Marketing Cloud Advisor | I'll help you get ROI with Marketing Cloud | Sharing lessons from 7+ years in Marketing Cloud.
Dallas, TX
Joined March 2018
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If you work in Marketing Cloud Engagement, you can be a developer as long as you:
1.) Are Curious enough to ask questions until you get to the root of a problem
2.) Understand how Data Views work (and get familiar with them)
3.) Know how subscribers flow through Business Units
4.) Are familiar with common SQL troubleshooting issues (like fields being too short and data not being able to fit in them, etc...)
5.) Can look stuff up & question every assumption
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Of course there's more, but that's a good start for someone who's a Marketing Cloud Email Specialist or Marketing Cloud Admin and wants to be a Marketing Cloud Developer.
Reading is like the gym for your brain.
Reading a physical book to start the day is a great way to get your brain into flow state.
- Remove your phone for at least 30 minutes when you wake up.
- Read 5-10 pages (or a chapter).
- Let your mind warm up.
In a world where there's endless AI and you don't know if the stuff you're seeing online is written by a human, pick up a book.
Your future self will thank you.
Data360 People need to read this
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi says if frontier models stopped advancing, it wouldn't matter for most orgs because enterprise AI is bottlenecked on context, not intelligence:
"There's no agentic work that's automated the whole enterprise. That has just not happened. Why is that? The real reason is the models are smart enough, but they just don't have the context that exists inside of any organization."
"They have not been in every meeting. They don't know what's in everybody's heads. They don't know all the processes. There's always a couple of employees who know everything in every organization. You go tap on their shoulder, and everybody's like, 'Oh my God, what would happen if he or she quits?'"
"If you just fused that and gave that context into the AI models, just the frontier today, I think there's so much productivity gains you could get for any organization on the planet."
"For that, we actually don't need smarter models... If the frontier doesn't advance, it doesn't actually matter for the vast majority of organizations on the planet. They're just so far behind in the adoption curve of actually automating things and getting value out of this stuff."
@alighodsi
Read the latest Profiles of the Future by @bhorowitz and @mikemcg0 on Databricks & the Future of the Firm: a16z.news/p/databricks-and-t…
Do Marketing Cloud for the love of the game.
Learn about databases because you're interested in it.
Master SQL becasue you want to become a master of transforming data and seeing it transform.
Document everything you do because you love the art of creating new things.
Build just because it's fun to be a builder.
If you do Marketing Cloud for the love of the game, you'll get further ahead and stop seeing it as a means to an end and you'll see every project you do as a little piece of the puzzle towards mastery.
Build a Marketing Cloud portfolio that you're proud of.
Underrated Marketing Cloud Skill:
Following up with people.
It doesn't matter if you build the best solution in the world, if you can't get it to production, it doesn't matter.
You can demo your heart out and show the best solution to a problem, but until you push it into prod and get it running, its just a demo.
You have to follow up with the team to make sure everyone is ready to push to production.
You have to bring it up in your Jira ticket.
You have to bring it up in your daily standups.
You have to advocate for the solution to be built (especially if you already got approval)
Companies are big, and people forget stuff (or they dont have all the info they need) and projects will die if you don't keep following up with people.
Keep following up. It's a simple habit that'll pay dividends in the long run.
Data 360 Native Connectors make it much cheaper to ingest data into Data360
If you're using Marketing Cloud Engagement + Salesforce CRM and putting data into Data360, it's free.
If you were using a 3rd party tool then it would cost money to ingest data into Data360.
You really have to think twice about how you use Data360 and how much its going to cost you because it could be an operational cost that you're not ready for if you don't have a targeted use case.
You can just build things in Salesforce.
There's no limit to what you can build now.
If you want to be a software engineer/developer, you can do it now.
There's nothing stopping you besides your own limiting beliefs.
Information is so easy to access. It's literally up to you to ask the question now.
Data 360 + Meta Ads
Great use case if you work at a company that uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement and wants custom ad audiences to increase ROI on Meta Ads.
Great beginner use case and doesn't require complex setup if you have up-to-date Salesforce Contact Data.
For MC Next to work, you need Data 360
Data 360 is the foundation to clean data in MC Next.
LERN the skill that keeps the lights on.
I call it being the "Electric Company"
You need electricity to do almost anything in modern life.
Be the person who owns the Electric Company and you'll never be out of a job.
Be future proof in the Salesforce ecosystem
Data360 Skills That Won't Be Automated
1. Data Modeling
2. Data Normalization
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You can't get anything out of Data360 if you don't model the DMO's correctly to the Data Stream Data.
And you can't get the right data into a DMO if you don't normalize the data to look the way you want when it lands in the DMO.
There's a lot of money to be made if you can model and normalize your data correctly.
Everything else in Data 360 follows these two foundational skill sets.
Best Way To Master Data360
You have to be in the system
You need a real world project you're solving
You need to search for answers that are relevant to the work you're doing.
If you're doing practice exams or reading help docus for the sake of reading - it's better than nothing.
But it's nothing compared to having a real use case and NEEDING to find the answers.
Anywho - keep learning on Trailhead and help docs to supplement your learning.
But make up a project that you have to solve if you don't have a full time job doing Data360.
Use AI to make up the scenario or start with using Data360 for Meta Ads as a good scenario.
You'll learn a lot if you stay focused on an outcome and what it takes to use Data 360 to achieve that outcome.
5 Step SFMC Email Studio RMM (To Create SF CRM Case)
You Need These 5 Things:
1. Triggered Send Definition (TSD)
2. Custom Sender Profile that uses TSD
3. AMPscript InsertDE() + RaiseError()
4. Data Extension to Log Replies
5. Journey with Case Activity
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Have you used Reply Mail Management to create a Salesforce Case?
Marketing Cloud Consultants Need A Team
A dedicated team
Not a ragtag group working on random projects without collaborating.
You need a dedicated
- Architect
- Developer
- Administrator
- Business Analyst
- Project Delivery Lead
You need Jira tickets to keep track of everything.
And someone to track those Jira tickets and make sure they get done.
You need a daily standup early in the morning.
- To say what you did
- What you’re going to do
- And what blockers you have
So you can keep your projects moving forward with the help of your Marketing Cloud team members
If you expect to get the most out of Marketing Cloud, then you need to dedicate resources to maximize its potential.
Marketing Cloud Developers, What Does A:
- Triggered Send
- AMPscript Email
- Journey Builder with Case Activity
- Data Extension
- and Reply Mail Management in Email Studio
All have in common?
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They help you create a Case in Salesforce CRM from Journey Builder.
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You don't need to use Web-to-Case anymore.
If you have Marketing Cloud Connect set up, you can automatically
1. Create a Case in Salesforce CRM
2. Keep track of everybody who replies to your emails
Just by using Reply Mail Management (and a little bit of setup in Marketing Cloud).
How did that person Unsubscribe from Marketing Cloud Engagement???
If you have no clue how someone got unsubscribed from Marketing Cloud it could be:
Reply Mail Management (RMM) for Email Studio
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Someone could have said one of these words in a reply email and got unsubsubscribed if you have Reply Mail Management for Email Studio turned on.
Could help save you time in the future when doing email testing in Subscriber Preview
Here's the common misspellings that could Unsubscribe someone from Marketing Cloud Engagement
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Unsub
Unsubscribe
Remove
Opt-Out
Leave
Common Misspellings
unsube
unsu
unsubscribed
unsubsribe
unsubscrabe
unscribe
unsubscribe...
"unsubscribe"
unsubscribe!
suscribir
renove
removed
take me off your list
delete me from your list
opt out
optout
laeve
leaved
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I'll put the link to the Reply Mail Documentation for Email Studio in the comments.
Track "Email Replies" in Marketing Cloud Engagement with RMM
10 Steps:
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1. Create a custom Sender Profile with RMM turned on (forward using Triggered Send)
2. Create an email with AMPscript InsertDE()
3. Create a Triggered Send Definition in Email Studio (& use the AMPscript email from step 2)
4. Add the Triggered Send to the custom sender profile (from step 1) and use the Triggered Send you created in step 3.
4. Create a Data Extension to hold RMM Details (The AMPscript email does the InsertDE() function and puts a new record in this DE)
5. Use the Data Extension from step 4 as the entry source for a journey.
6. Create a case in CRM for people who enter the journey (Map the Case fields)
7. Wait 5 min and send a follow up email
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What you get:
1. A log data extension to keep track of everyone who replies to your emails that use your custom sender profile and point to that Triggered Email Send.
2. A Journey that creates a Case in CRM for you and follows up with the person who replied to the email (you can add a survey email later on).
The BEST way to learn AI....
Use it to help you solve real world problems.
You don't have to give it all your data to solve problems.
You can use the tech to help you do what you want.
Ultimately, AI is as useful as the person using it.
If you learn how it can be used and you're using it to help you solve real things, then it has use.
If you're just using it to do basic things and you aren't pushing it to its limits and using LOOPS, .MD Files, Agents, Graphs, then you aren't using it to its full potential
Max it out and solve real problems. Like really HARD problems.
By osmosis, you'll learn how to use it (and you'll become a master of using it to help YOU solve YOUR problems and maybe even other people's problems)
That's how it should be used.
Triggered Send for Reply Mail Management is a life hack (Marketing Cloud Engagement)
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1.) It removes the need for email-to-case in SF CRM (and APEX to clean DMARC-rewritten emails and match to an existing ContactID).
2.) You can extract subscriber details of those who replied to you
3.) You can send a subscriber through a Journey who replies to your emails
4.) You can remove the pesky DMARC Rewrite mess that creates junk CRM cases if you send reply emails to CRM using web-to-case rules.
5.) You can keep better analytics on the people who reply to your emails (and have better data analytics)
6.) If you want to create a case in CRM (without using the Journey Builder Case activity), you can use CreateSalesforceObject() in your Triggered Send email (might take up more processing time)
The beauty of the Journey Builder option is that you can bulk send every hour, and it's less strain on your system
There are options - and as always, it depends on how your company wants to respond to email subscribers.
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I highly recommend using a triggered send to reply to customers with Reply Mail Management in Marketing Cloud Engagement.