The idea for challenges came from us realizing that what Trailhead teaches you is kind of limited. You get to a point where you want to do more, but you can’t learn it from Trailhead. So we thought, “Let’s do code challenges, because Trailhead doesn’t teach you AMPscript.” For the Baby Shark Challenge, we asked people to output the lyrics of Baby Shark using AMPscript.

There were three categories. First, we were looking for the least number of characters, so the shortest code, to output the entire lyrics of the song. The winner used only 156 characters, so kudos to them. That was incredible. The second category evaluated creativity. The judges were me, Adam Spriggs (co-author of The AMPscript Guide), and Greg Gifford (co-author of Automating Salesforce Marketing Cloud). I can’t remember what the third challenge was…

We had tried to give out prizes to encourage the audience, but what we found was that we were leaving out a lot of entry-level folks who wanted to participate in our challenges, but couldn’t because they didn’t have the knowledge. We realized that wasn’t fair and we wanted to make sure that we were including everybody in the Marketing Cloud community. So we decided to kind of shift focus and build the website up, adding content from anyone who would send us stuff.

Anthony Lamot: So are you all pretty active on Slack?

Genna Matson: Yes! Come, talk to us, and ask us questions. The interesting thing is that it’s not just our leadership team that answers questions. We’ve created a self-supporting community, so anybody can participate. So you get feedback from different people with different perspectives from around the world, which is hugely important for even folks like myself who have been on the platform for a decade or longer.

Anthony Lamot: I can testify to just how helpful this community is. We here at DESelect have been exploring additional ways to suppress communications from Marketing Cloud, so I asked about that in your chat and I remember being really surprised by how extensively people answered.

Genna Matson: Thank you. We’re very proud of our community and everybody who participates in it. Even us “dinosaurs” who have been in the industry for a long time learn something new every day.

Anthony Lamot: So what did you discover today?

Genna Matson: I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve just recently learned that when you do a “guided send” from Email Studio, it now creates a User-Initiated Email and stores the send definition there. I didn’t know that, because I usually use either Automation Studio, Journey Builder, or CloudPages.

Anthony Lamot: Wait, you can make a send from CloudPages?

Genna Matson: Oh, yes! Absolutely. It’s probably my favorite part of the platform, along with Automation Studio. In CloudPages, you can do anything you imagine.

Anthony Lamot: But why would you use CloudPages instead of another platform?

Genna Matson: There are lots of reasons. There is a web form that you can collect information from. Additionally, if you want to send an email telling users that they submitted this information or something like that, you could trigger it from that Cloud Page. It’s the same thing as a transactional send, you’re just doing it from a Cloud Page.

Anthony Lamot: I see. Going on a tangent here, when did you learn that “guided send” was remodeled into “transactional send”? Was that a big discovery?

Genna Matson: Yes. That and discovering that it writes a send definition, meaning that it now creates a record of every detail of the send that I can go back and look at. I can check which creative was used, what data set, what classification, etc. Before that, once an email was sent, it was gone. So having that information right on the platform is extremely helpful.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah. And, of course, we all love Salesforce, but we also know that they are notorious for changing their names. You know. It’s funny; I used to be a huge gamer. And some of these games, especially online games, have these sort of “patches” where they can constantly change the rules and the mechanics just to keep the players engaged. I wonder if that same strategy is used by software companies to keep their users interacting with the community.

Genna Matson: I’ve never thought about it that way! I honestly think it’s because they have turnover internally and a lack of documentation – hey, we’re all at a fast pace! Some of us don’t have time and we all fail when it comes to documentation. And that goes true for the people who build the platform, too.

Anthony Lamot: Or they never read the documentation!

Genna Matson: That happens too! They don’t read the documentation, or they don’t ask questions because they think they know the software, but then they go in and break something.

Remember that outage a couple of years ago when the Internet went down on the East Coast, and it ended up being someone at Google who had pushed the wrong code base? Poor guy! I don’t know if he didn’t read the documentation or what the problem was, but he probably got fired.

Anthony Lamot: And in this industry, I feel like people are very smart and more likely to want to do things their own way. The thing is, a lot of times they will waste time trying to solve a problem that already has a solution, but they don’t know that because they haven’t read the documentation.

One recent example that I remember was in CRM mapping, relating to lead sources and original lead sources. After a second group of employees came on board, they started developing a function that was already there.

Genna Matson: There is a lot of redundancy generated from people turning over and transitioning roles. We’re human, we make mistakes.

Anthony Lamot: Absolutely! And as long as we’re willing to learn from them, we will become better.

Moving on, you have a very interesting career path. Starting out in direct mail until, through sheer curiosity and ambition, you find yourself working with Marketing Cloud. Eventually, you start ‘HowToSFMC’.

I’m curious, to what extent have you still been able to tap into your direct mail roots? I know there are some direct mail options out there, such as Optilyz on the Salesforce AppExchange. Have you heard of anything like that?

Genna Matson: Yeah! In fact, there was an AppExchange offering that was a direct mail provider. It can be plugged into the Journey Builder application to send emails and direct mail pieces.

Anthony Lamot: That sounds quite cool. What is it called?

Genna Matson: They’re not public yet so I can’t disclose the name. But when it’s released, I will shout it from the rooftops because it’s pretty cool! It still has to go through security review and all that good stuff. You know how that goes.

Anthony Lamot: Yes, I do. Although, to the credit of our engineering team, we have done a total of four applications, and we’ve always passed the security review on our first try, which our partner manager on the sales side tells us is unheard of. Shout out to our product team!

Genna Matson: That’s impressive, congratulations! But yes, the offering I was telling you about is still working out some of the kinks in their application, it’s in Beta right now.

Anthony Lamot: Just to clarify, the Security Review we’re referring to is a screening that every app needs to go through before being added to the AppExchange. It is notoriously complex to navigate.

Genna Matson: And it should be a difficult process. There is a lot of data there, so there should be a lot of security. There are a lot of ramifications if something goes wrong. I mean, they have every right to scrutinize the apps the way they do, and I think that they do it for the end users and for us engineers.

Anthony Lamot: So Jenna, in your prior roles, what was your most interesting project in SFMC?

Genna Matson: First of all, shout out to Aaron Graves for working with me on that hell project that turned into something beautiful. I say it was a “hell project” because we kept postponing the end date and it ended up becoming a two-year project. They wanted to create a portal for mortgage lenders to go in and enter lead information for loan providers. They wanted it to trigger emails to the loan provider with a list of leads, and then possibly trigger an email or a direct mail piece to those leads from that loan provider.

It was supposed to be a simple automation project, but we ended up building a whole admin section, with reports and everything else. When we were done, it had turned into a direct mail environment.

Anthony Lamot: It sounds like you built your own Salesforce portal.

Genna Matson: Exactly, it was a portal. They didn’t want to go in Marketing Cloud and only wanted one administrator. Back in the day there weren’t a lot of content management systems for websites and things like that. So you would get requests to build out portals, which was hard.

We have the capabilities to do that, but should we? The portal we had built was not the most secure. This was before a lot of security standards that we have today were implemented. I would do it differently today, but it was a good learning experience, and I’m proud of what we produced.

Anthony Lamot: Yeah, it’s fascinating how far you can go with custom development in Marketing Cloud. I keep being amazed at use cases that come up.

Genna Matson: Yeah, and still have documentation for it somewhere.

Anthony Lamot: Oh, look at that! You actually wrote the documentation.

Genna Matson: I did! I used to write really good documentation, and I believe in telling people to write really good documentation, and I do write it for clients who pay for it.

Anthony Lamot: Fantastic. So if there’s one key takeaway from this interview – write and read your documentation.

Genna Matson: And use AI! It will help you write your documentation. I’m using it!

Anthony Lamot: That’s interesting, I hadn’t considered that. Well, since you brought up the subject, let’s switch gears to AI, starting with ChatGPT. How do you use it to write documentation, for example?

Genna Matson: I actually like writing technical documentation (post-bill documentation). I enjoy recording every step of the process of creating a portal or any other project. So I am actually using AI to help me with grammar, or scenarios and edge cases that I might not have seen. It can point out if I missed anything, which is extremely helpful. I also sometimes use it for blueprinting prior to the build because I hate doing documentation in advance.

Anthony Lamot: Can it also be a source for creativity during the early planning stages?

Genna Matson: Absolutely, if that’s your process. Personally, I like to go in guns blazing. You know, some people have different processes. I worked with a developer in the past that liked to do what they called “slamming” into other codes. If they were working with another developer, they would take the codes built independently and “slam” them together. That was their process.

My process is to go in and just start building. I like to have a clear idea of what the goal is, what the pain points are, and who the end stakeholder is. I usually get clients to sign off on blueprints, timelines, pre-build documentations of that sort.

With ChatGPT, I can test scenarios. I can say, “I need to build a journey that has five touchpoints and that has X criteria” and see what it outputs. Then you can engineer and tweak your prompts to better suit your needs.

Anthony Lamot: A really interesting prompt I’ve seen going around the internet is “tell me how to write better prompts.”

Genna Matson: That is a good one. And we have to remember that AI is only as good as what we tell it and as we code it. It does statistical analysis at incomprehensible speeds, something humans just can’t do. However, sometimes it outputs things that are just silly. So you’re gonna have to edit it, you’re gonna have to work it into what you need it to be. It’s not perfect because we’re not perfect, and we created it.

Anthony Lamot: I really like the phrase you used there, “statistical analysis at scale.” It’s closely aligned to our company’s mission statement, which is to “elevate engagement through human intelligence at scale”. I know everything was very different five years ago, when we started.

Genna Matson: It wasn’t that different, though. The first Logic Engine was created in the 1950s. That’s when the term artificial intelligence was coined. It’s more than 70 years old! The term neural networks was coined in 2012, so that terminology is a bit newer, but that branching neural network algorithm has been used for a long time. Even Siri uses it, all your personal devices. Marketers have been using AI for over 20 years. I’ve created algorithms myself before Salesforce’s AI, Einstein.

What is new is the open source base of the code. There are multiple series of conditional statements that the neural network is creating for itself. That’s badass.

Anthony Lamot: So despite having been around for a while and despite all the innovations, there has always been a person in the center of it.

Genna Matson: Right, there is always the human element. Someone needs to prompt the AI. It can get out of control if people use it for nefarious means. I mean, putting aside all the philosophical conversations, AI is just code. It is not alive, and it won’t grow legs and take over the planet.

Anthony Lamot: Opinions vary on that. Some very smart people I know speak up very strongly against AI, but then you have others who fully embrace it.

But as we approach the end of our conversation, I wanted to ask you: What is your favorite part of being a member of the Marketing Cloud community?

Genna Matson: I love the people. I want to thank everybody who sends me messages and shares a little bit of their day-to-day with me. Keep sharing your victories with not just me, but the community in general. It’s you that makes us great!

Anthony Lamot: What was your favorite moment at Connections this year?

Genna Matson: Probably seeing Dan Levy. He is very special to a lot of us, and he might not know a lot about marketing, but his message about acceptance hit really close to home. The special keynote speakers are always the best part of Connections. I’ve seen some really cool ones, like John Lewis. What I also appreciate about Connections is the chance to meet people in the industry. That’s where I first met you!

Anthony Lamot: I will never forget how much Dan Levy appreciates simple newsletters.

Genna Matson: You know, I agree with him!. Thank you for saying that, Dan Levy. I’m on the pro-newsletter side. I love my newsletters. Keep sending them, please!

Anthony Lamot: Genna, you’ve given so much valuable advice throughout this conversation – be curious, remember to document, and newsletters are great. Do you have any other parting advice to Marketing Cloud newbies, or maybe even veterans?

Genna Matson: Don’t be afraid to reach out and ask questions. If you don’t want to do it in public, do it in private. And every single one of us that have been around for a long time, and I am speaking for everybody, we all love when people reach out and ask us questions, even if they’re silly.

You can ask us something like “Hey, is there a way to turn the sky green on Tuesday, using Marketing Cloud?” The answer would be no, but you’re still welcome to ask. We’re all still learning.

Anthony Lamot: Thank you, Jenna, for taking the time today and for doing so much for the Marketing Cloud community. Your passion and curiosity are very inspiring. Thanks again for being here with us today.

Genna Matson: Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Discover how our platform instantly optimizes your Marketing Cloud

Discover how our platform instantly optimizes your Marketing Cloud

To be the best, you have to learn from the best. For that reason, we profiled Kaleem McGill, who became one of the illustrious Salesforce Marketing Champions back in 2020. More on this later.

Currently an Implementation Specialist, Kaleem has over a decade of experience working with CRMs and Marketing Cloud. We talked to Kaleem about his unconventional start to Marketing Cloud, how that led to some of his career highlights, and how others can advance their careers in a similar manner.

How did you start your journey with SFMC, and what’s happened since?

My journey into SFMC started unconventionally, much like many others. While working in a full-time client success role managing digital marketing campaigns, I realized the need for hard skills in digital marketing.

To gain these skills, I enrolled in a 6-month marketing program offered by Kenzie Academy, a coding school. Through Kenzie’s partnership with Pep Up Tech, I became a member of their Marketing Cloud Cohort and underwent 8 weeks of intensive training to achieve my Email Specialist Certification. I successfully acquired the Email Specialist and Marketing Cloud Admin certifications and landed my first role working in Marketing Cloud.

My hard work and dedication paid off when I was nominated to be part of the Salesforce Marketing Champions program, where I received valuable mentorship from some of the top professionals in the field. I worked in that role for almost a year before transitioning to a full-time marketing strategist position.

Currently, I am working as an Implementation Specialist at Fast Slow Motion and I am thoroughly enjoying my experience here. I aim to hone my skills and advance my career with the organization for many years to come.

What’s your favorite Marketing Cloud project you’ve worked on?

One of my most rewarding experiences thus far has been my involvement in a project for a prominent barbershop franchise, where I was tasked with implementing Marketing Cloud in conjunction with Community Cloud and Distributed Marketing. Throughout this project, we encountered a multitude of complex issues that required careful consideration and strategic solutions.

Notably, I was given the opportunity to take a leadership role in implementing the Distributed Marketing solution, which proved to be particularly challenging due to the vast amount of data involved – the organization had over one million contacts to manage. It was truly an eye-opening experience to witness seasoned consultants design comprehensive architecture and problem-solve with such expertise.

As the SME for the Distributed Marketing connection between Marketing Cloud and Community Cloud, I took great pride in deep diving into the product and sharing my knowledge with my colleagues. All in all, it was an immensely gratifying project that allowed me to contribute to the success of a large-scale initiative.

What is the biggest issue you see the Salesforce community facing right now or in the near future?

I believe that the Salesforce Community is eagerly anticipating the impact of AI on Marketing Cloud consultants and developers. This has been an ongoing challenge for the broader tech community as we have learned to integrate AI into our work rather than fight against it. As Marketing Cloud professionals, we must also adapt and determine how AI can be utilized to support us in automating recurring tasks.

By doing so, we will free up time and mental space to delve into more innovative strategies for our clients, which often require both creative thinking and complex architecture. It is only by embracing AI that we can fully leverage its potential to enhance the quality and efficiency of our work in the Marketing Cloud space.

What advice do you have for Marketing Cloud newbies trying to learn the platform?

For those just starting in Marketing Cloud, my advice would be to approach the tool with an open mind and a willingness to learn on the fly. It is impossible to know everything about the platform, and you will undoubtedly encounter issues along the way.

I had been a Salesforce user for most of my sales career, and I initially wanted to become an admin in Sales Cloud because that was all I knew. When I started my Trailhead journey, I didn’t know how many tools were available under the Salesforce umbrella. I was on the Trailhead site and found the Career Path page. I immediately lit up because I saw there was a path for Marketers. I studied marketing in college, and it aligned with my career aspirations.

I immediately started taking Marketing Cloud trails and realized they spoke my language. A few months later, the Pep Up Tech opportunity arose, and it truly felt like the stars aligned for me to dive into Marketing Cloud head first. I later discovered that Marketing Cloud practitioners were in high demand, and I just fed my fire to remain on the Marketing Cloud path.

That said, aim to gain a solid understanding of the entire tool so that you can speak to it confidently and know where to turn for support when faced with unique challenges. It is also valuable to specialize in an area that particularly resonates with you – whether it be data, email creation, or cross-cloud integrations – and to develop expertise in that area.

By doing so, you will be able to identify the skills that your team is lacking and contribute in a meaningful way. Ultimately, it is the combination of both breadth and depth of knowledge that will make you a valuable asset to any Marketing Cloud team.

What is your experience (if any) with DESelect?

I’ve referred DESelect Segment to several clients who wanted to do advanced segmentation beyond our engagement but did not have the coding knowledge.

Conclusion

Salesforce Marketing Champions must obtain significant product skillsets and rigorous community involvement. These maestros hold expertise in automation platforms, complete numerous Salesforce Certifications, and consistently share knowledge via the Trailblazer Community, workshops, and User Group Meetups.

As Kaleem mentioned, finding ways to automate repetitive tasks actually helps your career, as you can shift bandwidth to tackle more strategic challenges. If you want to better understand how DESelect provides that type of automation for audience segmentation, get certified in our Academy courses.

Questions

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Personalization techniques for SFMC from Marketing Champions

Personalization is critical for any successful marketing campaign, so in our hunt for more pro tips, we asked a couple of experts to share some of their personalization techniques for SFMC. Here’s what they had to say.

Swati Bhalla, Sr. Specialist Email and Digital Channel at Salesforce

Personalization in SFMC is something every marketer dreams of, and we have many ways to personalize content and reach your audience at the right time with the right message.

Here are just a few personalization tools at your disposal:

  • Personalization string.
  • AMPscript.
  • Einstein.
  • Dynamic Content module.

I want to focus on the Dynamic Content module and how it helped me increase an open rate by 27% (and CTR by 4%) in just 30 days.

 

What is a dynamic content block?

A content block allows you to tailor your email campaign so that different contact groups receive different content, specific offers, images, copy, or calls to action. For example, you can send one campaign with multiple targeted messages for various customer groups.

 

How I used it

We were running a loyalty program campaign where all the members received similar content despite their loyalty level (e.g., whale, elephant, rhino. etc.)

We used a dynamic content block to tailor the content based on each loyalty level, personalized images, the sender’s signature, and subject lines.

We also used Einstein features for the campaign to understand the best open time for our audience, thus targeting them better. 

Having witnessed great results, we are now scaling it further by using the new SFMC feature – released trigger campaign messages. I’ve always been a fan of Journey Builder, and now, with this cool feature, I can target my audience based on their preferred channel by analyzing real-time data.

 

Ben Briggs, Solution Lead at Lev

Automating Serialized Coupon Codes

Regarding promo codes in emails, it’s ideal to have a proper integration between your commerce platforms, such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This way, you can push personalized promo codes directly into Marketing Cloud on a 1:1 basis.

While that’s not always practical, you don’t have to settle for giving everyone the same “WELCOME20” promo code and lose all redemption tracking and the impact of serialized codes.

In such situations, the claimrow function in AMPscript is particularly handy. This simple AMPscript function allows you to assign serialized promo codes for bulk importing.

There are many ways of achieving similar results, but I usually start by creating two data extensions:

The first data extension will hold all promo codes, regardless of redemption status. The promo code field will be your primary key. This data extension should never be overwritten or purged. It must have a ‘Claimed’ or similar boolean field that will flip to True as each code is claimed by the AMPscript while logging the code claim date/time and the associated SubscriberKey. This is the data extension that the AMPscript will both pull from and update to.

The second data extension will hold only those codes that are unclaimed/active. This data extension is not critical for sending promo codes, but it allows us to trigger automated alerts when the volume of active codes drops below a certain threshold.

The first data extension would be populated by two sources:

  • Import automation that’s triggered by your promo code file. This could be as simple as a single-field PromoCode add-only import.
  • The claimrow AMPscript will update each PromoCode row as codes are claimed. This ensures that we don’t send the same code to multiple recipients while also allowing us to lookup an individual’s existing assigned code for use in reminder emails – rather than sending them a new code each time.

The second data extension is populated by a query. A simple query, pulling all records from the PromoCode DE where ‘Claimed’ does not equal True, as we want a count of all active codes.

The next step in this automation is a verification step, set to send an alert to the individual who manages the codes. For example, sending an email alert that the count of active codes has dropped below 15,000.

The last piece of the puzzle is the AMPscript. As mentioned above, this code does more heavy-lifting than simply pulling a value from a data extension field.

Here’s an example of how this might look:

				
					console.log( %%[
Set @subkey = _subscriberkey
/* Check if this is a preview rendering */
if _messagecontext == "PREVIEW" then
    set @PromoCode = "TESTCODE"
else
    /* Check if this subscriber already has a code assigned for this campaign */
    SET @PromoCode = Lookup("ExampleCampaignPromoCodesDE","PromoCode","SubscriberKey", @subkey)
        IF Empty(@PromoCode) THEN
            /* Subscriber does not already have a code assigned so we claim one */
            set @PromoRow = ClaimRow("ExampleCampaignPromoCodesDE", "Claimed", "Subscriberkey",@subkey)
                if not empty(@PromoRow) then
                    set @PromoCode = Field(@PromoRow, "PromoCode")
                else
                    /* No unclaimed codes exist so we log the error and stop the send */
                    InsertDE('ExampleCampaignPromo_RaisedErrorLog','SubscriberKey',_subscriberkey, 'Email',emailaddr, 'ErrorMessage','No promo code was located','EmailName',emailname_)
                    RaiseError('No promo code was located',false)
                endif
        endif
    /* This could pull expiration date if present */
    SET @ExpirationDate = Lookup("ExampleCampaignPromoCodesDE","ExpirationDate","Subscriberkey", @subkey)
endif
]%%
 
Here is your promo code: %%=v(@PromoCode)=%%
It expires on %%=v(@ExpirationDate)=%%
'Code is Poetry' );
				
			

This process takes more time than hardcoding “WELCOME20” into your email and calling it a day. But it provides the benefits of serialized promo codes in email without many typical hurdles.

Want to take it a few steps further?

In the example above, we check if the ClaimRow function successfully retrieves a previously unclaimed row. We do this by ensuring that @PromoRow is not empty. In cases where @PromoRow is empty, we utilize the RaiseError ampscript function. This allows us to halt the entire deployment or skip the current subscriber. In this case, we have elected to halt the entire send. We are also logging the error to a data extension (‘ExampleCampaignPromo_RaisedErrorLog’).

Open tracking has always been tricky as it relies on a rendered tracking pixel and has become less reliable with recent privacy settings. An email open also doesn’t guarantee that the individual redeemed the code. However, if you can create an extract from your commerce platform of the redeemed codes, then a nightly refresh of your PromoCodes data extension could flip an IsRedeemed boolean for those records. You can use this data to either exit applicable records from the journey or skip any resend/reminder steps.

Speaking of opens, you may not want to chew through your promo codes when previewing your emails in Marketing Cloud. To prevent this, simply nest your claimrow ampscript inside an IF statement that checks whether the _messagecontext == “PREVIEW”, as seen in the example above.

 

Conclusion

Special thanks to Ben and Swati for sharing their tradecraft. Personalization is a hot topic in marketing, so we remain keen to share actionable advice and tips on getting the most out of it. You might therefore like to read our eBook, How Can You Improve Customer Experience With Personalized Data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud? 

We understand the commercial importance of data and marketing. So we wrote this eBook to ease the process of understanding personalization’s nuances and technicalities. The book provides actionable advice regarding the use of personalization by leveraging data. You can download it here.

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Marketing Champions Spotlight – Vicki Moritz-Henry

We decided to find out what makes a Salesforce Marketing Cloud marketer a real Marketing Champion? To gain some insight, we spoke with Vicki Moritz-Henry, a Salesforce Certified Instructor who was previously a Freelance Consultant for Salesforcemums. Vicki shares her inspiring story about making it as a Marketing Champion with no educational background in marketing! We are sure that her experience will inspire you.

How did you start your journey with SFMC?

I’ll let you in on a secret – I actually didn’t have a background in marketing before starting to learn SFMC. I had a few years of experience on the core Salesforce platform learning different products such as Experience Cloud (Community Cloud back then). I had been leading our Admin courses at Supermums. We wanted to be able to support our trainees as they continued their journeys, and so many had a marketing background, so SFMC seemed the way to go. I’m so glad we did because it has been an amazing journey, and I can now proudly say that we’ve helped grow the SFMC community.

Which feature in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is your favorite and why?​

This may be a pretty common answer, but I have to go with Journey Builder here. It’s the tool that makes Marketing Cloud stand out from other marketing automation tools, and there are endless possibilities. You can make such rich and complex journeys to tailor content for your customers on any channel, making it so that no two customers have the exact same experience.

By the way, check out the guide we recently wrote about Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

What was the most exciting SFMC project you worked on?

Does creating and launching the Supermums Marketing Cloud course in partnership with Trailhead Academy count? We were the first course of its kind and a pioneer for using Trailhead Academy Bootcamp content within workforce development programs. Since we started our course, Trailhead Academy has gotten involved with other workforce development programmes. Leading those courses and sharing my love of Marketing Cloud with new talent is one of the highlights of the week. My absolute favorite part is when we get the demo orgs to be able to get some hands-on practice, and I’m able to lead the class through case studies and hands-on exercises. The trainees never cease amazing me!

What was the most challenging campaign in SFMC?

Since I’m mostly involved with courses, I would have to say troubleshooting for the whole class as we’re walking through exercises is the most challenging and, likewise, rewarding part of my day-to-day. We have a few ground rules when doing the exercises, such as ‘No man or woman left behind’, so we make troubleshooting issues into a learning opportunity, and everybody comes out with a bit more knowledge.

What is your advice for people starting with their Salesforce Marketing Cloud career without having experience working in digital?​

Be curious! You don’t necessarily need to have experience in digital to work in Marketing Cloud, and I definitely didn’t. But you do need to be curious enough to read up on marketing best practices, tips, and advice. I’ve read quite a few fantastic marketing books in order to have an understanding of the marketing business case in order to best leverage the technical aspect of the tool. Some great ones to start with are Email Marketing Rules by Chad White, anything by Seth Godin, and Building a StoryBrand. Also, follow some of the Marketing Champions on social media as there is a wealth of ideas and blog posts out there to help you develop ideas and campaigns of your own!

As head of training at Supermums, can you describe what you do? And what advice would you give to working mums?​

I do a little bit of everything – from launching new programs, teaching Marketing Cloud and the occasional Admin course, and forging new partnerships to leading the Supermums team and contributing to our marketing efforts. I’ll soon be moving on from my current role, but keen to stay involved with Supermums to deliver great Marketing Cloud content and excited about some new opportunities in store!

What are your biggest lessons learned since you started working with SFMC?​

The importance of email deliverability and authentic marketing! Email deliverability will help to make sure that your messages get to the customer in the first place, and authentic marketing will help you to keep them. You’ll lose subscribers pretty quickly, or they will become disengaged if you don’t provide high-value content without overwhelming them with too much noise.

We hope that this interview gave you some food for thought. Here at DESelect, we definitely found it insightful our own team consists of professionals coming from different backgrounds who are all on a quest to become better Marketing Cloud experts. Our biggest takeaway from a conversation with Vicki is that you should never be afraid to start learning something new. Even without a background in digital marketing, you can score as a marketing automation professional, like Vicki or many of her students have. Salesforce creates many possibilities for marketers to learn about the platform via Trailhead educational playground, trailblazer communities to talk with like-minded marketers, or subscribing to Salesforce-related blogs, like ours, and always stay updated with Marketing Cloud features.

Make sure to sign up to DESelect to receive more inspiring stories from Salesforce Marketing Cloud champions, SFMC best practices, and DESelect updates!

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SFMC secrets from Marketing Cloud professionals

“Secrets”, we say?! Yes indeed… We asked a select number of top Marketing Cloud experts about their experience working with the platform. Actually, our simple question was: ‘What do you wish you had known before starting with Marketing Cloud?’

These insights don’t just revolve around technical advice, but also general suggestions for people starting out with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and tips for those already use the platform and who are eager to level up. They say ‘learn from your mistakes’, but in this case, we hope it’s less painful to learn from the mistakes of others.

Picture of Rachid Mamai

Rachid Mamai

founder of SFMCify kicked things off for us, with his wishlist. Here’s what he shared:

“Never make assumptions”

Having worked on Sales/Service Cloud as well, often I made assumptions and didn’t test functionality in Marketing Cloud as it should be — especially at scale. 

Let go of any developer background

I like innovation and problem-solving, and Java offers an ocean of problem-solving possibilities. The fact is that SFMC offers a lot as standard, so there is often no need to look further. I wish I’d worked more often with standard functionalities, instead of building custom and complex solutions.

There are no guide rails

Marketing Cloud will let you do whatever you want. Sometimes it’ll show you a warning (like when you want to disconnect a data extension in Data Designer), and more often, you’ll be left without warnings, like deleting a data extension that’s actually used in a Journey, deleting an activity used inside an Automation Studio automation… Because of this, you must proceed with caution. “

Picture of Michiel van Gaalen

Michiel van Gaalen

Salesforce Application Architect & Marketing Cloud Consultant shares his experience.

“Never try to implement without experience”

I have a ton of experience installing email marketing and CRM systems, so usually, I’ll read up and I’ll manage. In Marketing Cloud you can take so many bad decisions that come back to haunt you, that it’s not funny. So you need to have someone by your side, who is experienced in that type of process. Don’t try to ‘wing it’.

Never use the email address for Subscriber id

Back in the day, this wasn’t well documented. Assigning Email as the Subscriber id is not wise, especially when you use both Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. It duplicates the contact activity as there’s no data sync back to Service Cloud.”

Picture of Mateusz Dąbrowski

Mateusz Dąbrowski

Marketing Automation Consultant and author of the blog mateuszdabrowski.pl shares the following

"Understand the different Salesforce Clouds"

I wish I knew more about the multitude and variety of Salesforce Clouds. Before I started working on Marketing Cloud, I decided to fill in my skill gaps. I heard SQL is helpful, and neither of the Marketing Automation platforms I worked on before used it. So “Salesforce SQL” I googled, and that led me to learn SOQL. It took me some time to catch that Salesforce Marketing Cloud is not using Salesforce Object Query Language 😉

Register on Trailhead and leverage microlearning

What would I recommend instead to anyone just getting into the Marketing Cloud world? Register on Trailhead, and follow the Email Specialist Trailmix. It will be a smooth start into Marketing Cloud, prepare you for the initial certification, and jumpstart your path to being a Salesforce Ranger. And with Trailhead Go App, you can do all that wherever and whenever you want.”
Picture of Markus Slabina

Markus Slabina

Cross-Cloud Architect/Consultant and the author of the blog markus.codes shares his SFMC hindsight

“Investigate List Detective”

There’s a lot I’d love to have known before starting with Marketing Cloud, but one of the most important things is knowing about List Detective and how it might impact your email sends. A lot of marketers only find out about the “role-based email address filter” as customers feedback that they didn’t receive any emails. This filter blocks messages to email prefixes like office@, sales@, info@, and so on — even for transactional sends! So especially in a B2B context or when working with small businesses, this can potentially have a huge impact. The good thing is that you can reach out to support and ask to deactivate the filter for whatever’s relevant to you.”
Picture of Kaelan Moss

Kaelan Moss

also known as MinuteAdmin, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Program Director and Instructor at Revolent Group.

“Share your learnings”

I wish I’d known about the power of providing value to others. It’s so important to share what you’ve learned, whether that’s ‘Best Practices’, ‘Industry Tips and Tricks’, ‘Real World Use Cases’, ‘How To Troubleshoot’, or anything else. Someone else out there is always going to find your insights valuable — victories and failures alike!”
Picture of Manish Thaduri

Manish Thaduri

Salesforce MVP, Technical Architect, Blogger at sfdcFanBoy.com.

“Salesforce Marketing Cloud isn’t like the others”

Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud product is completely different from its other Cloud products. No matter how many years of experience you have in the Sales, Service Cloud, or any other Clouds platforms by Salesforce, you’ll be starting from zero when you begin your SFMC journey. This is a good thing for freshers, though, as it puts them on an equal footing with those who may have been in the Salesforce ecosystem for a long time but are also new to SFMC. There’s no headstart for anyone.”
Picture of Nathalie Starr

Nathalie Starr

blogger at SFMC Geeks.com, Snr. Solutions Consultant at Acumen Solutions shares her insights

“Take full advantage of the SFMC community”

The biggest thing I wish I had known about is the community resources — especially the ‘SFMC’ channel on the ‘Emailgeeks’ Slack channel, and SFMC Stackexchange. There are so many amazing admins in the community, who are happy to help if you get stuck, or want to learn more. My world exploded as I realized I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Seeing what others were doing expanded my concept of the possible.”

Conclusion

We hope that this article provided a little help for you to navigate the complex world of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and that some of your questions have been answered. A lot of these insights aim to save your time navigating on the platform,  but it’s not only insights that can save your time, there are also actual tools for that. If you’re interested in saving 50% of your time spent on data management in SFMC, leverage our no-code segmentation solution, DESelect. You can book a demo with one of our professionals here.

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How to boost your career with Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Kaelan Moss from Minute Admin

Find the links to the mentioned resources at the bottom of this page!

Transcript: How to boost your career with Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Kaelan Moss from Minute Admin

Anthony: Hi Kaelan, welcome to this series.

Kaelan: Hey there, Anthony. Thanks for having me.

Anthony: Well, you know my pleasure really we’re glad to have you here. Could you please introduce yourself to our audience?

Kaelan: So my name is Kaelan Moss also known as Minute Admin or people who are following my YouTube channel. I am a Marketing Cloud, basically Email Specialist, Consultant, Administrator anything you want to you know, anything besides the developer role. I’m also a Marketing Cloud instructor, so about a month ago I was actually certified as a Salesforce Marketing Cloud instructor.

Anthony: Congratulations!

Kaelan: Thanks, that was a very thorough process. I’m definitely glad to have that under my belt now, so that’s probably my most proud achievement right now in the Marketing Cloud spaces. Being certified by Salesforce having that stamp of approval to be able to teach their courses.

Anthony: That’s great. I’ve seen the courses, I’m a big fan. So we’ll make sure to put the link in the comments of the video. I’m curious though, the name Minute Admin. Where did that come from?

Kaelan: Yeah, that was actually, you know something that really just came to me out of the blue. I was in San Antonio at the time and I was thinking about how difficult it was for people to really grasp Salesforce. And really I’ve always been someone who enjoys videos over reading even though I do both but I started thinking about how I could make videos that would teach somebody a subject in a minute or less. And so I was like, I’m going to teach people how to be an Admin. Marketing Cloud Admin, Salesforce Admin, any sort of admin in a minute or less and that’s where that idea spark from. Showing them what they needed to know without spending years teaching them a subject.

Anthony: Yeah, I love it. It’s a catchy name too, so good pick. When did you start on your own SFMC journey?

Kaelan: I started in 2017. So September October of 2017 and it really started as you know, just kind of there was a need. I was kind of an accidental Marketing Cloud admin. So, you know, you hear those stories about accidental Admins for Salesforce, but that was me for you know for Marketing Cloud. So yeah really started in October of 2017.

Anthony: Why I must say it’s pretty impressive. You’re already an instructor sounds like you’re doing pretty good at doing this fast-track. So if anyone can teach people how to be an Admin in under a minute, I think you’re the guy so Kaelan are you working on any courses we should be excited about?

Kaelan: Yes, I’m glad you asked you know, I am working on actually putting together three courses into one bundle right now. So it’ll be like a full Marketing Cloud course which will help people get certified as Email Specialist and Marketing Cloud administrators. So, you know, there’s a lot of overlap between the two and I decided to just go ahead and put a course together and really just, design a course that shows people the Marketing Cloud system since a lot of people don’t have access to it, showing how to do things through video and also through documentation that I’ve created to show people what a data extension vs. a list is, what a data filter vs. SQL query activity is, Automation Studio vs. Journey Builder and when you would use one or the other as well as the study guide, so there are not many study guides for people.

So I started creating an Email Specialist study guide and Marketing Cloud Administrator study guides as well. So people have not only the types of questions they’re going to see on the exam but they’ll also have every single definition they need to know for each section of the exam. So yeah, that way people aren’t confused when they see certain jargon or lingo when they go and take the exam, they’re not confused as to what you know, what Contact Builder is or something like that if they’ve never been exposed to it and, we can talk about attributes in the study guide before they go and see that on the exam that way, you know, I’ve shown them that definition, I’ve told them what it is. I’ve also given links to the official documentation to go learn more about that and then for each section. I’ve done that for each section of each exam and then also given exam questions on top of that. So that’s just that’s the second piece and then I’ve also created 35 to 40 Marketing Cloud interview questions with exactly the types of questions I’ve been asked and what other people have been asked and should be there.

Anthony: Sorry, to interrupt you. These are interview questions for job interviews?

Kaelan: Yes, for job interviews. You know I obviously want to teach people Marketing Cloud but not just stop there. I wanted to also help people get prepared for a real world Marketing Cloud job interview. So one thing I’ve seen on LinkedIn a lot, you know in my direct messaging box as well as email messages. I’ve been receiving a lot of people want those interview questions once they understand Marketing Cloud. So I’ve gone ahead and just created about 40 interview questions and people can have access to that once they sign up for that course. So it’ll yeah, hopefully it provides a lot of value to people and they not only learn Marketing Cloud but they learn the types of questions that will show up in an interview.

Anthony: I’m sure and I also love the interview questions because you give a real world practical application also like the dictionary. I remember, gosh, when I had to study for these exams there’s just so much jargon. So it’s good to know that you’re doing this because several people on my team are getting certified, so, you know, I’ll point them in the right direction. In general, who can benefit the most from your courses and who are the courses for?

Kaelan: So it’s obviously for anyone starting out in the Salesforce ecosystem. What I really want people to understand is when you come into the Salesforce ecosystem, you don’t just have to go and be a Salesforce Administrator or a Salesforce Developer. Now that’s the biggest, you know, the biggest media hype I guess you could say whenever someone comes into the Salesforce ecosystem, but I really want to show people you can start off in Marketing Cloud.

So this course is really for beginners as well as people who may have already started as a Salesforce administrator and they’ve been working as a Salesforce admin, but they want to get another certification. They want to go get it, you know, learn that Marketing Cloud platform and really get Marketing Cloud certified so really anybody who’s not Marketing Cloud Email Specialist certified or Administrator certified, you know, definitely that’s who the course was designed for also, you know, the course is designed for people to you know prepare for a job interview as well, which is why I’m throwing in those job interview questions, so it can be a refresher for somebody who does have experience for Marketing with Marketing cloud and have a place to you know, refer back to is kind of like a one-stop-shop to really just basically learned everything when it comes to marketing cloud and refresh on their skills when it comes to Marketing Cloud.

Anthony: Yeah, staying with the topic of the interview questions for just a little bit longer. Is it something that people asked you about?

Kaelan: Yes, I’ve been getting a lot of requests. I’ve been getting, I would say, I mean just within the past two weeks I have 10 people asking me real-world interview questions. So I was like, you know, there was a point where I was just calling them on the phone or sending them one-on-one like just typing it up and say “here’s what I’ve been asked” that was like well if this is a need, you know, what are the people who aren’t asking me these questions struggling with and they may be struggling with the same things. These are just people who’ve reached out and maybe you found me or you know, were courageous enough to reach out to me and ask me those questions. So I just went ahead and you know I feel the need that I’ve been seeing is there and hopefully, that helps a lot of people.

Anthony: Great. I think it justifies good entrepreneurial instincts. And so you mentioned though the Specialist certificate you mentioned the Admin certificate. Will there be a Dev certificate at some point?

Kaelan: I hope to work with a developer to create that course, so I have been creating the courses that the Admin and the Email Specialist cert courses. I’ve also been thinking about how I’m going to create the consultant certification course, which will come up next after this but you know, my biggest thing is I’m not a developer. I’m not someone who knows Server-Side JavaScript and gets really heavy into the development tools like API. But I would love to co-create a course with a developer or with a team of developers and just really utilize the knowledge that we both have or maybe myself and a team have and come together and create a course like that. So that’s definitely on the horizon, but I will need some help with that.

Anthony: Well, I will do a little shout-out right now. If there’s a really good SFMC developer listening to this you know who to go to. I think it’s a good opportunity to co-create something that could be really useful to the community. Now going back to your own learning experience, you’ve come a long way, obviously, you justifiably an expert but how long does it take, let’s stay, until you feel proficient with Marketing Cloud?

Kaelan: I would say it wasn’t really until I started teaching it to other people and that was just you know, that wasn’t even Marketing Cloud instructor certification. I was really teaching this to people just out of pure passion and just helping people and I would say that probably took me about honestly a year-and-a-half maybe two years after I was using it every single day because it’s such a big platform, it’s such a big system. There’s so much to do and at my first job, I was actually using the entire suite of Marketing Cloud. So there was so much coming at me from all angles whether it was Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Interaction Studio, you know and Automation Studio, Journey Builder and I just I was kind of like, you know, what are they saying fire hydrant drinking from a fire hydrant?

And so it was pretty tough at first so it took me a while to really understand what I was learning and understanding how to put all of that together is probably what took me the longest but to the point where I would say I felt comfortable with it as whenever I started teaching that to people which was I would say about a year-and-a-half to two years after using it. But that was you know like I said that was because I was using the full breadth of the system from day one and it was just like where do I go from here? I didn’t have any guidance so there wasn’t a Trailhead whenever I first started. There was a Trailhead, but not for Marketing Cloud, and yeah and everything was just pure help documentation. So that was my dilemma, which is also why I created the courses that I’ve created so I could put it all into one place and not you know prevent someone else from having 70 tabs open like I would normally have when I was learning.

Anthony: You become proficient the moment you teach. I think therefore Marketing Cloud admin is probably a good role in teaching their company about the product and it’ll make them better admins. So your courses are very interesting, but what distinguishes a Minute Admin course from the others?

Kaelan: Like I said I’m making sure you understand the concept you understand what you need to know. I’m one of those people that you know, I watch a YouTube video and I’m like, let’s cut straight to the chase here. You know, I don’t want to see five minutes of you talking about why you created the video, you know, a really quick intro and then go straight into it.

Anthony: Right, when you google for a new YouTube video and then skip the first five minutes because they’re just talking about themselves.

Kaelan: Exactly, and that’s where I think I differentiate. I get straight to the point, you know, my courses are designed to just get straight to it. Here’s what I’m going to cover, let’s cover it. If you have questions here is documentation about it, you can also join the Facebook group. What I’m trying to do is build a community around people who are trying to learn Marketing Cloud, so it’s really… there’s a lot of communities out there. But there’s no one-stop-shop community where people can go that are specifically learning what it takes to pass these exams and to get a job in my courses. That environment, that community that people can join to really say, hey, I’m a part of this community. This is exactly where I need to go, this is the one place I need to be at I don’t need to have a hundred tabs open. I can be here to learn every single thing I need to know step by step to pass the certification without having to do a hundred Google searches for a data extension versus a list, you know, it’s all there for people who are learning. So yeah, it’s just it’s all put together.

Anthony: Actually, I’m going to jump at the one question I wanted to ask later, but 2020 been a pretty interesting year for the world so far I’m kind of curious have you seen a change in the way that your visitors on your website consume your courses given there’s a pandemic, has it changed?

Kaelan: It definitely has, it’s really crazy I didn’t really start doing this really heavy until the pandemic. Right up until I would say about a month or two before the pandemic. I started getting serious about teaching Marketing Cloud. So I don’t have too many metrics to go off of compared to pre-covid-19. But I will say that there are a lot more people who are interested in learning skills that they can use online. There has been an increasing demand for not only learning online but for trainers. Like before the pandemic I would tell people “Hey, I want to train Marketing Cloud. I want to teach Marketing Cloud”. That’s all I want to do. Like I can do an implementation that is cool. But I want to teach this to people to give them back what I already know and there was really not much interest for that up until the pandemic really because then there was this influx of people who are like hey, I want to learn this, and now all of a sudden they need to be a trainer to come over here in and teach these people and that’s the biggest shift that I’ve seen is beforehand learning and development. It wasn’t that big of a deal in terms of Marketing Cloud or Salesforce. But now I’m seeing there’s a big uptake and in the learning and development space.

Anthony: Oh, absolutely. I think you hit the timing just right on this. I also remember at the start of the pandemic even Salesforce themselves started to create more awareness about Trailhead and so on and then suddenly I saw a stream of people having their certificates on LinkedIn. Yeah, kudos well done. Maybe a bit more general just beyond Marketing Cloud even what do you think for marketers are the biggest challenges today given the situation? 

Kaelan: I would say really for marketers it’s relating to people, you know, focusing on creating a campaign that matter to people and not coming off like you’re trying to just sell the people, you know, the biggest thing that I’ve seen for marketers, in general, is there’s a push for, hey, we have email marketing for a reason we have products we want to sell these products to our customers but really, you know, the biggest thing I would say is to focus on helping the customer and making sure that you’re providing value, you know to your customer base to your subscriber base. I would say especially with the pandemic people are looking for how people are looking for ways to improve their lives and I would say if you can give them a way to do that with your product I would say you’re going to set yourself off for a lot of success. Because if you can help somebody get further in life increase their value increase their status, you know, especially in this in this day and age, I mean people’s lives have been changed completely some not so much some drastically and if you can come in and then provide any sort of, you know, positive help to that change, I think that’s the biggest thing marketers can do now.

Anthony: That’s great. And how has your life changed by the way?

Kaelan: It’s funny that it didn’t really change that much other than the fact that I can’t just travel anywhere I want to. You know working in the Salesforce ecosystem is amazing like you can work remotely, I’m sitting here in my room. I’m sure you’re sitting somewhere either at home or at the office, but you don’t have to go into the office and it’s not a requirement. So I would say, you know, that’s the biggest thing about Salesforce that I really was attracted to when I first started but it hasn’t changed much other than the fact that I’m not traveling as much with that freedom to work anywhere I want to.

Anthony: Yeah, pretty much we have been lucky enough to be allowed to go back to the office, you know, where I’m based in Europe. But, of course, yes less travel. But fortunately enough as you said in the Salesforce ecosystem remote work is definitely possible. I think you know being able to work with marketers, marketing automation specialists, and just work with technical profiles. It seems that it’s very ingrained into the culture in business.

Kaelan: Yeah, really is not and that’s the biggest attraction for me is out. I want freedom, you know, freedom to basically work wherever I want as long as you get the job done, you know, that’s what really matters.

Anthony: Freedom of space in a sense. I’d like to go back here to something you’ve mentioned earlier in the interview that I thought was very interesting. I think you said that in your first project you were exposed to all modules?

Kaelan: Yes, I was so I worked at a company in Basin, Oklahoma City and we had the full suite of Marketing Cloud. So I was using everything like mobile push like I would you know, I would test all the messages that we were sending to our app, I would set up the SMS campaigns, I would set up the email campaign, make sure that the data was set up correctly do SQL, dabbled in some AMP script some HTML literally like when I say that the reason it took me so long to learn Marketing Cloud is that I had to learn so many different, you know things.

Anthony: You did it all?

Kaelan: Yeah, I would go to conferences like Connections in Chicago, learn about Interaction Studio or Mulesoft and you know, come back and start working on that. So it was like we were using everything that we could possibly use to get the most out of the system.

Anthony: So, of course, I have to ask which module did you like the most, and which module did you like the least?

Kaelan: I would say honestly, I like Automation Studio the most. It’s not the prettiest tool. It’s not like Journey Builder, but I like Automation Studio the most. I’m someone who thinks in terms of, you know, creating the right processes like this board right here this these boards are literally just the processes of how I do things jot it down on the board and I’m, you know, trying to recreate the process to make it as efficient as possible. And I think when you do that and you put that into an automation tool, like Automation Studio your life is just so much easier as you can segment your data you can you know, just basically you can import your data segment it, you know, export your data, transfer all of that without you know having to do it every single day, you know making sure that the process that is correct. And I like the fact that I don’t have to do tons of data work every single day once it’s set up.

Anthony: Yeah, I can relate. And which module do you like the least and why?

Kaelan: I honestly, I couldn’t say what I like the least.

Anthony: If not a module, the feature is fine.

Kaelan: I’ll tell you one thing. I do not like it whenever you create a data extension, you can’t change the order of the fields. I don’t know why that hasn’t happened yet but ever since I first started in Marketing Cloud in 2017, I’ve messed up. I created a data extension with like 50 fields and I messed up on the order of 1 maybe like somewhere between 36 and 37 and I was like, can I go back and change this? And I was like, yeah oh gosh, you can’t go back and change that order. That’s what I dislike the most but hopefully, there’s an update to that soon.

Anthony: Or you create a DE and you realize field number 7 out of whatever has the wrong field format and you just don’t care anymore. You’re like, oh God, this is from now on this number field is going to be a text field. That’s the way it’s going to be from now on.

Kaelan: Yeah, that’s definitely the most disliked feature, but I can’t say I dislike any module or anything like that or studio or builder. Definitely that feature right there.

Anthony: Now about your favorite module Automation Studio, I’ve heard feedback a couple of times it is still pretty technical to what extent do you think that marketers today should become technical?

Kaelan: I do think that you know marketers should have some technical abilities in Marketing Cloud whenever we’re talking about technicalities obviously we’re talking about the whole system being a technical system. So you have to understand obviously the basics of Marketing Cloud and at least understand how you know how to operate Marketing Cloud, but what I tell people all the time is if you know pretty much where to click buttons in Marketing Cloud you can get 90% of the job done. Like you can it’s like going to Facebook if you can go to Facebook and you know, which group you need to go to if you can like if you know the step by step process to creating a page or a group in Facebook, you can utilize Facebook if you know how to add friends. It’s the same thing, you know if you just know where to go.

That’s what I tell people when they’re learning Marketing Cloud, they know where to go, know where things are at. And once you get their know what you’re actually doing when you press that button which is why you know Salesforce is so great because they’re all about clicks not code in so that leaves me into saying, you know, as far as technical abilities, I would say I do encourage people to learn some SQL as well as AMP Script and I don’t really go much further than that after that. They want to learn HTML Server-Side JavaScript, you can learn that but there are so many different ways to get around things like that. So which is what you guys offer the DESelect so, you know, that’s why I am not super big on telling people you have to learn SQL anymore because their solutions like yours are so great that allow people to continue to just know where to click and still get the job done.

Anthony: Thanks for bringing that up. You know the Salesforce ecosystem is very open. That’s one of the reasons why partners like it, customers like it, and obviously, we like it. Now you’ve had a try at DESelect as a segmentation solution so I’m kind of curious, what was your experience working with it?

Kaelan: I loved it. Especially, when I found out that you can create a resulting data extension in DESelect when I first used it I was like, okay, I’ve got to create this filter this, you know to create what would I need to create and then I realized I hadn’t created a resulting data extension and I was like, okay I’m going to have to either save this or delete all my progress leave out to exit out of DESelect go back create resulting data extension and it was like, “what do you want your resulting data extension to be named” and I was like, okay, this is legit because I mean you can do everything that you need to do with SQL with DESelect I was like if I had access to this when I first started off in Marketing Cloud the amount of “a” time I would have saved would have been like mind-boggling.

People would have been like, “how are you getting all this done that fast” that would have increased productivity also probably got me, you know some more recognition or something like that at my company because you know if you’re getting the job done extremely fast then people are going to recognize that be it would have just allowed me to also save time on having to learn “a” SQL and “b” refer back to SQL code and whatever just allowed me to do the same exact thing without having to learn that entire language to do it. It’s like I tell people all the time, you know like I’ve mentioned a little bit earlier if you get the job done, it doesn’t matter how you get it done as long as it’s obviously legal which good thing we’re doing is you know…

Anthony: We would assume this.

Kaelan: Yeah, it doesn’t matter how you get it done. And I think that’s the biggest thing people, especially through this pandemic are going to realize is that normal isn’t always the best, you know, you can adapt, you can overcome certain societal, I guess, societal norms and that’s just like a philosophical way of thinking about it, but that’s you know, also with your product DESelect is that you don’t have to learn a new language to get the job done. Like for example, you know, I don’t know if you got the new update on the iPhone, but there’s an app here on the iPhone if I could pull that but it’s like a translate app you don’t have to learn a new language to speak to people nowadays. You can just translate it on your iPhone. Technology has come so far it allows us to still do the same thing and get the job done without having to spend a ton of time learning how to do it. It’s just here now and that’s, you guys offer it’s something that’s here easy that you know easy learning curve, pick it up really quick, start working on it day one still get the same job done, you know, so.

Anthony: Thank you for sharing that and I do like the philosophical note that you left there. I guess obviously, it is so covid-19 pandemic has been horrible for the world and everyone in it, but it is anything good that it’s maybe that now we can think of more unconventional ways of getting things done remotely. Either at the way we learn and teach and maybe even how we do our own operations. To sum that up actually, not just DESelect but any apps on AppExchange in general do you think that people should have a look there and should also learn about and educate themselves about what apps are available there?

Kaelan: I think they should, I think that should come you know after they have an understanding of the platform and where they’re going to need to use it but for you know for somebody starting out learning the platform, but once you learn the platform definitely get an understanding of what is out there to help you make your life easier because at the end of the day if you make your job easier, you’re making your life easier. You know, I always look at it like this. I want to be the type of Marketing Cloud consultant that creates a solution that allows people to still get paid possibly even get paid more than they would normally get paid but by doing less work because your productivity is increased tenfold a hundredfold, you know, so if you’re still outputting either the same or more, you know output in less time, you still deserve to get paid the same or more.

That’s why I’m saying the whole societal norm is, you know, I think we’re so used to trade in our time for, you know, money. Yeah, and I think it should be the other way around. I think it should be you should be getting paid for what you produce and I think that you know, it’s important to know the tools that are out there that allow you to produce more. So if you can figure out the tools on that the AppExchange that allows you to get more done than in less time and without also, like I said “a” less time actually doing the activity “b” less time learning about how to use something difficult and just using a solution that’s already built to get the job done. I think that’s at the end of the day the only resource we can’t get back is time. So if you find a solution that saves you that, you know, you’re literally increasing, you know, I think life happiness overall.

Anthony: Oh yeah, I think it’s a beneficial thing for society obviously you’re increasing efficiency and I’m very much aligned on whether we should reward people on results and not just how much input they give. You know I think it’s a great note to end up with but are there any closing thoughts that you would like to share with our audience?

Kaelan: I would say the biggest thing is to stay hungry. Stay hungry for knowledge. Stay focused choose the niche you’re going to go into when you come into the Salesforce world Marketing Cloud is an amazing niche to come into, it’s only growing, I’ve heard regional managers, regional directors managers at Salesforce say “learning a Marketing Cloud is like becoming a brain surgeon” like you’re becoming so specialized and you’re going to be in such high demand. And everybody’s going to need marketing for their company so why not learn Marketing Cloud to get into this niche do that.

But also stay hungry to continue learning because, at the end of the day, we’re living in the information age. The more you learn the more you earn so that that goes back to figuring out which sort of apps you’ll need to increase your productivity. If you learn about an app, that’s because you put in the time to figure out which apps are going to help increase your productivity and more than likely going to earn more because you’re more productive to stay focused and stay hungry for learning. I think that’s the biggest thing in our society. There is so much that’s changing and it’s constantly changing especially in tech, but now the world is seeing that life is changing and if you don’t learn something new and you don’t adapt that I think it’s going to be hard to keep up. So learning is the best way to keep up. The powerful thing we have is our mind. So, utilize that that’s my biggest thought. That’s all I ever tell people. It’s to continue learning whatever it is that you know, you’re interested in yeah continue doing that right stuff.

Anthony: Yeah, so stay hungry, stay focused, keep educating yourself. Kaelan, I want to thank you so much for coming over to our series. Thanks

Kaelan: Thanks Anthony, thanks for having me.

Anthony: Our pleasure.

Video Recording: How to boost your career with Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Kaelan Moss from Minute Admin

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