Sitecore Analytics and Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sitecore are best-of-breed systems that specialize in delivering a personalized experience to your prospects and customers.

"66% of consumers say they're extremely or somewhat likely to switch brands if they feel like they are treated like a number rather than an individual"

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has powerful tools to send personalized emails to mass recipients. More than a simple "Hi Dave" greeting, Marketing Cloud can deeply personalize the content based on many sources of information. The power of Marketing Cloud is only limited by the data that can be made available to its personalization algorithms and this is where the Sitecore analytics data has great value.

Personalization data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is held in containers called data extensions. Multiple data extensions can be associated with each email subscriber and each extension can contain multiple fields. Data extensions are particularly powerful for personalization because:

• Data extensions can be populated with external data through the Marketing Cloud Web Services SOAP API
• Data extension field data can be accessed, using AMPscript, from inside an email template

FuseIT's S4MC is one way to push Sitecore analytics to Salesforce. S4MC is a Sitecore wizard that lets content editors map Sitecore forms to Marketing Cloud subscribers and data extensions. After new data extensions have been created to receive the Sitecore analytics, any visitor who submits a form can have their analytics pushed to the data extensions in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. After the initial push, a scheduler can be used to regularly refresh the data.

With the Sitecore analytics in the Sitecore data extensions, AMPScript can be used to manipulate email content. For example, the following email template extract personalizes an email based on the Sitecore pattern card that matched the visitor ("Rock" or "Country"):

%%[
VAR @ResultColumn1 
/* Retrieve result - "NAME_OF_DATA_EXTENSION", "NAME_OF_RESULT_COLUMN", "COLUMN_TO_SEARCH", "TEXT_TO_SEARCH_FOR" */
SET @ResultColumn1 = Lookup("SitecoreProfile", "ResultColumn1", "LookupColumn", "Pattern_Genre")
]%%

%%[IF @ResultColumn1 == "Rock" THEN]%%
   Stamp on the stomp box, we love that you are interested in rock music ...
%%[ELSEIF @ResultColumn1 == "Country" THEN]%%
   Well, I declare, we love you are interested in country music ...
%%[ELSE]%%
   We would love to hear about your music interests ... 
%%[ENDIF]%%

While this is a trivial example, consider the value of personalizing emails based on some of the other data stored in the Sitecore analytics database (xDB): 

• Geolocation
• Referral source
• Industry
• Company
• Number of visits to the website
• Average time on the website
• Actual Pages visited
• Scroll movement down the page
• Number of visits to particular pages
• Sitecore goals achieved
• Pattern card matched

FuseIT's experience is implementing personalization using our range of integrations in the Sitecore, Salesforce and Salesforce Marketing Cloud space. To learn more about how to add value to your business in this way please contact us for more information.