How can Sitecore data help you build better Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journeys?

What if you could automatically trigger an email to customers with the top products they viewed on your website? What if your website could recognize each individual visitor and optimize its content based on the emails they’ve opened? As far back as 2014, marketers have harnessed the power of behavioral targeting to convert customers and drive revenue. So why are we still getting bombarded by generic ads and email campaigns in 2020?  

When you look under the hood, the issue isn’t usually a lack of data—it’s a lack of connected data. While most companies capture heaps of behavioral data from their CMS, marketing automation platform and CRM, siloed teams and disjointed marketing strategies prevent them from seeing the full picture. As a result, these firms rely on guesswork and one-size-fits-all marketing campaigns. 

To achieve 1:1 personalization across multiple channels, let’s explore four ways marketers can leverage Sitecore behavioral customer data to improve automation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.  

By fusing the power of Sitecore—an enterprise-level content management system and robust commerce platform—and Marketing Cloud—the world’s leading digital marketing automation platform—you’ll unlock the insights you need to drive personalized, anticipatory experiences across the entire customer journey. 

Goals: Track and measure your success 

To beef up your strategy with behavioral targeting, you first need to determine your organization’s marketing objectives—collecting more contacts, increasing leads, etc. To help you achieve these objectives, you can set up goals in Sitecore to track how visitors engage with your website and other channels. These measurable activities can include: 

• Registering for an email newsletter 
• Visiting specific pages 
• Downloading an ebook 
• Signing up for an online demo 

Once you’ve created a few goals, keep an eye on your conversion rates to gauge your progress toward each one. If Sitecore is integrated with Salesforce, you can trigger actions in Marketing Cloud when a customer achieves a goal. For example, you could create a goal to track visitors who have viewed a product page during separate visits but haven’t made a purchase. After a visitor reaches this threshold, you could automatically drop them into a Marketing Cloud journey and send them a personalized email or text message to move them further down the sales funnel. 

Engagement Value: Score every customer action 

Traditionally, marketing automation platforms use engagement scoring to gauge things like lead quality, churn risk and product interest. Scores reflect the actions and behaviors of users on your website. For instance, setting up a call demonstrates a higher level of commitment than signing up for a newsletter. 

By combining marketing automation scoring with Sitecore engagement values, you not only get a more complete view of the customer—you can trigger actions based on every granular activity and optimize your website to continue learning more and more about user behavior over time.  

Personas: Build audience profiles based on their activity 

As users interact with your website and begin to reveal their cards, crafting common personas in Sitecore can help you uncover personalized pain points and bring customers to life. To help you identify accurate personas, we recommend you use Sitecore AI. This machine learning tool recognizes users from previous visits and personalizes content based on demographics and behavior. Common persona groups include: 

• Mutually exclusive: Gender, family status, employment status, location 
• Role-based: Prospect, customer, job seeker, investor, internal employee 
• Topic-based: Potential, interest, likelihood to buy, influence 

Tracking customers with cookie syncing 

In addition to using Sitecore data to trigger actions in Marketing Cloud, you can also sync cookies to complete the single view of the customer. Cookie syncing can help you identify users and encourage them to continue down the funnel. After a website visitor agrees to your use of cookies, they are assigned a cookie ID. This ID enables you to track them across the internet and target them with ads based on the pages they viewed on your site. 

While cookie syncing is a great way to stay top of mind and persuade users to follow through with a purchase, it can be a double-edged sword. We’ve all been pestered with irrelevant ads for products we already researched and purchased. This happens when a company’s CMS isn’t integrated with their CRM. Users are targeted based on their website behavior, but a key ingredient is missing—their purchase history. Marketers have no idea whether or not users have converted, they only have access to their behavioral data. By syncing Sitecore with Salesforce, you get the full picture of each customer. 

1:1 personalization—your ultimate competitive advantage 

At Horizontal Digital, we believe the four pillars to a winning marketing strategy are technology, data, people and process. By connecting your tech stack and aligning your teams, you’ll be well positioned to deliver a personalized customer experience over every channel. In today’s digital world, this is your ultimate competitive advantage. Let’s talk. We’d love to help you turn your vision into reality.