What Happened To Your ExactTarget Marketing Data

Do not leave 1+ Billion ExactTarget (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) Events Untapped

Salesforce marketing cloud platform (SMC), formerly known as ExactTarget, is a leading platform to help improve the investments you make into email marketing efforts. ExactTarget was a Salesforce acquisition a few years back which was intended to bolster marketing capabilities within the Salesforce platform.

What is ExactTarget? The Salesforce Marketing Cloud

ExactTarget is used in digital marketing, social media, and customer service. Salesforce describes it as an interactive marketing hub with a dose of marketing automation. Brands such as JetBlue, PlayStation, and Best Buy are using the service.

A big part of the Salesforce Marketing is Email. Why is Email so important? It is consistently ranked by marketers as the most effective channel to reach potential customers and engage existing ones. In fact, 72% of Americans prefer to communicate with companies via email, according to Business2Community.

ExactTarget marketing cloud Salesforce integration: Unlock your data

Having 1+ billion transactions may seem like a big number, but all of those customer contacts via email start to add up in Salesforce Marketing Email Studio. For every send, there can be a halo of 10–20 additional email transactions generated. Even with a modest send volume of 50–100 million, you can be pushing close to the 1+ billion transaction threshold.

Salesforce marketing cloud use cases?

ExactTarget email tracking represents various performance data points. For example, a person opening an email can have 10,20,30…different data points associated with that single event. Understanding performance means looking at all aspects of your email, including all the data associated with these events. Here are a few examples of various data points typically associated with events:

• Day and Time Sent
• Send Count
• Delivered and Undeliverables
• Campaign and Promotions
• Personalization/Customization/Versioning
• A/B Tests
• Location/Geography
• Bounce rate: Block, Hard, Soft, Technical and Unknown types
• Opens, Unique Opens, Open Rate,
• URL Clicks, Unique Clicks, Click-Through Rate
• Unsubscribes and Unsubscribe Rate
• Deliverability Score
• Conversion and Conversion Rate
• Shares (forwarded emails)
• Survey Responses
• Complaints (spam flags)

Use Case: Salesforce marketing cloud automation for Best Buy

Best Buy is a multinational consumer electronics retail brand and one of the largest ExactTarget users. How does Best Buy get to a billion email events? In addition to transactional emails for eCommerce, they also have 30+ million members in their loyalty program. Over the course of a year, all of that data adds up, quickly.

ExactTarget email campaigns

Best Buy will deliver the various type of emails based on behavior, season, and product windows. We included the Best Buy calendar using Mailcharts (which focuses are promotional emails):

Best Buy Email Calendar

ExactTarget transactional emails: Different Types

For a little more context, we can take a look at examples that drive those event volumes.

• Welcome emails: Emails that are a starting point of the company’s communication with the customer.

What you can learn from the data? You may get an insight into how people would likely be engaged with your messaging by looking at the open rate and times when email was open. Which call to action was more engaging? Where visitors go right from your email? What can you change to drive more engagement?

Best Buy welcome email

• Special announcements and company news: These include anything related to the company such as special dates, happenings, changes to the terms of services, partnership, and co-marketing program emails.

What you can learn from the data? From the performance of this type of email, you can learn who would be the most loyal customers and would be willing to promote and spread the word about your product. If people are interested in what’s going on in the company it is a good sign.

• Promotional emails and campaigns: These types of emails include product announcements, holiday, seasonal, and daily sales. Best Buy has those sent on a daily basis and features multiple product deals:

Best Buy Promotional Emails

What you can learn from the data? The performance of these types of emails will help you understand customer needs and build more personalized communication and campaigns such as special offers.

• Special Offers: This type of emails refer to the deals based on customer profile, for example, birthdays, flash sales, a year with the company mark, discounts based on purchases.
• Shopping cart abandonment: Emails to remind the customer they have not made a purchase yet.

What you can learn from the data? Cart abandonment email is your chance to bring the potential purchaser back to your site. Just like welcome emails, you should keep an eye on these emails to adjust your message by testing and analyzing, so you can achieve your goal.

Best Buy Cart Abandonment

• Transactional emails: These emails include receipts, confirmations, password resets, alerts such as balance amount, subscription renewals, etc.

What you can learn from the data? Transactional emails may serve as a good assistant to drive more engagement if you include products related to what has been purchased. See how Best Buy is leveraging these opportunities by including links to help topics and special offers. Remember when you analyze performance data you may find that customers would appreciate more receipt-like emails, so make sure to test transactional emails too.

Did you know you can get ExactTarget data extract activity sent to your data warehouse or a data lake? Openbridge has an ExactTarget marketing cloud Salesforce integration which allows you to migrate all your SFMC ExactTarget tracking extracts.

Best Buy Confirmation Email

Employing Tools To Understand Performance

Basic email reports residents in ExactTarget are serviceable for a quick peek at the activity. However, if your goal is to understand the performance of your email efforts you need the data and the right tools for the job. This is true even if you are a fraction of the scale of a Best Buy. Remember, your data is a treasure trove of insights waiting to be discovered, you just need to unlock the value stuck in the Salesforce systems.

Salesforce marketing cloud connector: Data extract + ExactTarget

Access to data becomes an issue at scale, especially for teams who are using analytics tools. Without simple access to the underlying Salesforce Email Studio data, performance insights are difficult to obtain. The good news is that Salesforce provides a means to export all of your rich transactional for use in an external data warehouse.

Salesforce marketing cloud analytics: Self-service data visualization for ExactTarget reports

We have structured and modeled the available data to be easily consumed by your preferred analytics tools. We make it easy to leverage all of your Salesforce marketing cloud campaigns in a preferred analytics tool. With data in hand, you have many choices to undertake the analysis. It is not uncommon for teams might choose powerful self-service data analytics and BI tools like these:

• Tableau + Salesforce marketing cloud: https://www.tableau.com/
• PowerBI: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/
• Grow: https://www.grow.com/
• Mode Analytics: https://modeanalytics.com/
• Periscope Data: https://www.periscopedata.com/
• Redash: https://redash.io/
• Chartio: https://chartio.com/
• Looker: https://looker.com/

Other teams may choose R, SAS, SPSS, Stata, SQL, Python, Java, Ruby, Pig…to chew on the data. Regardless of your choice of tools, you can’t get very far with data analysis if do not have access to the underlying Salesforce Email Studio data.

We Can Help You With A ExactTarget marketing cloud Salesforce integration

Openbridge has developed optimized systems that allow you to aggregate email data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Our Salesforce marketing cloud architecture supports a code-free, fully automated migration of your data to a private data warehouse or data lake. This includes all the heavy lifting relating to data collection, processing, and storage of all the data points available within any ExactTarget tracking extract.

For more information about email performance data points and how those are accessible within ExactTarget or Salesforce Email Studio read our past article Two Ways to Harness Your Salesforce Email Studio Data.

We have launched a code-free, zero-admin, fully automated Salesforce marketing cloud integration to leading cloud warehouses and lakes.

Get started with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, Redshift Spectrum, or Amazon Athena for free!

DWant to discuss how to leverage Salesforce marketing cloud integration for your organization? Need a platform and team of experts to kickstart your data and analytic efforts? We can help! Getting traction adopting new technologies, especially if it means your team is working in different and unfamiliar ways, can be a roadblock for success. This is especially true in a self-service only world. If you want to discuss a proof-of-concept, pilot, project or any other effort, the Openbridge platform and team of data experts are ready to help.

Reach out to us at hello@openbridge.com. Prefer to talk to someone about ExactTarget? Set up a call with our team of data experts.

Visit us at www.openbridge.com to learn how we are helping other companies with their data efforts.