Who said that automated emails should be simply transactional or generic messages?
The classic “Dear #FirstName,” email is not that welcome anymore. As marketers, we have a duty to sparkle the light that lies within our customer’s eyes at every interaction. That should happen at every email communication you are sending out, be it the monthly newsletter manual send or that dripping email automation you’ve just set up.
Personalization seems, to most of us, like an unattainable Grail. Yet, it is simply a matter of data. It’s having the right information, available to be leveraged by the Marketing tool for your communications. This implies that your Central Database is in phase with your Marketing Cloud. But is it?
When you orchestrate your marketing initiatives with Marketing Cloud connected to Salesforce and you wish to personalize your message, you need to be able to leverage Salesforce fields within Marketing Cloud. That’s currently achieved through Marketing Cloud Attributes mapped with Salesforce fields. Marketing Cloud attributes are, indeed, mappable to Lead and Contact or Account fields. When you wish to personalize your email communications, you simply use one of those %%MarketingCloudAttribute%%. So far so good.
Things could become less straightforward when you automate your Marketing initiatives with Journey Builder and you wish to personalize your message in emails sent within a Journey.
Every Entry Source is based on a Data Extension, whether you explicitly choose Data Extension as Entry Source or go for a Salesforce Data Entry Source. Salesforce will automatically create a Data Extension with all the fields chosen in the Salesforce Data Entry Source definition process.
When you choose to start from an already existing Data Extension, the personalization is quite straightforward: all the fields in the Data Extensions are available to you for personalization purpose, nothing more, nothing less.
Yet, when you go for the Salesforce Data Entry Source, two paths open to you. You could use the system generated Data Extension fields to personalize your content, but this requires a bit of a more data-savvy mindset. Else, you can use Marketing Cloud Attributes that are mapped to Salesforce Fields. This is were the trick lies. Despite Marketing Cloud Attributes personalization working seamlessly when sending an email to Salesforce Campaigns/Reports through Send Flows (manual sends), the same cannot be said when automatically sending the same email within Journey Builder to a Salesforce Audience (be it Salesforce Data or Salesforce Campaign Entry Source). In fact, Marketing Cloud Attributes mapped to Salesforce Account fields will nor display, nor work.
Workarounds:
For Emails in Journeys with Salesforce Data as Entry Source, make sure you personalize your email based on the name of each field of the system generated Data Extension. There, you will find all the Salesforce fields included in the Entry Data step. You will therefore be able to include fields from related objects! Mind you, their syntax looks like the following: %%Object:FieldName%%
For Email in Journeys with Salesforce Campaigns as Entry Source, you will have to create additional fields in Salesforce, on the Contact object. These will be Formula fields that will fetch related objects fields (such as Account Fields). You will then need to change the Marketing Cloud Attribute mapping towards the newly created Salesforce fields, located on the Contact Object.
I hope this will help you in your journey to success with Marketing Cloud 🙂
Best,
Stef
Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the unsaid. 