Month: November 2019

Two Use Cases for SFMC to attain Customer 360

Integrating Marketing Cloud with AWS platform

These days, a significant percentage of customers are using the AWS platform for data ingestion. If Marketing Cloud is using the AWS platform as the source of customer data for the campaign orchestration and the data from the Marketing Cloud system is not syncing back to the AWS platform, it gets cumbersome to achieve a customer 360. The typical process will be to query the data from the SFMC system and manually push to the AWS platform, which will be time-consuming and marketers will not have a real-time sense of customer behavior.

We can build a quick solution without using any third-party connectors. For this solution, we will be using the external SFTP location.

Prerequisites:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service. FTP can be set up for the S3 location. Amazon has started providing this service from 2018.

Steps:

  • Generate SSH key through command Terminal for Mac users.
  • Amazon S3 bucket can be encapsulated with FTP. The FTP will need an SSH public-private key for access.
  • Setup user access with the FTP location. An admin at the AWS side can set this up pretty quickly.
  • Register the SSH key in SFMC
  • Once the SSH is registered, we will register the FTP location as an external SFTP location in the SFMC system

And that’s all we need for extracting data extensions and data extract data directly to the S3 location.

AWS Lambda is a compute service that lets us run code without provisioning or managing servers. Python-based functions on AWS Lambda can be used to read from the S3 bucket and populate the data in the AWS redshift cluster.

 

Integrate Salesforce Audience Studio with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud-based email campaigns can be integrated with the Salesforce DMP platform, known as Audience studio. Salesforce Audience studio was formerly known as Krux and has been re-branded as Salesforce Audience studio. It can read from 1st party and 3rd party data sources and create audience segments with new insights.

A typical use case will be journey based email campaigns. We can send emails to a specific audience from Journey Builder.

  • DMP platform can track the audience across devices and builds an expanded view of the customer.
  • DMP platform can send this enriched data as CSV files to the SFTP location and then Marketing Cloud can use these segments as a source of Journeys.
  • This can be used for re-targeting

The email’s contents will need to have a special tag for the Krux pixels to fire. The tags can be selected from a drop-down in the content builder.