Effective email marketing hinges in your ability to respond quickly to what’s happening in your industry and what your customers are doing. The average internet user receives over 100 emails per day. As we scroll through our timelines and navigate the web, we’re inevitably added to a growing collection of mailing lists, from which we periodically unsubscribe, mark emails as junk, or semi-consciously filter out senders of irrelevant information when we conduct our daily trawl of the inbox.
To stay out of the junk folder, you need to be sending your customers valuable and (critically) relevant content. Staying relevant means reacting quickly to how your customers (or prospects) are behaving. If you receive an email promoting the new Bubbletastic Bacon Bubble Blower, having invested in the Bubbletastic just days ago, you’re not going to hesitate in unsubscribing from that mailing list. Conversely, if the post-purchase follow-up email details maintenance tips for getting the most out of your Bubbletastic, you might just make a mental note to pay attention to the next few emails that sender directs your way. If something significant happens to your industry or to your customers – say for example a global pandemic – you can get a leg up on your competition by responding faster than they can in offering free home delivery or branded facemasks for example.
The challenge of keeping your email campaigns responsive
Responsive emails ultimately need to be driven by creative people, i.e., email marketers who know what their customers want and are capable of finding inventive ways to engage them. Building a new campaign landing page or designing a new automated customer journey has, at least until very recently, required an extensive technical skillset. Typically, copywriters don’t write code and coders don’t write copy, which slows down the process of altering an existing campaign or building a new one. If the above scenario describes your technical environment, you’re likely missing out on opportunities that your more technically advanced competitors are taking. Thankfully, there are tools inside Salesforce to help you alleviate this roadblock.
The role of CloudPages in marketing automation
CloudPages is a relatively new feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) that you can use to build Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for email or landing page creation. This essentially allows for the codeless creation of content, with drag-and-drop customisation replacing hard-coded development. You can use CloudPages to quickly create a collection of content tailored for different audience segments. For example, a travel business might create a collection of emails or landing pages promoting Christmas getaways, with each variation tailored to the location of the recipient. Existing templates can be easily adjusted and re-used when new and unexpected opportunities present themselves.
Content created through CloudPages can be optimised for mobile, web, or social, and you can send them out either immediately or on a schedule. CloudPages integrates with other SFMC solutions such as automated journeys and AMPscript, enabling seamless, rapid development of new email campaigns.
The objective of using a tool like CloudPages is to free up your creative email marketers to do more of what they’re good at and less of the technical work they’d likely rather avoid. More available time means more scope to experiment, more variations used in split-tests, more time spent monitoring user behaviour and external events and, ultimately more considered and personalised email campaigns. Capitalising on the automation tools made available through SFMC is critical to keeping your audience engaged, staying ahead of the competition, and maximising ROI.
