All of our clients know just how much we love to build great email campaigns—and we create lots of them. We’re constantly on the hunt for new email marketing automation tools that can elevate our clients’ campaigns with dynamic, easy-to-use functions.
One platform that’s quickly becoming a favorite for us is Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Email Studio, which provides businesses with professional-level email marketing software. It helps you plan, personalize, segment, and optimize customer journeys within its all-encompassing platform.
Our team at obo. Agency has been around the block, and we know a good marketing automation system when we see one. During our early encounters with Email Studio, we were impressed by a number of features that could enhance both the email building experience and the effectiveness of an email campaign once it’s left the nest.
Here are four of our favorite features from Marketing Cloud’s Email Studio.
Template Building
Every good email marketing automation platform contains templates that users can select, customize, and mold into their perfect email. Email Studio is no exception. Its email builder offers two starting options: You can paste an existing string of HTML markup to import a pre-existing template, or you can use its intuitive drag-and-drop editor to build something from scratch. Both methods are comprehensive and perfectly functional.
We tip our hats to the mobile-responsive compatibility of Email Studio’s stock templates. As frequent email builders, we often encounter difficulties in ensuring that design elements are consistent across different devices, from desktops to tablet or mobile views. With uniformity guaranteed, users can spend less time troubleshooting their template and more time perfecting it.
Content Blocks
Not every email needs to be entirely unique. Oftentimes, there are certain brand elements or calls to action that remain evergreen across your campaigns. Email Studio introduces content blocks to make it easier for you to store those elements for reuse.
A content block is just as it sounds: a chunk of reusable content that can be dragged into different sections of an email template. A content block can consist of a single element or several—from text and images to buttons, forms, and code snippets, you can create blocks to your heart’s content and store them away for future use. They’re especially useful for elements that are common to the majority of your emails. For example, if you often feature a call-to-action button that urges your contacts to schedule a call with one of your sales representatives, you’ll want it to be consistent in its appearance, messaging, and hyperlinking.
Content blocks to the rescue! Now, your building process is one-and-done. You can create this button (or any other element) to your liking, save it as a content block, and easily access it anytime you create a new one-off email or template.
A/B Testing
Email Studio offers granular A/B testing that is not commonly found in other email marketing automation platforms. While most allow you to easily test two subject lines or senders against each other, Email Studio goes the extra mile. Now, you can test different content elements or entire emails.
A/B testing capabilities allow you to bring in different content blocks and pit them against each other to determine user engagement behaviors. When your email is ready to send, Email Studio will automatically split your list of contacts right down the middle for A/B testing purposes.
This is an excellent feature to take advantage of if you’re wanting to compare the effectiveness of two different template designs, images, calls to action, or email sections.
Personalization Tokens & Dynamic Content
What would a marketing email be without personalization tokens? Bland, boring, and disconnected! Email Studio delivers on beloved personalization features, which allow for dynamic, unique emails based on a contact’s record information. You can utilize some run-of-the-mill tokens, such as first name or company name, or get creative with more personal touches, like acknowledging a contact’s birthday or job title.
Dynamic content is a game changer for email customization. This feature can adapt the elements of your email based on a contact record’s information.
Here’s an example: Suppose you’d like to include a discount code in your monthly newsletter to contacts during their birthday month. Using a dynamic content block, you can set rules to make sure that the discount code only shows to contacts whose birthday month is the same month as your email launch. Any contacts who are not affected by this rule will receive your normal newsletter, sans a discount code.
This is just one of many innovative use cases for a dynamic content block. You can get even more specific and versatile with enhanced dynamic content, which lets you import a delimited file into Content Builder containing text and image URLs to create bulk dynamic content for your emails. There’s no limit to what you can customize—go wild!
How To Get Marketing Cloud
If Email Studio’s features have piqued your interest (we’re sure that they have), then it might be time to get in touch with our team and discuss if Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the right tool for your business.
Why OBO? With Certified Salesforce Admins on deck and hundreds of hours of experience, we’re the team you can trust. Call us today for your free consultation.
