Unpacking Salesforce: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Across all industries, email marketing provides an invaluable way for companies to reach and engage their audiences. Today, 82% of marketers worldwide use some kind of email marketing strategy. With email marketing revenue sitting at 7.5 billion dollars in 2020 and projected to reach as high as 10 billion in 2023, it’s safe to say that successful email marketing campaigns are fundamental to business success. 

This is where Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot), a part of Salesforce’s solution for Marketing, serves an essential function. 

Without a digitalized infrastructure, the efficacy of email marketing – and other marketing efforts – tends to be limited. Leaders need a solution that dissolves silos across departments, allowing teams to collaborate strategically and efficiently throughout the conversion funnel. Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is an industry-agnostic product that does precisely that.

What is Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (or Pardot)?

Account Engagement is primarily known for facilitating strong, personalized email marketing campaigns. However, the true scope of its capability is considerably larger.

Like other Salesforce solutions, Marketing Cloud’s Account Engagement helps create a single source of customer data among departments, aligning sales and service with marketing toward the common goal of conversion. All the while, the product’s unique slate of engagement tools work throughout customer journeys to facilitate faster and more organic conversions. Some of those tools include:

• Lead Tracking and Scoring: Once a marketing team sets scoring criteria within Account Engagement, every potential account that interacts with the company will receive a grade based on the likelihood of further interaction. This helps marketers identify and target the warmest leads from the outset.
• Engagement Studio: With this tool, marketers can pre-program responsive, lead-nurturing paths to guide prospects through the sales funnel.
• Email Segmentation Lists: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement allows teams to quickly and efficiently create new email lists, as well as add or remove contacts from those lists.
• Lightning Email Builder with Drag-and-Drop functionality: Account Engagement empowers marketers to create custom-made email marketing campaigns with a vast array of templates and tools.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s toolbox of automated processes and personalized assets allows marketers to develop engagement hooks at every stage of a customer’s journey. The initial point of contact — a personalized email sent to a warm lead — transitions into an automated, pre-programmed path that organically takes the consumer to sales and beyond. With marketing, sales, and service operating off the same centralized data, all departments can work together for a faster, smoother conversion of warm leads.

How Salesforce leads consumers throughout the conversion funnel

Good interdepartmental communication is always a net positive for any organization, as silos create confusion and slow down operations. However, leaders might struggle to visualize how Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can facilitate the roles of each department throughout the conversion funnel. A brief exploration of one possible path follows below:

1. Marketers utilize Account Engagement’s advanced lead scoring and tracking capabilities to identify priority prospects for the sales department. 
2. The team uses Engagement Studio and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s Lightning Email Builder to craft a personalized campaign to draw engagement and pre-program consumer journeys based on their responses.
3. Marketers send out targeted marketing campaigns to high-scoring potential clients that lead them through automated, personalized journeys, turning potential prospects into interested, engaged parties.
4. Marketers assign those prospects to particular sales reps, hastening the conversion process and connecting customers with knowledgeable staff. 
5. Sales leads the customer through the purchasing process, keeping the consumer engaged through the end of their journey – and, if all goes well, the beginning of their next.

Optimally, the customer’s journey will not end with a single purchase. With each customer’s purchasing history tracked in the Salesforce system, Marketing can send emails designed to encourage subsequent transactions. It’s also worth noting that the entire customer journey is recorded and stored within the Salesforce system — thus making it easy for the service department to pull up customer information and address any customer issues, questions, or concerns.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement adds value across industries

Like other Salesforce solutions, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s benefits aren’t just applicable to one industry. Wherever customer journeys suffer from siloization and companies lack market visibility, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can refine processes. A brief examination of how Account Engagement can address pain points in various industries follows below:

• Healthcare - With Account Engagement, providers and payers can transmit personalized, cross-channel content to beneficiaries to keep them engaged in their healthcare journey. 
• Manufacturing - Using Account Engagement, companies create custom digital journeys for partners and customers. Automation capabilities can also make routine tasks and outreach less hands-on; for example, mobile-optimized custom forms might capture leads at trade shows.
• Financial Services - Account-based marketing allows companies to track how each account holder interacts with marketing efforts, and tailor future offerings based on the messaging topics consumers engage with the most.

Though the configuration of Account Engagement might differ from sector to sector, this industry-agnostic solution provides the same results – increased pipeline and market visibility, new marketing personalization and automation capabilities, and faster journeys through the conversion funnel. Using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, companies can create the loyalty-generating, omnichannel shopping experiences customers crave.

If you’re interested in how Marketing Cloud Account Engagement can revolutionize your company’s marketing efforts, give us a call to start a personalized journey with one of our consultants.