The Sitecore, Salesforce & Marketing Cloud Round Trip

You may have seen the infographic that shows a lead's round trip between Sitecore, Salesforce CRM, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (or Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua, and a bunch of others). The conduit is S4S which allows the intelligence collected by each system to be accumulated, shared, and then used to increase lead engagement. 

Increasing engagement

Increased engagement translates directly to increased sales, support satisfaction, and customer retention. Engagement is about:

• Knowing what your prospect or customer wants
• Highly personalizing communications
• Frequent and consistent touchpoints

Successful engagement requires finding as much intelligence about each individual as possible. This can be collected as the individual is processed by Sitecore, Salesforce CRM, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The intelligence then provides the fuel to address the individual's needs, personalize sales and support calls, create targeted emails, and deliver tailored content on the website.

What is the round trip?

This is the passage of an individual through various systems as they are moved from one state to another. It is round because the trip ends at the start system so the journey's success, or lack of it, can be tracked. An example is the sales funnel which progresses an unknown person through to being a customer. This journey is very effective using Sitecore, Salesforce, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud.  

Sitecore, Salesforce, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud round trip

The round trip begins when a new lead is created in Salesforce. This can happen in many ways so we need a system that works in every situation. During the lead creation, a unique key (S4SId) is auto-generated. This key becomes a common identity across the three systems. The full process is:

• A new lead is created in Salesforce and given a unique S4SId
• The lead, and the S4SId key, also appear as a subscriber in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This is because leads have been mapped to SMC subscribers
• The subscriber is added to a campaign and emails are dispatched from SMC. The email contains a link to a Sitecore web page. The link has the S4SId as a parameter
• The subscriber clicks the email link which opens a Sitecore web page
• In Sitecore, S4S reads the S4SId and writes the value to the Sitecore visitor record
• Sitecore tracks the visitor's browsing behavior and S4S finds and updates the Salesforce lead record by matching the S4SId. The browsing analytics are now in Salesforce
• Salesforce operators can override Sitecore personalization to further improve the experience of the  lead/subscriber/visitor, perhaps after learning more in a voice conversation
• Because the browsing behavior in Salesforce is also mapped to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, emails can be personalized based on Sitecore browsing behavior

Note the unique key has been passed to all three systems. Sharing the same key lets the intelligence collected about an individual be easily shared with an adjacent system. The key is randomly generated and not intrinsic to one system so it is safe to use in the public domain, for example, as a URL parameter in a clickthrough link in the email body.

Conclusion

Customer connected experiences are now expected experiences. Omnichannel personalization is possible by creating a Salesforce - SMC - Sitecore - Salesforce round trip. This enables the intelligence collected about individuals to be shared with the adjacents systems and used to provide delivery a better experience.

Call us to learn more about how S4S can create greater omnichannel engagement and improve your operational efficiency.