Why Salesforce Marketing Cloud training is essential for today’s marketing teams
Marketing teams face numerous challenges in their work, from personalizing customer experiences to proving the ROI of campaigns. In fact, 85% of B2B marketers report that connecting marketing performance to business outcomes is a significant challenge, while only 32% are fully satisfied with how they use customer data to create relevant experiences. However, Salesforce Marketing Cloud empowers marketers to solve real problems effectively. By learning through structured courses and practical guidelines, marketers can gain the skills to tackle common issues head-on.
This article covers five challenges solved with Salesforce Marketing Cloud training:
- Personalizing customer journeys at scale.
- Managing data and segmentation.
- Improving email deliverability and engagement.
- Automating campaigns efficiently.
- Measuring performance and proving ROI.
Challenge 1: Creating personalized customer journeys at scale with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Understanding the challenge
Personalization is no longer optional – customers expect it in every interaction. According to a 2024 Salesforce study, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. While the McKinsey 2021 report shows a similar figure, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized content.
Image source: McKinsey & Company
Marketers feel the pressure to meet this expectation, yet many struggle to do so. According to another 2024 Salesforce report, only 32% of marketers are completely satisfied with how they use customer data to create relevant experiences. This gap between consumer expectations and marketers’ abilities is a real-world challenge: how do you create personalized, data-driven customer journeys at scale?
How Salesforce Marketing Cloud training helps personalize at scale
Learning Salesforce Marketing Cloud directly addresses this challenge by teaching you how to use tools like Journey Builder, Email Studio, and Automation Studio to design tailored customer experiences. You learn Salesforce Marketing Cloud best practices for:
- Segmentation: Discover how to define customer segments based on behavior or demographics and then craft automated journeys that send the right message at the right time.
- Personalization: Salesforce Marketing Cloud hands-on training covers dynamic content and personalization strings that insert custom details into emails. The result is more engaging communication that treats customers as individuals.
- Customer journey: In this training, you get familiar with Journey Builder’s canvas, configuring triggers and decision splits that automate the customer’s path.
By the end of the course, you will know how to practice Salesforce Marketing Cloud in a real-world context: taking a marketing goal and translating it into an automated, personalized journey using the platform.
Challenge 2: Managing customer data and segmentation using Salesforce Marketing Cloud best practices
Understanding the challenge
Modern marketers are flooded with customer data from many sources – sales, service, web analytics, social media, and more. While having rich data is beneficial, it introduces a huge challenge: breaking down data silos and targeting the right audience. When data lives in different systems, it’s difficult to get a single view of the customer or to segment audiences accurately. Without proper data management, campaigns might be poorly targeted or irrelevant, leading to wasted efforts.
As the 2024 Salesforce report noted, having disparate data that is hard to unify and analyze hinders marketing personalization efforts. In practice, this means a marketer might struggle to create segments like “loyal customers who haven’t purchased in 6 months” if purchase data and email data aren’t connected. The result? Blanket campaigns that don’t perform well.
How Salesforce Marketing Cloud training improves data and segmentation
Through Salesforce Marketing Cloud help and training, you learn how to solve this with the platform’s robust data tools. A Marketing Cloud Administrator course dives into:
- Subscriber data management: Learn how to structure and maintain clean, reliable contact data.
- Data extensions and attribute groups: Understand when to use Lists vs. Data Extensions and how to set up attribute groups in Contact Builder.
- Subscriber keys: Maintain unique identifiers that unify records across multiple touchpoints.
These examples highlight what you can expect to apply after you learn Salesforce Marketing Cloud online through structured courses.
Challenge 3: Improving email deliverability and engagement with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Understanding the challenge
Email deliverability and engagement remain critical challenges in digital marketing. A beautifully crafted campaign is pointless if it lands in spam or if subscribers ignore it. Unfortunately, many marketers struggle here – factors like sender reputation, list hygiene, and content quality all influence whether an email gets opened or even delivered.
Consider these real-world 2024 insights:
- Nearly 1 in 6 marketing emails never reach the intended recipient’s inbox.
- On average, about 16.9% of emails either go to spam or get blocked entirely.
These statistics underscore how challenging it can be to simply get in front of your audience. Moreover, 61% of email marketers in 2023 believed that deliverability is getting harder.
Image source: Validity
Even after reaching the inbox, getting the subscriber to open and click is another hurdle, which depends on relevant content and timing. This is where Salesforce Marketing Cloud training material and best practices are invaluable.
How Salesforce Marketing Cloud training boosts email performance
In a Marketing Cloud Email Specialist course, you learn the factors that affect email deliverability and how to optimize them, for example:
- Sender authentication measures: Help email providers trust your messages.
- List management techniques: Keep your subscriber list clean (removing bounces and inactive addresses).
- Email marketing best practices for engagement: Crafting effective subject lines and pre-headers, using mobile-responsive email design, and testing your message.
These are practical skills that directly translate to better deliverability outcomes.
Challenge 4: Automating marketing campaigns for efficiency and consistency
Understanding the challenge
Marketing teams often find themselves repeating manual tasks, which can be time-consuming and prone to error: scheduling emails, pulling lists, and sending follow-ups. Automation is the solution, and it’s a challenge and opportunity in one package. The challenge lies in implementing automation correctly.
The opportunity is huge, as automation frees up time and ensures no leads or customers slip through the cracks due to human forgetfulness. Studies show just how impactful marketing automation can be, and its importance is hard to overestimate:
Image source: The CMO
Routine tasks like welcome emails, birthday messages, or post-purchase follow-ups can all be automated. Yet, for someone untrained, using a powerful platform like Marketing Cloud to automate these tasks might feel daunting. Without guidance, one might not know where to start or how to use the tools optimally.
How Salesforce Marketing Cloud training enables smarter automation
Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides robust automation capabilities through Automation Studio and Journey Builder. And with proper training, you learn to leverage these to their full potential.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud online course will teach you about:
- Automation workflows: Learn how to build data-driven workflows for tasks like nightly imports and triggered sends.
- Behavior-based journeys: Explore designing multi-step customer journeys that react to user behavior.
- Onboarding and retention flows: Automate common flows like welcome series and re-engagement campaigns.
Once configured, the system handles the workflow automatically. This saves time, improves consistency, and ensures each customer receives the intended touchpoints in the correct order.
Challenge 5: Measuring campaign performance and proving ROI with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Understanding the challenge
Finally, one of the most pressing real-world challenges for marketers is measuring the success of campaigns and demonstrating marketing ROI. After all the effort put into an email or journey, stakeholders want to know: did it work? How much revenue or engagement did it drive? Many marketers struggle to answer these questions in a concrete way.
2023 studies show that 85% of B2B marketers say that connecting marketing performance to business outcomes is a significant challenge for their organization. This difficulty in connecting marketing actions to business outcomes can make it hard to justify budgets or decide where to focus next.
How Salesforce Marketing Cloud training supports ROI tracking
Salesforce Marketing Cloud includes tools for tracking and analytics, but without training, a user might not utilize them fully. Through Salesforce Marketing Cloud training classes, you explore:
- Performance tracking: Understand how to monitor open, click, bounce, and unsubscribe rates using Email Studio dashboards.
- Conversion and attribution: Find out how to configure conversion tracking that might involve integrating with Google Analytics or using Marketing Cloud’s own Einstein features, Analytics Builder, or even Marketing Cloud Intelligence.
- Real analysis scenarios: Practice interpreting data with Salesforce Marketing Cloud certification questions that cover topics from the complete Salesforce Marketing Cloud certifications list.
These Salesforce Marketing Cloud exam questions mirror real decisions you’ll make on the job when analyzing campaign results.
This hands-on Salesforce Marketing Cloud practice exam not only prepares you for the test but also reinforces your ability to evaluate campaign performance logically.
Conclusion: Empowering Marketers to Solve Real Problems with Training
The best way to learn Salesforce Marketing Cloud is through effective training that turns challenges into opportunities. By mastering the Marketing Cloud platform through structured learning, you’ll be ready to handle each of the challenges that we mentioned in this article with confidence and skill. This journey continues as you apply these skills, pass the Salesforce Marketing Cloud exam, earn respected credentials, and deliver tangible results for your company’s marketing efforts.
Key Takeaways
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is easy to learn with structured training that prepares you to:
- Personalize at scale: Build automated, personalized customer journeys using Journey Builder.
- Manage data effectively: Unify customer data and create precise segments with tools like Data Extensions and Contact Builder.
- Improve email deliverability: Boost engagement by mastering sender authentication, list management, and email design best practices.
- Automate for efficiency: Use Automation Studio to create workflows that save time and ensure consistent campaign execution.
- Prove ROI: Measure campaign performance and demonstrate value using built-in analytics and conversion tracking tools.
Start Your Salesforce Marketing Cloud Training with a Focus on Force
Focus on Force offers Salesforce Marketing Cloud course online resources that reflect the structure of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud certification exam and real business scenarios, including:
- study guides,
- interactive lessons,
- practice exam questions.
If you’re looking to get started, consider Focus on Force courses, which will help answer the question of how to learn Salesforce Marketing Cloud in a convenient online format.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Administrator courses provide comprehensive study material, hands-on training scenarios, and realistic exam questions that together serve as the best Salesforce Marketing Cloud course experience for those certifications.
