Automations can be used for a number of purposes but we’ve found them particularly useful for running a series of activities to firstly query the data in our Data Extensions, in order to establish an audience for a campaign based on some criteria, and then trigger the running of the campaign for this audience.

The first step to building a campaign will be to build a simple automation in Marketing Cloud’s Automation Studio. Marketing Cloud uses a contact model to provide a single view of a customer’s information across Data Extensions, so let’s assume that this Data Extension is correctly set up with our contact model, otherwise we couldn’t be able use this data in our Marketing Cloud campaigns. The following image shows a simple Data Extension with some test customer entries pushed to Marketing Cloud by our service. Just think of Data Extensions as tables in a relational database. In turn, these messages are mapped to a structure that enables each one to be sent in a POST request to Marketing Cloud’s REST API – the information will be written to a new row in a Marketing Cloud Data Extension. We have built a Windows service that sits inside our Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) in AWS and subscribes to a number of important messages published to our internal message bus. A worked example will best illustrate the problem we encountered when introducing this custom behaviour. We needed to make unique voucher codes available to campaigns from our main e-commerce platform. Fortunately, we can customise the experience and provide the marketing team with even more automation tools. However, we have found that there are many business requirements that still can not be fulfilled by the vanilla Marketing Cloud product. We currently only use a subset of Marketing Cloud’s functionality but it is already proving to be a powerful enabling platform for the marketing team – helping them to build automated campaigns without the need to write code. Marketing Cloud offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data and analytics, email editing, management of social media advertising, interactive website creation, and cross-channel marketing automation. At JUST EAT, we have chosen Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Fortunately, a number of marketing management CRM solutions are available to greatly streamline this process. With the widespread consumer adoption of mobile devices and social media, the number of channels across which marketing operations must be carried out has only increased – meaning data plays a crucial role in creating tailored, cross-channel customer interactions. Personalised marketing has evolved quickly in recent years and customising digital communications based on customer behaviour has become commonplace.

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