Category: Digital Marketing

Salesforce Winter ’25 Release Notes: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

The Salesforce Winter ’25 Release Notes for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE) introduces various features to enhance your marketing efforts and data management. From the ability to merge duplicate prospect records to expanded content-copying options, these updates streamline your operations and improve accuracy. Explore how these updates can elevate your marketing operations and drive more impactful results.

Find and Merge Duplicate Prospect Records

Keep your database clean and ensure that your marketing team is working with the most accurate information using the duplicate prospect tool in Optimizer.

Copy Forms and Emails to a Salesforce CMS Workspace

New file types for content copying are also supported, including .pdf, .mp4, and .zip.

Gain Insights with Form and Landing Page Engagement Data in Data Cloud

Personalize your marketing efforts, create calculated insights, and build segments through Data Cloud with form, landing page, and tracked web page engagement data. Enable the Account Engagement connector in Data Cloud and then create an engagement data stream.

Create More Data Cloud Segments per Business Unit

You can now have up to 25 Data Cloud segments per business unit when creating dynamic lists in Account Engagement. Previously, only five segments were allotted per business unit.

Open System Email Links in the Lightning App

Improve your workflow in Salesforce and open Account Engagement system email links in the Lightning App instead of pardot.com.

Pause or Cancel Permanent Prospect Deletions

Take control of your prospect deletion bulk action requests by pausing, resuming, or canceling them using the Table Action Manager. This feature is available for deletion requests initiated from the API or UI. Previously, bulk prospect deletions couldn’t be paused or resumed from the UI.

About Corrao Group

Since 2002, we have been helping B2B organizations of all sizes optimize their business processes with Salesforce and their third-party applications. As everyday Salesforce power users, Corrao Group understands how flexible the Salesforce platform is to support every business department. We’ve worked with nearly 1,200+ customers, implementing, customizing, and optimizing over 2,400+ Salesforce projects. If you are interested in learning more about how Corrao Group can help your company, read our reviews on G2!

Salesforce Winter ’25 Release Notes: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Welcome to the Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE), formerly known as Pardot. This update brings pivotal changes to MCAE, changing how you interact with prospects and optimize engagement strategies. Learn more about the latest features and enhancements for MCAE below.

Restrict Which Domains Can Display Account Engagement Assets

To help protect the security of your data, you can now restrict or limit iframing for your Account Engagement assets, such as forms and landing pages. From your Business Unit Settings, you can restrict iframing completely, allow iframing only for specific domains, or have no restrictions. Business units created after the Winter ’24 release have iframing restricted by default. Business units created before the Winter ’24 have iframing unrestricted by default.

Chart Historical Prospect Changes by Feature

Review prospect changes at a glance using the new Prospect Change Monitor histogram in the Account Engagement Optimizer. Easily focus on specific feature areas or view all changes across your business unit.

Restore a Paused Prospect by Deleting Their Visitor Records

Prospects are paused when their activity levels are high enough to impact Account Engagement’s performance. If you have a paused prospect who is important to your business, you can restore the prospect by deleting their visitor activity records. Choose a date in the past and Account Engagement removes the prospect’s activity records before that date. When you remove enough activity records, Account Engagement restores tracking for that prospect. If the prospect exceeds the activity threshold in the future, they’re paused again.

Design Engagement Programs with More Precise Wait Times

Prospects can now wait in Engagement Studio Program steps from 2 to 8 hours. Previously, wait times were limited to increments of days.

Update Email Templates with Invalid Senders

As part of the domain validation requirement from Spring ’23, Account Engagement doesn’t send email templates with a sender address that includes an unverified domain. You can now review templates with invalid senders on the Email Templates page. To continue using the template, change the sender or validate the sending domain.

Remove Unconverted Visitor Activity Records

Free up system bandwidth by removing old visitor records that didn’t convert to prospects. Use the new Stale Unconverted Visitors option in your Business Unit Settings to automatically remove unconverted records older than 365 days.

Account Engagement API: New and Changed Items

Access more of your data with new and updated objects for Account Engagement API version 5. Copy marketing assets from sandbox to production business units using Salesforce Flow.

Updated Objects in Version 5

New Dynamic Content Endpoint
Added support for Dynamic Content endpoint.

Optimized Exports
Improved large export processing speeds.

Query by ID Array
Added support for querying by ID array.

Other API Changes

Copy Marketing Assets Using API Version 5 for Flow
Now you can copy marketing assets between business units or from sandbox to production business units using Salesforce Flow.

New Account Engagement Sandbox to Production Flow
An example flow is included to help you model your own custom copy flows.

If you would like to learn more about the Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, please contact us.

About Corrao Group

For two decades, Corrao Group has stood as a pillar of expertise, assisting B2B organizations across various industries and sizes in implementing and optimizing their business processes through Salesforce and integrated third-party applications. With an unwavering dedication spanning 21 years, we have cultivated a deep knowledge and understanding of Salesforce as power users ourselves. This recognition of Salesforce’s flexibility empowers us to cater to various departments’ needs, ensuring seamless alignment. Our mission is to seamlessly translate your business processes into Salesforce, promoting not only successful integration but also widespread user adoption.

Sources

Salesforce Winter ’24 Release Notes Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

WFH? Invest in Salesforce

Successfully running a company from home requires the right culture, employees, procedures, and maybe most importantly, technology. Some businesses who haven’t invested in a cloud-computing software such as Salesforce have been having a hard time adjusting to working from home. Salesforce is a cloud-based software that provides customer relationship management (CRM) and a suite of apps that go along with sales, service, marketing automation, and more. Salesforce becomes your central location to store all your important data, accounts, and deals. With a newly designed mobile app, take work on the go and be just as productive as you were on your computer. This allows businesses to run their entire company within Salesforce, supporting all departments with real-time data.

Managing Your Sales Pipeline with Sales Cloud

Sales Cloud is a customer relationship platform (CRM) designed to support sales and marketing by bringing all your customer data into one central location. Leverage Sales Cloud to manage and automate day-to-day sales activities including lead assignments, quote generation, forecasting, Einstein Analytics, and more. Additionally, your sales staff will have full visibility into every deal, account, opportunity, customer, and lost deals. Sales Cloud workflows and task automation help you create tasks and a process to help speed up your sales cycle. When implemented correctly, Sales Cloud helps save you time and builds long-lasting customers.

Servicing Your Customers with Service Cloud

Service Cloud is a customer relationship service platform designed to help you manage customer support issues quicker and increase first-visit resolution. With historical data on every customer interaction, your team can personalize your service based on their problems and history. Additionally, Service Cloud offers a multitude of tools to help you meet the needs of your customers. Some extensions for Service Cloud include: Field Service Lightning (FSL), Knowledge Base, Web2Case, Email2Case, and Customer Analytics. When implemented correctly, Service Cloud can improve customer communication, enable team collaboration, and give you full visibility into the health of your customer base.

Automated Lead Nurturing with Pardot

Pardot is a marketing automation platform designed to help companies engage leads and customers, support sales with qualified leads, and grow relationships. According to Salesforce, “Customers have seen sales revenue increase by 34% and marketing effectiveness increase by 37%” with Pardot (Pardot.com). Pardot gives you the ability to personalize your customer’s journey wit automated campaigns, targeted messaging, and predictive intelligence. Additionally, design and create email templates, content, landing pages, and more inside of Pardot. If you would like to learn more about Pardot, please visit our blog.

A Complete 360-View for Manufacturers with Manufacturing Cloud

Manufacturing Cloud gives manufacturers full visibility into their entire business operations. Manufacturing Cloud extends benefits to all your partners to collaborate across the same forecast order and demand data in one single source of truth. New features such as sales agreements gives manufacturers insights into committed and actual order volumes, performance against the forecast, and other time-phased metrics. Forecasting gives manufactures the ability to take control of their business with smarter business decisions based on analytics. If you would like to learn more about Manufacturing Cloud, please read the blogs below:

Virtual Collaboration with Quip

Quip provides your team with a messaging collaboration platform that helps transform productivity and resolves issues faster. Provide your team with the ability to create, discuss, and work faster with real-time documents, spreadsheets, and data that connects inside of Salesforce. With full integration, your employees will no longer have to work together in multiple systems. Quip becomes your central location to collaborate with other employees on deals, documents, and more. Furthermore, Quip has a mobile app to view, update, and work on the road.

Maximize your Salesforce Investment

Since 2002, our Salesforce experience has benefited thousands of clients and projects. We understand how flexible the Salesforce platform is and how it supports every department in your business. The key to maximizing your Salesforce investment is to implementing the platform company-wide. If your business is struggling to work from home without a cloud-based technology, it’s time to invest in a technology like Salesforce.

The Effects of Bad Data

Did you know poor data costs businesses on average around $700 billion annually, equivalent to 30% of the company’s revenue (Salesforce)? Having a powerful CRM platform like Salesforce doesn’t automatically ensure business success. Keeping data inside Salesforce healthy takes a lot of time and effort for your employees. Clean and quality data ensures that all high-level data related to marketing campaigns, sales forecasts, project management, pipeline reports, and dashboards are accurate.

But what happens when the data in the system is unreliable?

What is Bad Data Quality?

Unhealthy data is information in the system that can disrupt a company’s business process through missing, inaccurate, or duplicate data. A recent Salesforce study found, “The average contact database is composed of 90% incomplete contacts, with 20% of records being useless due to several factors, 74% of the records needing updates, and more than 25% of those being unintentional duplicates.” In essence, poor data includes:

    • Missing Data: Empty fields that data is required to be in.
      • Example: Missing phone/email, title.
    • Inaccurate Data: Wrong information put in the fields.
      • Example: Wrong address, phone numbers, emails, titles.
    • Duplicate Data: Contacts, accounts, or leads that show up more than once.
      • Example: Two leads with the same number or email.

IPad showcasing bad data

How Poor Data Effects You

According to RingLead, the 2nd largest issue among Salesforce customers is bad data. Companies start making poor business decisions because of inaccurate data producing misleading results. Here are just three ways that bad data can hurt a company:

    • Inaccurate Reports and Dashboards: Inaccurate data negatively impacts the sales or marketing teams to stay on top of qualified leads or opportunities. Employees could be wasting time on the wrong opportunities. False reports can lead to the company’s top decision-makers making choices based on inaccurate data.
    • Wasted Time and Money: Spending money on campaigns will be inefficient if the ROI reporting is incorrect. Bad data can report that your advertisement campaign only sourced $6k worth of deals when it could have actually been $80k. Not seeing that proper ROI could lead to missing out on the chance to rerun successful campaigns and efforts.
    • Decline in User Adoption: Users might use another system to keep track of their data if they have little to no confidence in the quality of data. Employees tracking data in another system is another example of time and money wasted on a powerful CRM system.

How to Improve Your Data Quality

According to Salesforce, “Because the quality of the data affects the entire organization, data quality metrics should be a company-wide responsibility.” Improving your data quality starts with training employees on the importance of data. The Corrao Group can help you standardize your Salesforce process and implement data requirements throughout your Salesforce sales process. Healthy data brings better results for the company in terms of customer experience, reports and dashboards, shorter sales cycles, and more. Your company can expect great results when employees start inserting data of high quality into your CRM system.

Bad Data across the world in different countries

Corrao Group x RingLead Data Solution

RingLead is the #1 data quality platform for sales and marketing, and has a suite of products dedicated to removing and preventing duplicates, improving data quality, and performing system-wide data scans. Partnering with RingLead has given Corrao Group an easy to use platform to consistently improve lead quality by providing tools to help prospect new leads, standardize records, and clean unhealthy data. Corrao Group ensures your sales and marketing efforts are reaching the right people with accurate information.

Corrao Group Health Check

One of the ways Corrao Group can help your company improve bad data is through a Health Check. A Health Check is a reverse Salesforce system demo to ensure you’re getting the most out of your current investment. Health Checks help ensure your system is up to date on the latest Salesforce release and enable you to learn best practices from a certified Salesforce implementation expert. Corrao Group can help standardize your Salesforce process and implement data requirements throughout your Salesforce Sales process.

Please contact us to take your first step towards optimizing your data and maximizing your Salesforce investment!

Sources

Salesforce.com 

RingLead 

6 Reasons to Use Video in Account-Based Marketing

Videos work because it helps companies stand out from their competitors; they grab the viewer’s attention in a way that a simple email cannot.

B2B companies are seeing higher ROI with Account-Based Marketing tactics (ABM) than they are with other marketing initiatives. Incorporating video technology into one’s ABM program can only boost its success. While those extremely nice and ground-breaking videos we see from Nike, Apple and others are amazing, even simple videos of a rep at their desk can boost ABM efforts. These videos work because it helps companies stand out from their competitors; they grab the viewer’s attention in a way that a simple email cannot. In addition to standing out from your competition, here are six reasons to use video in your ABM efforts:

1. Videos Boost Conversions and Sales

Having a video on your landing page can boost conversions by 80%. With vision being the most dominant sense, it’s not surprising. For sales, 74% of users who watched a product video ended up buying something. In today’s digital world, videos are outperforming white papers and enhancing landing pages to give the customer an easier experience.

2. The ROI is There

83% of businesses report that video provides great ROI. Whether the video’s quality is at the scale of Nike, or a simple product demo, it pays off. As technology advances, editing tools are getting easier to use and more affordable. Companies that don’t have experience in video marketing can easily get involved and start today.

6 Reasons to use video in Account-Based Marketing editing (1).png

3. Video Marketing Saves Time

Consumers are smart, and they know downloading a white paper means going through a sales demo at some point. They also know that it takes time to read and digest the content as the content tends to be more sophisticated than that of video. Showing a video helps viewers learn all they want about a company/solution if the video does the job right.

6 Reasons to use video in Account-Based Marketing camera .png

4. Provides Confidence and Validation

If the cost is large enough, the buyer will have to put their reputation on the line to justify it. Having a case study video testimonial will help the buyer, and their company feel more confident in your solution. Videos are also easier to share and don’t require additional information as white papers tend too.

5. Videos are Easier to Digest

In your busy workday, can you afford to spend 15 minutes reading a white paper, or would you rather watch a 3-minute video to obtain the same info? The average viewer retains 95% of info they watch versus the 10% when they read. Multiply this a few times because your colleagues will be reading/watching this content and it all adds up.

6 Reasons to use video in Account-Based Marketing camera (1).png

6. Communicates Emotion

A personalized video goes a lot further than a white paper, especially when it comes to first impressions. Emotions play a part in making decisions, and personalized videos can build a relationship. When the buyer narrows their choice down to two solutions and can’t decide on which one to choose, having that relationship is going to be the difference-maker.

Anyone can start using video marketing in their ABM strategy as soon as today! Recording a video containing content that would typically be copied and pasted into an email can be your simple start. Don’t have an ABM strategy in place yet? Don’t worry, it’s not required to use video in your outreach. If you’d like to start Account-Based Marketing, take a look at our 5 tips to get started blog post. Visit our website and contact us today if you’d like us to help run, or assist your marketing efforts through our digital marketing agency. We provide marketing services of all kinds, including content creation, paid advertising, filling funnels, and much more.

Top 10 Digital Marketing Terms You Should Know

When starting a new digital marketing presence, a strong foundation is crucial. We’re here to help you understand the most fundamental, but important terms out there. These are the top 10 digital marketing terms you should know.

B2B vs B2C

B2B and B2C are very similar, B2C is business to consumer and B2B is business to business. For example, a B2B company is Microsoft, selling software and electronics to other businesses. B2C is more like Apple, where instead of marketing their products solely to companies, they target and sell them to individual consumers.

A/B Split Testing 

A/B split testing is when you would like to test if one version of your asset outperforms another, similar version. For example, version A of a landing page could have a form at the top of the page where version B has the form at the bottom. Test the pages for a month to see which one outperforms the other, and then stick with it! Changing the text or picture an asset can make all the difference. The more assets you have out there, the more feedback you’ll get on how to create the best version of it.

CTA

CTA is your Call to Action. Usually, a button or next steps that will either give the customer the option to buy a product, give their email, or any other activity that gets the customer involved with you. It should be the biggest and boldest part of your page, it should draw the attention of the customer when they first log onto the page. When a customer first lands on the page and sees the CTA they should want to click on it and see what they need to do to get involved. Creating CTAs comes from asking, “what do we want the viewer to do after reading this?”

Hard Bounce/Soft Bounce 

Hard Bounce is when you email certain customers and the email wasn’t delivered due to a particular reason. The email address might be wrong and have a typo or the recipient could have left the company. Soft Bounce isn’t as bad as Hard Bounce, all this means is that the recipient’s email is full and can’t hold any more emails or the email was too big. If this continues and emails keep getting soft bounced, some systems may mark it as a hard bounce.

CTR

CTR, or Click-Through-Rate, is a statistic that measures the number of times your ad will appear on a site whether or not the audience sees it or clicks on it and also can apply to emails as well. It is comparable to the term “reach” which measures how many people can see your content and impressions, and see how many times your ad/content was displayed. These impressions help build your company’s brand.

Buyer Persona 

A Buyer Persona is a very important part of the sales and marketing process. It gives you the bigger picture of the potential customer you’re working with. This includes the customer’s name, age, interests, pain points, buying tendencies and anything else that would give you an advantage over other competitors trying to gain them as a customer. Use these to help your marketing team write content on how your solution will solve their pain points.

SEO 

SEO is another name for Search Engine Optimization. It is the organic way to move your site to the top of the search engine. In other words, getting to the top of Google’s search results. There are many parts to the SEO such as targeted keywords. These words will match the ones that customers are typing into the search bar giving you an advantage over the companies that don’t have any keywords, bumping you to the top.

PPC

PPC, or Pay Per Click, is similar to SEO in some ways. With PPC, you pay Google to sponsor your ads, making them appear more frequently than others. The more money you give, the higher you’ll be put at the top of Google results. To get more clicks to your website, you’ll want to create ads with the keywords you want to be associated with, small sentences, a picture and maybe an extension like an email to a certain department or the company phone number. 

CPA

CPA, or Cost Per Acquisition, is used to determine how much you’d need to spend to acquire a new customer. The way this is done is by dividing the total cost of your campaign by the total number of conversions. This part is important because it shows how much you are spending on a single conversion. If the cost is too high, try to brainstorm ways to rewrite your marketing campaign.

Hopefully, you’ll be able to walk away from this knowing some vital digital marketing terms to help further your marketing experience. These are digital marketing terms that everyday marketers deal with and know how important they are to be experienced in them. If you have any questions or want to get in contact with us to, please feel free to visit our website and reach out to us. Hope to hear from you soon!

 

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

In its most fundamental structure, marketing automation software is intended to take time away from the most tedious workplace tasks, freeing up bandwidth for more strategic initiatives. With a powerful marketing automation software like Pardot, you can automate sales, marketing, project management, accounts receivable, and more. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of the benefits of optimizing your marketing automation processes, between generating leads, personalizing their journey, aligning sales and marketing, and more.

Lead Generation

Lead generation is a crucial component in any marketing strategy. Artificial Intelligence is giving you the analytics in real-time to find what content leads are engaging with on your website. Being able to track clicks, downloads, and website activity gives you more insight to understand what the visitors are interested in. Tracking customer behavior helps your sales team identify the pain points and needs of your prospects. In a study done by Invesp, “80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in the number of leads, and 77% had an increase of conversion.” Having automated messaging, such as social media, emails, or lead magnets, will create more qualified leads for your company. Automating lead capture allows your marketing and sales team to further invest in strategy and business planning. Once the lead is engaging with your material, it’s time to start them on a customized journey.

Personalized Journey of the Customer

Let’s say you had an ad that someone clicked on and downloaded a lead magnet. The lead can now be put in a customized, automated drip campaign. Developing a library of diverse content to fit any and all of your prospects will serve as the foundation for your automation strategy. Your company saves time each time a prospect is automatically added to a drip campaign with content tailored to their area of interest. This personalized and relevant information to leads provides inherent value allowing you to stand out from the rest of the competitors. However, being able to track engagement with your content is a vital piece of the qualification process.

Accurate and Reliable Data – Reports and Dashboards

Choosing an appropriate marketing automation tool allows you to develop real-time reports in a matter of minutes. With big data you’ll be able to assess the effectiveness of past, present, or future campaigns. Your reports and dashboards, as with many tools at your disposal, will also come into play during the lead qualification process. Pardot’s automatic scoring system scores a prospect based on engagement with all of your marketing assets from email to landing pages to videos. Your sales and marketing teams will then have further insight on your prospect’s existing relationship with your organization paving way for better-informed decision-making in the nurturing process. However, your team may find that you have access to an overwhelming amount of data, and you’ll need a plan for identifying the most valuable among it all. At Corrao Group, we run reports every day to find the data we need to make improvements in our sales and marketing strategy.

Marketing Automation insight

Save Time and Resources

One of the most significant benefits of utilizing marketing automation is the increased bandwidth that comes with it. Imagine how much time you are spending on manually sending emails to leads or preparing posts on your social media accounts. Many different marketing automation tools allow you to have more time to spend on strategic planning to maximize return on investment. Free from the burden of many manual tasks, you’ll devote your resources to creating more engaging marketing content, working with your sales team, and building better relationships with customers. Improved relationships within your team and with your prospects is a win for all parties involved.

This explosion of AI technology over the past couple of years has allowed marketers to leave low-status, redundant tasks to AI while being able to focus on the more prominent creative marketing strategies with marketing automation. When leveraged for its full potential, automation software is not a tool just for sales and marketing. At Corrao Group, we created EZ-AR™, the first automated invoice generation and account receivable collection solution. What used to take hours upon hours of manual work, now gets done in minutes thanks to lessons learned in our experience with marketing automation.

Sales and Marketing Aligned

Disconnected sales and marketing teams plague organizations across industries, but marketing automation can bring the two teams together. Marketing automation provides help to the sales team by improving lead generation, lead scoring, and automated lead follow up for sales. The streamlined qualification and hand-off capabilities of a marketing automation tool connect the sales cycle from start to finish. Collaboration between both teams is vital to have, and the relationship of these teams should only grow closer as they work to maximize ROI at your company. Marketing automation delivers higher quality leads with more context based on the pain points and interests of each of these prospects, and all this before an initial phone call. It’s incredible what your company can do when you have both the marketing and sales team aligned, and working as one.

Marketing Automation sales and marketing become a team

There are many more ways that marketing automation can efficiently and effectively improve your company’s time and revenue stream. Being able to have a powerful tool that can run different parts of your company with AI technology is becoming the norm. More and more companies are moving towards utilizing marketing automation; roughly 51% of companies are already marketing automation users with 58% of B2B companies planning on continuing to use the software or make the switch. Understandably, it can be a lot to handle, and if you would like to learn more, please feel free to contact us. Our marketing innovation combines technology and creativity in a unique experience that attracts, converts, closes, and delights.

How to Build a Structured Content Calendar

Is your content creation team struggling with staying on top of marketing content? If so, you need a comprehensive digital content calendar. Every company, from start-ups to Fortune 500s, can benefit from the structure of a content calendar, so if you’re not using one, you can start to fall behind. Making sure you have planned content posts in advance is one of the best ways to make sure you are providing the consumer with current and relevant information.

Here are our top 5 tips for creating your digital marketing content calendar!

digital marketing assistance

1. Decide what you want to post

When your content creation team begins to build the calendar, they need to decide what kind of content your company would like to post. If you want to post pictures, social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter would be your best options. If you would like to share information about your company’s services, blogs and emails may be best. Do your research on the times that are best to post for each outlet, as you don’t want your posts to get lost in the abyss of social algorithms.

Another question you need to think about is who your ideal audience is going to be. Your content creation team will want to target the content to your audience, so you need to make sure it’s relevant and interesting to get them coming back for more.

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