Cool Things Nonprofits Can Do with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement
You probably know that Salesforce continues to roll out new products and functionality. As our team here at Heller Consulting works on technology products with our nonprofit clients, we get to know these products better and have a clearer sense of what they can do for nonprofits.
In this article, we’re sharing some ideas about functionality in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly called “Marketing Cloud”) that can help nonprofits take their marketing and fundraising up a notch.
Cool things nonprofits can do with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement
Let’s start with what nonprofits can do with the introductory level of Marketing Cloud Engagement, called “Pro” edition. While this level does not give you access to the constituent journey-building tool in Marketing Cloud Engagement, it does give you a lot of cool capabilities including:
- Personalization in email marketing – You can add personalized content to your email marketing communications. So, for example, you might include different information for annual donors and recurring donors. Or, for instance, if your nonprofit offers memberships, you can include information that’s specific to each constituent’s membership level.
- Email approval process – This functionality allows you to build teams and assign submitters and approvers for email communications. It can help to ensure that your team does not send out emails with errors or to the wrong audience.
- Triggered communications – With this capability, you can set up email communications that include personalized content and configure them to send based on some constituent action that you define. For example, if a constituent makes a donation, a pre-configured email can be automatically sent to thank the donor and provide a donation receipt.
- Marketing Cloud Connect – This app sits between your Salesforce Sales Cloud instance and your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance. Once configured properly, it allows the two Clouds to pass data back and forth. So, going back to triggered communications, you could, for example, have Marketing Cloud “watch” for specific activity in your Sales Cloud and when a new contact is entered, you can have that contact automatically entered into a “welcome” email series within your Marketing Cloud.
Another example: Marketing Cloud Connect allows your Sales Cloud users to see useful details, such as the types of messages that your contacts have received and interacted with (or not).
When you’re ready for more advanced capabilities, the “Corporate” edition of Marketing Cloud Engagement offers more sophisticated capabilities, including:
- Journey Builder – This functionality is the type that often comes to mind when marketers think about marketing automation. One cool thing to note here is that Marketing Cloud Engagement comes with a handful of out-of-the-box journey templates that allow you to easily do things like automatically send a birthday greeting on a constituent’s birthday or a thank you note on the anniversary of a donor’s first gift.Using this functionality, you could also do things like create a win-back journey for sustaining donors that have stopped giving. Or send a “heads-up” email to monthly donors whose credit cards are about to expire.
One cool piece of functionality in Journey Builder is called Path Optimizer. It’s a sort of super-charged email journey testing functionality in which you can set up multiple different constituent journey paths (up to 10), test them with a percentage of your audience to see which one performs best, and then automatically move to using the one that has the highest engagement for the remainder of your audience.
- Mobile messaging – With this functionality, you can employ robust SMS text messaging capabilities to do things like text constituents on important dates, send surveys, share a discount code for an upcoming event, and more.
- Einstein – This AI-driven functionality has so much potential for nonprofits – too much to cover in one article. However, two cool capabilities include:
- Einstein Send Time – This capability allows you to determine the best time to send email communications – not to your audience as a whole but to each contact – to optimize email open and click-through rates.
- Einstein Frequency Optimization – With this capability, you can determine how often to send email communications to each contact within a constituent journey. So, for example, this functionality helps you segment your audience by those who you could contact more, those who you should contact less, and those who you are contacting at a good frequency. Again, this capability helps you to optimize response rates.
Learn more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement for nonprofits
This article just scratches the surface of the possibilities of Marketing Cloud Engagement for nonprofits. As Salesforce continues to release new products and features for nonprofits, our team here at Heller Consulting is ready to help you understand these growing options.
We’re knowledgeable about nonprofit technology, including the new Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud. We also have experience working on thousands of technology projects for nonprofits. So, we’re well-positioned to help you decide if (and which) Salesforce products are right for your organization, develop a business case and roadmap, and implement and support the solutions.
Contact us today to learn more and get started.
About the Authors
Adam Kaye
Adam has been supporting nonprofit clients and leading technical teams for more than a decade. At Heller, Adam taps into his robust technical background and strong communication skills to guide his clients through digital challenges and enables them to make the most of digital technology. A veteran of the... Read More
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