The boundless potential of data and technology has inspired today’s marketing leaders to set large goals for their enterprises. Marketing leaders are constantly innovating to bring experiences that attract, retain, and grow more valuable customer relationships. Many are investing heavily in technology to make that happen, and it’s critical that the technology they select supports their operations in service of their most important goals.

It’s no wonder that many enterprise leaders turn to Salesforce Marketing Cloud to make it happen. Built on Salesforce’s leading CRM software, Salesforce Marketing Cloud presents a powerful platform to help you understand and engage customers and drive value across the customer journey – using a host of tools to build customer journeys, harness insights, connect data, activate campaigns, and measure success, etc.

The content for these interactions needs to be automated everywhere possible to deliver personalization efficiently, at scale. To enable this automation, CRM teams need the tools to analyze data from across the enterprise, not just from traditional CRM channels; each effort poses a real challenge.

For years, Merkle has helped companies achieve their visions by delving further into Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Here are two practical examples of how it can solve difficult business challenges:

1. Automating the Customer Journey

For brands looking to provide behavioral, trigger-based interactions across channels, Salesforce’s Journey Builder and Marketing Cloud can help integrate other tools in the Salesforce environment.

Merkle recently worked with a major cosmetics brand to help the brand move from batch-and-blast communications to an automated, trigger-based program, delivering personalized interactions across the entire customer journey. The company wanted to build value with each interaction, leveraging multi-channel campaigns across various channels (email, mobile, social, direct mail, etc.). Journey Builder can construct all of the timing and steps so there is consistency in messaging and timing to create a fully automated workflow. This resulted in automation across twenty-seven of the cosmetics brand B2B and B2C brands, from purchase to reactivation, with the entire customer life cycle in mind.

2. Enabling Excellence in Email Marketing

To power more effective email marketing campaigns, many organizations seek to build an email center of excellence, which would be customer-centric, enable centralized email delivery, and deliver dynamic email campaigns. For a major hospitality brand, this meant expanding the footprint on Salesforce Marketing Cloud for several lines of business. Merkle was enlisted to help integrate marketing data and campaigns from the brand’s multiple lines of business (e.g., host, guest) onto the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Merkle also helped the company launch an email center of excellence by building business kits for centralized delivery of email. Major operational hurdles were overcome when building technical kits to launch various lines of business on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Want to learn more about the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Check out our new eBook here to more examples of brands who are leveraging it to take on complex business challenges.