Marketing Cloud Implementation: How to Get Ready for Your First Test Email

Speaker 1: Welcome to the In The Clouds Podcast. In The Clouds is a Marketing Cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experience- obsessed, and podcast hosts, Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master meaningful one- to- one connections with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how tos and real life used cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Welcome to the In The Clouds Podcast. I'm Bobby Tichy along with my cohost Cole Fisher. And as a reminder, this is a podcast about the functional and technical and solution elements of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. And today, we're going to focus on, and really starting our series of implementing Marketing Cloud. Everything from licensing to building out the account and baseline configuration, data modeling, all that good stuff. And today, we're really going to start with and focus on the email sending readiness, and really what that means from the start. Once you get your licensing all squared away, to really being able to send out that first testing [ inaudible 00:01:40]. So as we think about the first thing to do, or the first element of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is obviously the licensing aspect of it. So assuming that maybe you're in the process of buying Marketing Cloud, or you're thinking about going down that road. The first thing to think about are the additions of Marketing Cloud. And there are four baseline additions, and essentially it's just the difference in functionality that come with each one. There's Basic, Pro, Corporate and Enterprise. Enterprise being the most powerful and the most feature rich. And this is really primarily thinking of email as that main channel, like we mentioned of what that is going through as far as implementing for Marketing Cloud and what we're focusing on for this episode. And we'll get into the other elements as we go along for sure. But, as we think about those different editions, obviously Basic is going to be the most baseline, just needed to send out emails all the way to Enterprise, which includes a lot of different elements in feature rich functionality, like things along the lines of Audience Builder, which is a next level feature for really advanced and high volume segmentation. So, you can see on the spectrum. And if you go to Salesforce's site, you can actually check it out. And take a look there too at the different ones. So I don't want to spend too much time there, but as you're going through that you can figure out what features do I need to make sure that we're going to be successful in implementing Marketing Cloud and what features do I need?

Cole Fisher: Yeah. And a couple other items within licensing, once you select your edition. You think about super messages and the number of contacts and things like that. And of course, that's going to be really specific to whatever business you are. But we think about super messages as essentially the touch point for any contact. And so, for instance, an email would be one super message. But in higher lift, more workload bearing touchpoints, we would have things like a personalization builder web impression would actually be two super messages. So exposure to that product recommendation is considered a touch point. And so you think about what that super message construct might look like. And then as well business units, when we think about business units, these are the divisions within your own company that tend to match this hierarchy that you have as an organization. So you may have a parent level, which would probably be more executive reporting and things like that. And then you may have a marketing department as one. And you may have a certain line of business as other business units. And so we use the term business units to really delineate what those purposes of each line of businesses and then who has really access, users roles and permissions within those lines of business.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, so the good example is marketing might be a business unit. Operational, transactional might be a business unit. Other elements too, a lot of times people will regionalize their business units. And another way of thinking about business units, Cole was mentioning was, they're essentially sub- accounts. So, their own individual instance, technically of Marketing Cloud. And so you can have someone have access to all business units within your org, or you can have them have access to just one or a couple. You can really build that out however you want. The other thing going back to super messages quickly is that, as you're going through this, and you're trying to evaluate how many super messages do I need? Which will certainly be part of your licensing with your Salesforce account executive. Emails are one super message. So if you send out, 200 million emails a year that equals 200 million super messages. Push notifications, same thing, it's a one- to- one ratio. SMS messages are a 10 to one ratio in the U.S. And it varies across the different countries outside of the U. S. across the world from there as well. So just something to keep in mind. Another thing too are cloud pages. So the landing page functionality of Marketing Cloud. Each impression is included as a super message as well. So, think about your custom preference centers, your landing pages for gated content, different elements like that. You'll all want to include within that super message allotment. When you go and figure out pricing from your Salesforce AE. The other element that's typically included within these licensing portions are what's called the Sender Authentication Package or SAP for short. And this is a combination of domain branding as well as IP address. And so, we'll talk a little bit more about IP address and the pros and cons of a shared versus a private IP here in just a little bit. But essentially what that SAP allows you to do is verify the domain that you'll be sending from, and then tie that to the branding within Marketing Cloud. So, any from email address, any links within your emails, as well as your cloud page URLs will have a domain that's branded specifically to you. So that way nobody knows that you're using an external system or anything like that.

Cole Fisher: And it all starts with a welcome email from Salesforce. So the congratulatory, Hey, by the way, you are proud of new owner of Marketing Cloud. And you receive a welcome email that'll actually be the initial provisioning of your account. So you'll actually have access. So this will typically go to somebody who's a or an or the administrator, that's been identified beforehand during the sales process. This will essentially raise your hand as to, who's going to really be the power user and be the person that's got the master access in setting up other users roles and permissions, and things like that.

Bobby Tichy: Mm-hmm(affirmative). Yeah, primarily the main contact that Salesforce might be dealing with. So keep in mind if you do want it to be somebody else that gets that first initial welcome email, just to let them know, and they'll be able to send it whoever they need to.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, I think there's ever confusion on that. It's because somebody like the CMO is inadvertently signed on as the power user, and he or she may not be the actual administrative user, but they receive this provisioning email. And the people that are actually going to be living in it day to day are still waiting for that email. And a case opens up and they find out that it was just a message that was disregarded, that we assumed that, somebody assumed everybody else was receiving as well.

Bobby Tichy: Right. For sure. So you have something to keep in mind there, that welcome email typically goes to just one person. So important to get it to the right person and Salesforce I'll help you with that. As we get into that, so, you signed your paperwork, you get the welcome email from Salesforce, you get going, or what's next, right? Well, typically most folks will utilize a partner like Lev to implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or an outside consultant, or if you've got experience internally to implement it, that's great too. But it's really important to have someone who knows what they're doing. And it's important to keep in mind that this is enterprise software, right? So there is still so much tribal knowledge, and so many things that you can decrease your timeline for implementation and increase your ROI, all these things are really important if you use someone that really knows the tool. And so as part of that, the first thing that we think about is what we call email sending readiness or account configuration, whatever that might look like. So, as we're starting to figure out who's going to have access to the platform? What domain we're going to use? Should we have a shared or a private IP? And just being able to test those basic elements, it's really fundamental, because it's essential and required before you start sending out your first campaigns, right? And the data and the content, all that stuff, we'll touch on a little bit later, but focusing first on users and roles. And as you build out the platform, if you've got a marketing team, a tech team, everyone should probably have for the most part, different permission sets or things that they should be accessing. And luckily Marketing Cloud comes with some great standard roles. You can also build custom roles, they're actually over 1100 individual level permissions that you can use to create a custom role. They're very rare. Most of the time, 99% of people utilize the standard roles because they work just fine for most folks.

Cole Fisher: And there's so many possibilities with standard roles. There's so many different configurations of these roles, that really you can almost... You'd come up with virtually anything. I had a hard time the other day, trying to think of a reason that a customer might want. They were asking about custom roles. I was trying to think of how they could leverage one. I was like, you know what? Honestly everything that you've laid out in terms of all your business units, in terms of the B2B and B2C sides, everything can really be configured with just standard roles. So your users roles and permissions really don't need anything more drastic than what's already laid out before us. But you mentioned that's part of the tribal knowledge of implementation when it comes to Marketing Cloud. So marketing college is just so robust and has so many features and capabilities that it's really understanding how people have used it in the past. How somebody wants to use it going into the future in the first instance, that you could spend a lot of time developing custom roles. And spinning these things up, not realizing that with just a couple of check the boxes, that we could come up with the exact same types of permissions. Same thing when it comes to shared or dedicated IP addresses. I know this is a big one, and there's not really a recommendation necessarily, because if you have low volume or depending on your lead acquisition processes and things like that, it may make sense to have a shared IP address. The benefits of that is you don't have to warm up a new IP that you're already recognized by ISPs or by the domains that you're sending to. And so that allows you to have that very quick start into Marketing Cloud. So you're up and running very quickly without an IP warming process that usually takes four to six weeks or so, depending on the volume, sometimes even longer, or even having multiple IP addresses, if you have really high volume. But the benefits though to actually having your own IP address is really not only the fact that when you're on a shared IP, your deliverability reputation is really just at the mercy of everybody else on your IP address. So you're sharing these with other companies that you may or may not have any idea who they are, and it's already established before you get involved. And so the more customers on an IP address, the greater likelihood of being blacklisted or having these honeypot email accounts and things like that, that you really need to look out for.

Bobby Tichy: And a couple of things that benchmarks not really recommendations, I guess, more of just best practices around IP addresses. So as we think about a private IP, typically we need to have about a 100, 000 emails sent from that IP per month, for you to qualify for private IP, anything less than that typically will go towards a shared IP. And then on that same front, like Cole mentioned, you have multiple IPs as well. So typically the max for a private IP, I would say, or I think is about three million a day. If it goes over that, then it's typically recommended to go ahead and get another private IP and you can pool those and distribute across the two of them as you're sending out a large send or something along those lines. The other thing that we get questions a lot too, for people who are on another platform like Responsys or Cheetah or Sailthru, whatever it might be, as they're coming over to Marketing Cloud, we talk about IP warming, they ask, what can we bring our current IP address with us? And unfortunately you cannot, the IP addresses are owned by the email service providers themselves. So those specific platforms company, but as you come to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you'll have to spin up a new IP for the private IP recommendations from there.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. And another thing is when we think about multiple business units in that org chart of how our organization looks within Marketing Cloud, a lot of the times we separate these IP addresses based on the functions that they're performing within the business. So, marketing may have a very different IP address than transactional odds are you don't want to have your must have transactionally-

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. That's a great point.

Cole Fisher: Being on the same IP address as what may be perceived as junk mail or spam or promotions or things like that, because it may not very well be that by any functional measure, but if it's perceived at all or could be marked spam, then you don't want that affecting transactional or other lines of business that are going to be sending from different IP addresses.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. That's a great point based on the kind or classification of the messages you're sending, it can also be a great idea to have different IPS there too. And we'll dive into IP warming with one of our favorite consultants in a future episode to really understand the nuances of it and how to approach it the right way. So let's say that you've gotten your welcome email, you're in the tool, you selected your domain for sending. This is the last element that's included on the account configuration piece of what's going to be the from address. And what I mean by that is everything to the right of the @ sign for your default sending from Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So for example, if our website was intheclouds. com, we would want to have either a new domain, most likely, or a sub domain of In The Clouds. So it may be email. intheclouds. com, maybe everything to the right of the @ sign or email- intheclouds. com. Main reason for this is, is we want to be able to silo where this domain is sending messages from. So that way we can counteract any deliverability or elements that may pop up. So a good example is a lot of people will say, well, I use this domain at my current provider, can I just use that? Now, technically, can you? Absolutely. Technically it's certainly possible, but as a recommendation, especially as we start IP warming on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we want to have that domain be something different because if those domains are the same, those email from domains, then it's going to be impossible for us to tell if we do get blacklisted or we're hitting the spam folder, which platform is causing that problem. And then it becomes extremely difficult to near impossible to help remediate, to make sure that we're where we need to be on that front. So as we're selecting that, it also serves as the domain for our cloud pages. So for example, let's say it's email. intheclouds. com, is our sub domain that we select as part of our Sender Authentication Package, that also translates to cloud. email. inthecloud. com as the landing page URL. And then you can personalize it from there as we start to build out some cloud pages. So you figure out your domain, Oh, one other thing I forgot to mention there is people often want to know, how many from addresses or can they make those from addresses dynamic? All those different elements, the answers to all those questions is yes, absolutely. You can have as many from addresses or from names as you want within the platform, as long as the domain is delegated to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and you've purchased that authenticated domain from name. So anything to the left of the @ sign, you can have literally as many as you want. So if we wanted to have, feedback @ email. intheclouds. com or marketing @email. intheclouds. com, just based on where you want that message to look like it's coming from, it can be as many as you'd like, it can also be dynamic. So if you're communicating on behalf of someone, for example, it can populate to their specific use case.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, and that's really handy when it comes to lead gen or lead acquisition, or distributed marketing efforts where you may be sending a journey on behalf of a sales person, but you want things to look like they're actually coming from that salesperson. So we can actually be even beyond just feedback or marketing at so- and- so. com, it can actually be a full blown first and last name of the actual agent or salesperson or whomever this person might be expecting correspondence from.

Bobby Tichy: So you've got your domain set up, you go through the SAP process to finalize that you'll actually submit a form that Salesforce will provide. They'll confirm that your domain is good to go. And if you have a partner or consultant helping you, they'll certainly help you along that path. And then the final step to make sure that your IP address is correct, your domain is delegated the right way. And you're able to log in successfully to send a test email send. And typically we just have this be a text email, plain text, no HTML or CSS is required, but you certainly could do it. And speaking for myself, I almost always use Gmail. So I'll send a test email to myself. And then on the upper right hand side of Gmail, you can do a dropdown and go to show original. And then it will show that your domain passed the verification tests, and then also we'll provide your IP address. And then you can look up the IP address to make sure that it's owned by Marketing Cloud. And that it's the one that you were assigned during the SAP process. So it brings everything together to make sure and confirm that as you continue to build out the account and you move into data modeling migration, all these other elements that the nuts and bolts or the initial foundation is where it needs to be.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, this is really exciting part. This is where you have the cornerstones of at least a framework of Marketing Cloud is in place. Now there's a lot more to be done, especially around data, which lays the entire foundation of everything you'll be doing in Marketing Cloud. But this is the point where ability to send users and roles, permissions is already established. This is the honeymoon like, Hey, now we have Marketing Cloud. We're legit, it's official. I feel like once you've tested it, once you've gotten past that opening email from Salesforce, the welcome email, and you've gone through these processes and actually tested that email. Now there's just a certain new car smell to that experience in that feeling.

Bobby Tichy: It is very exciting. Especially as you go through that whole buying process and you finally get to get your hands on the tool. So a quick reminder as you guys have questions or things come up that are top of mind as we're going through this or other things that you've experienced, please reach out to us at intheclouds @ levdigital. com. Again, that's intheclouds @ levdigital. com and before we sign off, Completely Unrelated. What do you got?

Cole Fisher: I was just thinking about this. Have you ever listened to recordings of your own voice prior to this? I'm sure you've had on- sites things like that where you've recorded and listen to yourself.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, I'm sure I have. I just don't think I've ever really thought about it.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. I used to actually have to do those. And I feel like everybody is this way a little bit, where you just don't like listening to yourself. A, there's a certain point of, well, I just said all this, I know this already. And then B, inaudible listen to your own voice.

Bobby Tichy: Let me stop you right there, because I don't like listening to you.

Cole Fisher: Nobody does.

Bobby Tichy: But no, actually just triggered in my mind when I interned for a software company and they did medical transcription services. And so, the background there is as a doctor, you go and see a patient, you have a recorder, you record your notes of what that was. And then a medical transcriptionist will actually take that recording and put it in actual copy in text. And as part of that internship, a big bulk of what I had to do was create these instructional videos and tutorials for people, these medical transcriptions to use the platform. So I would have to do this whole video and then I'd have to cut it and edit it. So I would have to listen to my own voice all day long during this internship. And let me tell you, by the end of the day, I just didn't want to talk anymore. Because I was so tired of hearing my own voice. So I get what you're saying.

Cole Fisher: Yeah. I'm waiting with bated breath for Salesforce to come out with transcription studio. It's got a legitimate technology. And technologies used to get better in this regard, because there are already transcription services out there. But when I use them... I take some online classes and stuff. And when I use those, I feel like we already know that there's a certain memory imprinted factor when you see, hear and interact with something versus when you just read it in a book. Everybody says that they're hands- on learners, that's a really common thing, but what's actually happening is, when you're using multi- sensory capabilities to receive a message. So when you're reading something and you're hearing at the same time, you're more likely to remember it, because you have more sensory perception to actually store that in memory with. And so there's a bunch of studies around this, but what I noticed is that, I feel like I'm really traveling along well in classes when I'm reading the transcription and listening to the lecture at the same time. And so it should notably be having a positive effect, but with transcription technology, the way it is right now, I'll be listening inaudible and it'll say something about like, well, I'll turn in your textbooks to page filibuster. And I'm like, that can't be right. It's just a random, and then next thing we'll start up and we'll talk about are far from Newgen. It's like, well, I know there's a word in here and I'm hearing this, but now I'm distracted because I can't get the-

Bobby Tichy: Right. And inaudible sort of thing about far from Newgen-

Cole Fisher: Yeah. He start on far from Newgen, man, I'll tell you.

Bobby Tichy: You think about your favorites and those were the good old days, I tell you.

Cole Fisher: All time far from Newgen.

Bobby Tichy: Well, the one thing I was just thinking about was this is actually completely related to Marketing Cloud.

Cole Fisher: Oh, see that's cheating.

Bobby Tichy: I know. I know, but it's fun for me to think about, because any time you start on a new adventure or a new job, it's inevitable that something's going to go wrong, right? At some point something is not going to go the way you expected. And those are really good learning experiences or what I call failures. So when I first started, I started my career at ExactTarget, and I was about a year in and I had just started on the services team as what was called the implementation consultant at the time. And one of my first clients was this regional bank, and this regional bank had an amphitheater where they would have concerts. And so they wanted to be able to have, as you're coming into the concert, there are banners everywhere, Hey, text VIP to this short code and you'll be entered to win a VIP treatment. So it was this really cool solution. So as you're walking into the concert, you text in and then from there you would be able to about 10 minutes after the show started, they would select a winner. And you get to come down and be a VIP, sat in the front row and meet the band crosstalk stuff. Yeah. It was really cool. Right. And this is for those of you who've been around the marketing called Platform when it was ExactTarget, this is the days of SMS interactions before it became what it's now called Mobile Connect. And so-

Cole Fisher: Throwback.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah. And so I built this solution. I was so proud of it. I was excited for, I hadn't heard of anybody else doing it. Where it was going to randomly select this automation was going to run 10 minutes after the show started, is going to randomly select the winner, text that winner, but also text the people at this regional bank. So that way they knew who won. So when they came up to the booth and they showed their ID, they'd be able to identify them. And what ended up happening. I'll never forget this is a Saturday night, I was out to eat. I'm sitting there and I get a text message from the main guy, this regional bank. And it's in all caps MAY DAY. And so I get out of the restaurant, I go home, he calls me. I had made the mistake of, instead of... For those of you who know SQL, instead of doing select top one, when I was testing it, I did select star. So select all. So A, every crosstalk who opted into this campaign as they are walking into the concert, got the alert that they won the VIP treatment. And so the long story short, the leaders at ExactTarget at the time, I am forever indebted to you, because they were completely understanding. The guy at the bank even was completely understanding. And like I said, I'll never make that mistake again, but they ended up having to cough up some cash to that regional bank as part of it and it took a settlement type thing, but they were truly wonderful in how they dealt with it with me, and that regional bank they even said that, going forward we still want to work with you and all that. So it was a really cool experience.

Cole Fisher: I've made some Biffs in my day, but that one that's pretty epic.

Bobby Tichy: That's not [inaudible 00:28:43], so one of these episodes we'll talk about how not to implement marketing crosstalk and go through some of the stories that I've heard over the years.

Cole Fisher: Oh yeah. We can fill a lot of time with inaudible those are the stories.

Bobby Tichy: Well, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.