Pass Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Email Specialist Exam in First Attempt Easily

Email Marketing Best Practices

1. CAN-SPAM Explanation

In this section, I'll be talking about CANSPAM requirements. What is the CANSPAM Act? It's a law that sets these rules—the rules for all the commercial emails. This law establishes the requirements for all commercial messages. It gives the recipients, as in the customers or your subscribers, the right to have you stop emailing them, and it also spells out very tough penalties for all violations. So these are basically the rules that you have to follow while sending any commercial emails from Salesforce Marketing Club. In fact, this not only applies to Marketing Club, but these are general rules. So even the salesforce has to follow these rules. So the Can Spam Act imposes much stricter requirements on commercial emails than on transactional emails. So these are more for all the commercial emails in the promotional emails that you will send out to your customers than the transactional ones. These or all of these might not be applicable. So we'll look at what is applicable for the commercial emails and what is applicable for the transactional emails. So there are six spam requirements. So the first one is accurately identifying the sender in the header information. That is, you should not use any false or misleading header information. By header information, we mean your from name, the to email address, the reply-to email address, and all the routing information that you put in an email. It should be; it should be the right information; there should not be any misleading header information, including the originating domain name and email address. These all must be accurate, and you should identify the person or business that sent this message. So that is Rule Number One. And then second, use a subject line that accurately represents the content of the email; don't use any deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message. If your message says it's a promotional email, then the subject line should also be in relation to that content. Then the third one would identify the message as an advertisement unless you had express consent from the subscriber. So again, this is related to the content, so you should identify the message as an advertisement. But the law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, and you must still disclose clearly that your message is an advertisement. Then, very importantly, include your physical mailing address in the email. Generally, you put the physical mailing address at the bottom in the footer of the email. So it's a must that you include your physical mailing address. So you must tell your reception where you are located. So your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a postoffice box you have registered, or any private mailbox you have registered with a commercial email receiving agency. And the next one is that you should provide a mechanism for the subscribers to opt out, so you cannot require a subscriber to login or visit more than a single page to unsubscribe. So your email body or your email content should have an unsubscribe link, and once they click on it, they should be able to see the preferences and be able to log out as in "unsubscribe" from your email. Within that page, there should not be more than a single page to unsubscribe. So you should tell your subscribers how to opt out of receiving future emails from you. Your message must include a clear explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. You can grab the notice in a way that's easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, or understand. And you should also give a written email address or another easy way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. Sometimes you may also create a menu to allow the recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, let's say like weekly messages or your monthly newsletter, so you can give them these options. So this is all within the law, but the point here is you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you and make sure your spam filters don't block these opt-out requests. Once you have this opt-out mechanism, the last point is in relation to the fact that you should honour your opt-out request promptly. That is, you must process all the unsubscribe requests within ten days, and your unsubscribe mechanism must be operational for at least 30 days after the mailing. In addition, you may not charge a fee or require the recipient to provide personally identifying information other than the email address as a condition for honouring an opt out request, nor may you require the recipient to take any other action other than sending a reply email or listing a single page on the Internet. So once people have told you that they don't want to receive your messages, you can't sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. So you have to honour the request very promptly. So there you have it, the six requirements for commercial messages. Let's look at transactional messages. What is a transactional message? Let's say if a customer orders a product from your website, the receipt that you send via email is a transactional message. So the rules that apply for your commercial emails will not apply to a transactional email. So which one applies for transactional messages? because the main purpose of this transactional message is to communicate transactional content and is mostly exempt from all the requirements except the first one. So that is to accurately identify the sender in the header information. So this is the only spam requirement for your transactional messages that you have to follow. The dollar sign can be ignored for these transaction messages. So now the question is, how do you identify, when you build an email in MarketingCloud, whether this is a commercial email or a transactional email? Salesforce Marketing Cloud has "sent classification," which is a combination of your sender profile and delivery profile. So if you remember, in the sender profile, you have the header information or the sender information, so you are accurately identifying the sender in that, and using the sent classification, you can tell the system whether this email is commercial or transactional in nature. So once you define the send classification, all the Internet service providers will process your messages or emails using that. So in short, there are six cancer requirements that you need to follow for your commercial emails. These are very important. Your certification questions will be based on them. For example, they would give you four options, one of which would be different from the six options we discussed, and sometimes the questions would be like a transactional message and what the spam requirements were that you needed to follow. For that, you have to choose just one option, and that is to accurately identify the sender. So that's all for camp requirements.

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Email Content Creation

1. Content Personalization Explanation

In this section, I'll discuss content personalization in marketing cloud. There are two types of content: static content and personalised content. This is nothing more than the text or images that you use to build an email. So in your email, there could be static text or personalised content. So the text or images that does not change in your email irrespective of the customer attributes or the subscriber attributes, that is called static content. For example, the company logo at the top of your email or the social links at the bottom of the email like your profile center links or the subscription links or the unsubscribe links. So these are like static content. These do not change for every customer because every customer would view the same logo, every customer would view the same links. So basically you can say the header and footer or your static content. What is personalized content. Personalized content are the text that varies forever customer like the name in the email. Let’s say if your company has a membership program then the membership ID or your account ID and let’s few companies have like the loyalty rewards program. So the balance, the point balance would vary for every customer. So these are like personalized content or dynamic content. So the content which varies based on the customer, it is called the personalized content. For example, dear customer, instead of using customer as a static text you can change that customer tousle the real first name of the customer. So dear Manish like Dear John so these are like personalized content in that email and other example is your current membership points or XXX. So instead of XXX you would show the reappoint balance of that customer and sometimes you can also have different images shown for different customers. So this is like changing the entire content block. So within personalized content you could be changing the static text or personalized strings like customer name, membership ID’s that is one type of personalized content. The other type of personalized content is you’d be changing the entire content block. So I'll explain this in detail with a real example. So here is your email, at the top youkan see there is subject then there is preheader. So if you look at the subject line it says hey, then there is a personalized string last name thanks for being a part of us. So as you can see instead of writing like Dear customer, hey customer you’re giving the personalized string there. So this is an unscripted string. So when you send this to a customer the last name would replace with the real last name of the customer because your data extension would have the last name field, it would pull that information from your data extension and display that value in the email. And the other example within this emails dear first name, last name. Again, these are personalized strings. And then what is the static content in this? So you can see there is the header image and there is also text. Thanks for being a part of our esteemed inner circle. There is no personalization required for this. So these are like static content, which would not change for every customer. Again, I would like to highlight. Within personalized content, there is dynamic content. Here you are changing the entire image for every customer. Let's get deeper into this. This is the email build screen. As you know, there is three stepson billing and email defined properties. You add content and you preview and test’s here we are in add content screen and we have added the content blocks into this email. And we have the dynamic content block here. When you click on the dynamic content block on the left hand side, you can see there is a default content. So that means you have selected an image to display for everyone who received this email. Generally, if it's normal content blocked, every customer would see the same image. But what dynamic content here does is you add a rule to this. You say the country is equals to Australia and you chose this image. So for all the customers who are being viewed, this image, email from Australia would receive this. Also, rule number two, country is equals to New Zealand. So all those customers whose country is set as New Zealand would see this green landscape image instead of the Australian image. So what we're doing here is you're changing the entire content block based on the subscriber attributes or the customer attributes. The country is a field in your data extension and based on that value, you are changing what the customer views in the email. And the default content will show for the customers who does not have any country value in the data extension. In the data extension, if the country value is blank or null, it will show the default image. That's how you define the dynamic content within an email. So you have seen the personalization strings, you have seen the static content, you have seen the dynamic content. So your certification questions would be based on this. Let's say they would give an example. Dynamic content example. Generally, if there are four images to be displayed, how many content blocks or how many rules do you need? So if the default content is already there, then you would need three more rules to get that requirement so based, because the requirements keep changing. So you have to be careful while reading the question, especially on the default content. The question would be on the default content. There is no rule for default content. That's how you analyse the question and answer the question. Hope things are clear on the static and personalization strength now.

2. Available Content Blocks

In this section we will be looking at how to create Content Blocks in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So here I am on the content builder screen. In Marketing Cloud you have the option to create email message or an email template. You can create Content Blocks which we'll be discussing more in detail in this section. And you can also upload your existing email or existing templates or your Content Blocks. So we'll be starting to look at how to create these Content Blocks and what are the different types of Content Blocks that you'll be able to create. In marketing cloud. I'll be describing the available Content Blocks for you and giving an example for few of them to help you understand how and when to use this particular Content Blocks. So let's start with a B test. Content Block this a B test allows you to create two different content areas within an email and track which content performs better during a content area. A B test, you know, a B test works with contemporary emails for testing the content. Then we have button. This is a simple button content Block you can add this to your email. Next we have code snippet. Use these code snippets in Content Builder to save reusable bits of HTML or Am Script or Guide template language. So this is mostly for your code snippets where you want to reuse a particular section of your email in different emails. Then you would create a code snippet and then save it and reuse this in different emails. You can insert snippets when editing HTML via the code snippets toolbar selector or by typing the customer key value for the snippet. So once after you create these code snippets, you can reference these code snippets in your email using and script functions. There are two and script functions for these. These are called content block by key or Content block by ID. So you mentioned content block by key and give this the key of this particular code snippet and in that email this code will render and generate in the email. So these code snippets behave just like Content Box but are different because they do not include an extra HTML table that wraps the entire content. So that's the main difference between code snippets and other content Blocks. Then we have dynamic content. Dynamic content is another type of content block. So this is used to display in an email according to the rules that you define based on the subscribers attributes or data extension column values. So by using dynamic content you can ensure that a more tailored message is reaching your target audience. So for example, let me give an example. Let's say there is a clothing advertiser and you want to display women's clothing information in the email to all the females and men's clothing information to all the males that are accessing your email. So for that, what you would do is you would just create a dynamic content block and you would select the content and you would choose what should be displayed for male and what content should be displayed for female. So basically you need four elements to build a dynamic content. First is the attribute, the value operator and content attribute. In our example that I said is the attribute is nothing but the gender column. So the gender column is the attribute and the value you are looking at is male or female. And the operator here is very straightforward, it's just equals so the gender equals male. Then you display the content. So the content can be either image or text and it can be defined for each rule. The content can be defined for each rule and also you can also set default content. So default content is a content you specify in the default Content field. This content displays when a subscriber does not meet any rule that you've created. And one more thing about dynamic content is it can be used in any type of email other than text based email messages. Moving on. We have Enhanced Dynamic Content. Enhance Dynamic Content lets you import into a content builder using a delimited file containing text and image URLs to create enhanced dynamic content for your emails. So instead of using Am script and Data extensions to manually create the dynamic content, what you would do is you would import your dynamic content using an import file. So the columns in this import file can contain the names of Enhanced Dynamic Content Assets and the rows content the content variations of each asset. So three elements to note one is the file upload. So you would upload your file and select the Car column. Sorry, you select the delimiter whether it's comma semicolonor tab as your delimiter and you choose whether to respect double quotes also then you have the second one is the data preparation. Select which column to use as a primary key and optionally you can also edit the names for each enhanced dynamic asset. And finally you would select the type of content for each column whether it's text, image or you can choose to exclude this column completely. So you just need to do file upload and data preparation. Then you have external content. External content is to reference your content from a URL. So for example, your images are in your clients hosted domain and not within marketing cloud. Then you'd use this external content and you would use the URL for that particular content to be pulled from your external source into this email. You can also choose when to retrieve this content. It's very important because you have two options whether to retrieve the content immediately or retrieve the content on send time. So when you choose immediately, it immediately reduces the URL content. Use this feature to get the content as it appears at the URL right now. If you select this option, you can't include personalization in the URL but you can edit and preview the content in the layout and plain text. Preview of an email can be done if you choose Send Time Retrieval. It reduces the URL content at the time the system processes the email for sending. So use this feature to get the latest content at the URL at the time the email is sent. If you choose this option and select a failure protocol. You can include personalization in the URL when used in an email. You can't edit the content because it would be retrieved only at certain times. So you wouldn't know what would be the exact content when you are building this content block. But you can still preview the content for a test subscriber and see how the content is being displayed. And if you select Sentiment, you can choose a retriever option. So retrieval option is again two types whether Email Level or Subscriber. Email Level retrieves the URL external content only once, and every recipient will receive the same content. So for example, any swiper sends a daily email with the latest news headlines, okay? And when the email is sent, the external content block pulls headlines from my Web Service, the newspaper created to serve the headlines and links to the full stories. Since the headlines are the same for everyone, this retrieval is only called once for the entire time. So this is email level retrieval. Subscriber level Retrieval retrieves the URL external content for each individual recipient and for each recipient receives unique content. Example an airline newsletter contains a recipient's miles balance. Since each recipient balance is different, the external content block calls a web service every time for each recipient to get their miles balance. Note since this retrieval can result in millions of external calls in a large sent, we recommend our salesforce recommends Email level to choose as the retriever method or time. Then you have freeform content. So to add text or links or images, etcetera. You can use the free form content block in Content Builder. So the HTML code let's say if you're putting HTML code in this, the code must be pasted using the option paste from Word so that it would retain the HTML code tags in it. There is a HTML content block separately. Also, you can use that if you are using if you're using HTML to build a content block. So you can enter or paste HTML. You can choose the existing HTML from SFMC itself, or you can drag files from your computer and browse for files and put them as a content block. Then you have image block also. This is to add images. Use the Image content block to add images in an email. You can insert a few types of images like JPEG, PNG, SVG, Jif and Amscope. Note that not all email clients support SVG. So you should be careful while using SVG type of format in this image block. And then you have image carousel. The image carousel block allows you to add blocks up to five rotating images. You can set these images to auto rotate every 6 seconds. I repeat five rotating images to auto rotate every 6 seconds so navigation arrows allow the recipient to manually rotate through the images also. But very important to note that the image rotation only works in Apple Mail and iOS mail. In all other male clients, only the primary image is shown. Not all the images hope that's clear. So these are all the content blocks that are available. That's all for this section.

3. Create Email

In this section we'll be looking at how to create an email in SFMC. First you need to go to Content Builder and click on Create Email button and then this screen. Let's look at what are the steps involved in email creation. As you can see at the top, there are three sections or three steps define Properties, Add Content, and Preview and Test. So once you complete these steps, you will be able to complete the Create Email process. So right now we are in Defined Properties section. So here you can see the Create email has different options. You can choose to create the email from a template, from an HTML or text only email, or you can create from an existing email. That is if an email is already created and you want to create the new email from that existing email, you can do that as well. And for creating email from templates, salesforce provides you with many different kinds of templates. And as you can see the bottom three, there are three types of templates. There one column, Image or Hero one, two three column or Hero one three column. So these are few of the different types of templates that are available. So in this step, you are only required to choose the template or decide what is the email creation process. After you've chosen. Let's say we have selected HTML template for this email and let's go to the Add Content section. So in this section in the screen, you'll be able to add the content like text, images, links, etc. For and everything. Apart from that, the important thing to note here is apart from adding the email content, there are also some snippets provided by Salesforce to include in the email. A couple of them are mandatory as well, as you learned in the Can Spam requirements section at the beginning of this course. So the Physical Mailing Address and Profile Center are two important and required snippets for every email that you create. So once you've created the email with your HTML code and everything, you have to make sure to include these snippets as well. So from the drop down you choose that option and you select Physical Mailing Address and click on that, it will populate the link in your email. Similarly, for Profile Center, it will give you a link once you click on that, and you can include that in any of the HTML part of your email. Let's look at what are the other options we have in the system snippets. You can look at View email as a web page. This is another URL or another link that you will be able to include in your HTML include in your email. Similarly, there is Unsubscribe Center, there is Subscription Center, there is Facebook like as well, and another important one is Track Email Opens. So once you select that, a code will be placed in your email and you'll be able to track the Opens for it. So make sure that all emails include the required Snippets because it will satisfy the can spam requirements as well as the Profile Center and Subscription Center are generally the most included ones. So we have done with the Add Content section. Let's go to the third step of this, the Preview and Test. So in the preview and test, there are two options the subscriber Preview and Attributes. Then you choose the recipients. So what basically in this step we do is we preview the email that you have created. You can preview based on a subscriber or an existing customer, and then you do a test set to see how the email is rendering. So let's look at the options that are available in this. So the subscriber Preview and Attributes, you click on that folder icon and you choose the Data extension and you select a particular subscriber. So in this example, as you can see, I have selected a subscriber with 400 ARPU 30 zero. This is a subscriber key for this subscriber. So once you chose this subscriber, the email will be rendered according to the subscriber details. Let's say if your email contains Dear, first name or the last name, then the email will show as Dear and it will replace the first name with the actual customer name. So you'll be able to preview according to this customer. Similarly, you can click on these arrow buttons to preview based on other customers as well. Other subscribers as well. So this is in the subscriber Preview and Attributes. Once you have previewed it, then the next one is Recipients. So in Recipients whom you want to send this email for Test preview, remember this is only for tests, not the actual sent. So you'll be able to send to yourself for your testing team to review the emails. So what options we have, you can choose to send to an individual recipient. Like you can enter email addresses, or you can also select the Test Data Extensions. As in if you select Test Data extension, everyone in that data extension will receive a copy of this email with the Personalization. For the personalization, again, there are three options as you can see the Content Personalization options. So the first one is based on the subscriber preview. The second is based on the subscriber preview, the data extension, and the third one is based on recipient test data extension. Let's look at these options in detail. So once you have chosen the recipients, you have to choose the Content Personalisation option. So the first option we have selected here is based on that particular subscriber preview. So in this preview, what it happens is an email will be sent to each recipient and will render based on the selected subscribers data. That means everyone receiving the email will have the same content. So the content will be based on the data based on the subscriber that you have chosen from the data extension. This is very important because most of the certification question would be based on this. And the next option is based on Subscriber preview customers. In this option, all rendering options of the email based on the list or the data extension selected from the subscriber preview are sent to each recipient. Very important. That means every recipient will receive multiple versions of the same email because there are different rendering options of the email and every recipient will receive different versions of the email. That means your team is testing each and every version of the email. That is a very useful and very important feature as well. And the third option is based on recipient test data extension. In this, an email will be sent to each subscriber in the selected recipient test data extension. The difference here is the email will render based on the recipients data. That means if you have a team of five members, all the five members will receive a different email. As in the email will be same, but the content in that will be varied according to the subscriber preferences. So these are the three options that are available for this personalization. So to summarize, while creating an email, you choose the properties, then you choose the add content, you add content, you add the Snippets. What are the required ones, required links, then you preview and test. In Preview and Test you have subscriber preview and attributes. Then you have recipients and personalization options. That's all about email creation. In the next section we will look at how to send these emails to the real customers. Bye.

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Email Delivery

1. Email Send Flow Video

In this section we are looking at how to send emails from marketing cloud but specifically we are looking at email send flow. There are many ways to send and email and marketing cloud. You could create a user initiated send or a triggered sent or you could use sent flow. Right now our focus is on send flow. Let's look at how to send email using the send flow. To start the send flow you select the email that you want to send the email to customers. Once you've chosen the email you click on the drop down you can see there are different options that you can do with this particular email. You can edit the email, you can see the properties of it, you can send this email. This is the option that we are looking at now to send email. Let's look at what other options also are there. You can do a preview and test. There is content, detective. This will test the email and see identify any issues with the content or you can share this email to other business units. You can copy the location of this email, you can move this email from one folder to another folder you can duplicate this email and create a new email or you can delete this email. For now our focus is on sending flow. So here you will select send from that drop down after you click on Send this is the screen you will see. You can see there are four steps in this. The first step is define properties. The second is select audience whom you want to send this email to. The third is configured delivery how you want this to be delivered and the fourth is review and send. Let's look at the first step of this defined properties. As you can see in the properties there is a subject line for this email. So if you want to make any changes to the subject you can make the edits. Here there is a pre header. Again you can make changes if you want. Some options are nothing but your sender profiles. So you choose the sender profile as in what should be the from name and what should be the from email address the customer sees when they receive this email. These are defined in your send up profiles. Optionally you can select the saved send classification. Remember send classification is a combination of sender profile and delivery profile. You just choose the from name, the sender profile and delivery profile or you can choose to send classification itself and on the right side you will see the preview of the email but no personalization will be shown here because we haven't selected any audience or anything yet. So here you will see a default preview of the email. Once you have selected the properties and you make sure everything is fine then you can click on next button then it will go into the select audience screen on the left hand side you can see the audience types that are available. You can choose lists or groups, data extensions, share data extensions from different views. You can choose Suppression list, shared Suppression list as well. So if you want to send this to different data extensions, you can expand the data extensions. There will be different folders structures. Then you choose the right de for this. And once you've selected the de you can drag and drop drop that data extension into the targeted section on the right hand side. So on the right hand side you can see there's targeted subscribers. There is also option to exclude or suppress few customers. So let's say you have two data extensions. One data extension is for your target. So you try and drop that into the targeted section and you have a suppression list or you have a list of subscribers whom you don't want to target. In this particular Sent, you select the data extension and drag and drop into the excluded and suppress box there. So once you've chosen the right audience and all you can click next it will go into the configured Delivery. Configured Delivery section is nothing but when you want to send this email. So you choose to send timing whether you want to send it immediately. Or you can also schedule this on a particular date and at a particular time as well. And on the tracking options you can select the box to track clicks. So the reports will have the tracking of the clicks or any clicks of the email. Optionally, you can suppress this from the Send report. Let's say if you're doing a test send, you don't want this to be shown in the reports. Then you can select that box check box suppress from Send report and the last one is tracking distinction folder where you want this to be shown in the reports. So if you notice the schedule is on a particular date and particular time, the difference between the same flow and the user initiated set is in a user initiated Sent, the options are all same. You define properties, you select audience, you configure the scheduled time and you save that particular schedule or particular send. And you can do that and you can repeat that process for every user initiated. Then whereas in Sent flow there is no option to save you schedule and you right away send this to the selected audience. That is the main difference between a user initiated Send and Send flow. So going ahead with the fourth step in this, this step is only to confirm that everything is right. So just like making sure that everything is right with this email, so you select that box, the information is correct and this email is ready to send. And at the bottom below this line you would see the preview of email and all the options, options that you have chosen in the first three steps. So you review everything and you click on Send to send the email. That's all in a send flow.

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