Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Connect your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account with Lexer

You can connect your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account with Lexer, to import your customer data and create enriched identity profiles. This will also allow you to activate Segments for email marketing campaigns.

What about ExactTarget?

ExactTarget was an email marketing platform acquired by Salesforce in 2013, and rebranded to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Throughout Lexer, we’ll always refer to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) but know that the names “Salesforce Marketing Cloud” and “ExactTarget” refer to the same product.

Benefits of a Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration

Integrating your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account with Lexer provides a number of benefits, such as

• Import your contacts as enriched Profiles
• Send audiences for targeted marketing campaigns
• Sync data between your Lexer CDP and Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Integration in a nutshell

Here's a summary of how Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrates with Lexer: 

API Access

Before we can connect the two accounts, you’ll need to provide Lexer access to your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account. We can achieve this by creating a Salesforce Marketing Cloud application. Please note, if your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account contains more than one brand, you will need to create an "Installed Package" for each brand.

You will now see a summary page with a Components section. This section lists your Client ID and Client Secret settings, which we’ll need to paste securely into Lexer as detailed below.

Once you’ve configured the components, navigate to Access and select only the brand you’d like this "Installed Package" to be used for.

How do I integrate my account?

1. Select the Salesforce Marketing Cloud tile
2. Click Integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud
3. Enter your Salesforce account name (this could be your brand, or sub-brand name)
4. Paste in your Base Authentication URI
5. Paste in your Client ID and Client Secret generated from making your Installed Package
6. Click Save

Extracting data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud

When Lexer extracts data from your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account, we encourage you to create two unique Data Extensions per brand. This ensures that the data we need to populate your CDP is correct and formatted in line with your own internal expectations.

We've included a schema guide below for each Data Extension.

Data Extension #1 "Lexer Customer Table"

Data Extension #2 "Lexer Email Engagement Table"

Sending data to Salesforce Marketing Cloud

This article will guide you in activating Segments from Lexer to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly ExactTarget). The activation allows you to create and update existing lists, update existing Data Extensions, and enrich your customer contact data in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Before you get started, make sure you’ve done the following:

• Connected your Salesforce Marketing Cloud account with Lexer.
• Created an activation to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (reach out to Lexer Support (support@lexer.io) if not)
• Built your Segment(s) in Lexer Segment
  

Lists, Data Extensions and All Subscribers

Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to target both Lists of customers, and Data Extensions containing customer data. What’s important to understand is both of these are fed from a catch-all “list” All Subscribers.

Lists

A List is a group of your customers. You can create an unlimited number of Lists depending on the number of customer segments you require.

Lists can:

• Contain a maximum of 500,000 contacts
• Take longer to update than a Data Extension

Data Extensions

A data extension is a table within your Salesforce database containing your data, think of it like a dynamic list that can automatically update based on rules (just like a Segment in Lexer Segment). You can use data extensions to store sendable subscriber data - like lists, or to hold relational data. If you activate directly to a data extension, any contacts you add that don’t match the rule conditions of the data extension could be removed when it next syncs with your All Subscribers list.

Data extensions can:

• Hold more than 500,000 contacts
• Import faster than updating Lists
• Permit you to setup triggered email sends

Syncing your data with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Whether you use Lists or Data Extensions, you will likely want to ensure the data within your Lexer CDP is synced with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. To do this, we want to send our Segment to List – All Subscribers. We recommend using a Segment containing all Profiles, setting it to auto-update, and letting it run automatically indefinitely.

1. Click ACTIVATE NEW AUDIENCE to get started
2. Select your Salesforce Marketing Cloud activation tile
3. Add your “Customer Universe” Segment (containing all your customer records)
4. Update the audience name as required (this won’t appear in Salesforce)
5. Set your activation to Update an existing audience it should default to List - All Subscribers
6. Set which Contact Properties you’d like to sync, ensuring you map each ATTRIBUTE to it’s correct Property
7. Agree to terms, and click Send Audience

Creating a new List

We also support creating a new List which can be used for one-off campaigns or similar.

1. Click ACTIVATE NEW AUDIENCE to get started
2. Select your Salesforce Marketing Cloud activation tile
3. Add your one-off campaign Segment
4. Update the audience name (this will become the List’s name)
5. Select Auto-update activation if maintaining this list is important
6. Agree to terms, and click SEND AUDIENCE

Set and forget – auto-updating audiences

Lexer Activate permits you to automatically update your lists and contacts within Salesforce Marketing Cloud. With this selected, Lexer will add or remove customers from your List or Data Extension, as customers enter and leave your Segment.

Okay I’ve sent my audience, what next?

The moment your activation has been confirmed as sent in Activate, you’ll see records begin to update in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We’ll send you an email to let you know once an audience has been sent – the time this takes will vary, depending on the size of the audience.

Sending an email with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Email Studio

Salesforce have heaps of documentation around their Email Studio platform, you can check out those materials here.