Marketing-Cloud-Email-Specialist Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Email Specialist (SU24) Question and Answers

To target subscribers who are not receiving too many emails but are engaging constantly with the emails sent to them, Northern Trail Outfitters should use Einstein Engagement Frequency. This feature uses AI to analyze and predict the optimal number of emails each subscriber should receive to maximize engagement without causing fatigue. It helps marketers balance their sending frequency to maintain high engagement levels.

Path Optimizer in Journey Builder allows marketers to test different paths within a journey based on various parameters. This tool helps in assessing the effectiveness of different emails or other journey steps by comparing how different segments of the audience respond to each path.

The Email Overlay View in Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides a detailed visual representation of an email's performance, including metrics such as Total Clicks and Unique Clicks. This view overlays performance data directly onto the email, making it easy to see which links were clicked and how frequently. This feature is described in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud documentation under email tracking and reporting features.

For segmenting Platinum loyalty members from a larger data extension, the optimal process is to use Automation Studio to run a query. This query will filter the specific 100,000 Platinum members into a new data extension, ensuring only the qualified members are included in the journey.

The Email Studio > Overview section in Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides key performance metrics and insights for recent email sends. This includes the delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, and other vital statistics. For quickly finding the delivery rate of the most recent email, this is the appropriate location.

References: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Email Studio Overview

 

To honor the opt-in communication method for subscribers in NTO's welcome series, it is recommended to create one Entry Source for each messaging channel in Journey Builder. This approach ensures that subscribers receive communications via their preferred channel, whether it be email or SMS. By configuring separate entry sources, the welcome series can deliver messages that align with the opt-in preferences of each subscriber, enhancing the personalization and effectiveness of the communication.

APIs provide real-time interaction with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, enabling immediate updates for important subscriber information such as unsubscribes. By using APIs, Northern Trail Outfitters can ensure that subscriber data is reflected instantaneously, which is crucial for regulatory compliance. For more information, refer to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud API documentation.

Send Throttle is a feature in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that allows marketers to control the rate at which emails are sent. This can help manage and distribute the load on the website by pacing the influx of visitors, preventing potential server overload and ensuring a smoother user experience.

References: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Send Throttling

Collecting emails at offline activities, such as in-store events or other physical locations, is a best practice for increasing subscribers. It ensures that the emails collected are from individuals who are genuinely interested in the brand and are more likely to engage with email communications. This method also helps to maintain the quality and relevance of the email list.

References: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Subscriber Acquisition Best Practices

When building a data extension that will be updated by a SQL Query Activity, it is essential to define a Primary Key. This ensures that each record can be uniquely identified, allowing the SQL Query Activity to update the correct records in the data extension. For more details, refer to the Data Extension documentation. 

Contacts Analytics provides insights into the changes in the customer population over time, including metrics on new contacts, unsubscribes, and other population dynamics. This report allows marketers to track and analyze how their cross-channel customer base evolves, making it suitable for the marketing manager's needs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud documentation includes detailed information on generating and interpreting Contacts Analytics reports.

Interactive Email Forms can significantly increase engagement and response rates by allowing recipients to complete forms directly within the email. For a post-purchase feedback campaign, including an interactive form where customers can provide their feedback without leaving the email can make the process more convenient and likely to yield higher response rates.

References: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Interactive Email Forms

In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the Send Log Data Extension is used to record information about actual sends that go out to subscribers. However, test sends and preview sends are not logged in the Send Log Data Extension because they are intended for testing and validation purposes, not actual subscriber communications.

References: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Send Logging

 

When a subscriber submits a form on a third-party vendor's web page, Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides a way to enter that subscriber into a journey through the API Event Entry Source. This entry source allows external systems to trigger a journey by making an API call to Marketing Cloud. The API Event is designed to accept data from external sources and initiate the journey, ensuring immediate response to the form submission.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on API Event Entry Source

Block bounces are a critical metric to analyze when assessing sender reputation. High block bounce rates indicate that emails are being rejected by ISPs due to issues such as poor list quality, spam complaints, or reputation problems. This metric can provide insight into the health of your sender reputation and whether the recent import of subscribers may have negatively impacted it. This approach is verified in Salesforce Marketing Cloud documentation on monitoring and maintaining sender reputation. 

 Einstein Messaging Insights in Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides notification badges and alerts to help users quickly identify any abnormal subscriber behaviors or performance issues with their email campaigns. This feature leverages AI to detect and notify marketers of anomalies, ensuring they can promptly address any concerns.

Datorama Reports in Salesforce Marketing Cloud provide a powerful way to explore and analyze large volumes of send data without needing to write SQL queries. By using the pivot table feature in Datorama Reports, NTO can dynamically filter, sort, and group their data in one view, making it easier to gain insights and analyze performance metrics.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation: Datorama Reports

The Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) Activity in Journey Builder allows marketers to send emails at the optimal time for each subscriber based on their past engagement behavior. This helps increase the engagement rate by ensuring emails are sent when subscribers are most likely to interact with them.

Purging inactive subscribers is a critical step to maintain email deliverability. High bounce rates from inactive or invalid email addresses can negatively impact sender reputation and deliverability. By cleaning the email list and removing inactive subscribers, the retailer can ensure that emails are being sent to active and engaged recipients, thereby improving overall deliverability.

References: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Email Deliverability Best Practices

The List Unsubscribe header is an email header that allows subscribers to easily unsubscribe from emails without relying on the sender’s unsubscribe link. This header is managed by various email clients and ISPs, offering recipients a one-click method to unsubscribe, which can contribute to unsubscribe reasons even if Reply Mail Management (RMM) is not implemented in the account.

To ensure that a data extension includes only records from the previous day and is updated with newly added records, the marketer should schedule an automation to refresh the filter activity daily. This approach ensures that the data extension is consistently updated with the latest relevant records, maintaining its accuracy and relevance for campaigns.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Filter Activity

Defining a goal for each journey in Journey Builder helps marketers measure the success of their campaigns against specific objectives. Goals can be set to track important metrics like conversions, clicks, or other relevant actions. This feature allows for better performance tracking and optimization of customer journeys. Salesforce Marketing Cloud documentation provides detailed instructions on setting up and tracking goals within Journey Builder, supporting this approach as a best practice.

 

To obtain information on the email performance of an abandoned cart journey, including data on all versions of a specific journey’s cross-channel performance data, the Analytics Dashboard in Journey Builder should be used. The Analytics Dashboard provides comprehensive insights and detailed metrics about the performance of journeys, including engagement across different channels and versions.

References:

Salesforce Help: Journey Builder Analytics Dashboard

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Journey Builder Reporting

To understand the metrics of email sends on a data level, particularly during IP address warming, the "Email Performance by Domain" report should be used. This report provides detailed insights into how emails are performing across different domains, which is crucial for identifying and addressing deliverability issues during the IP warming process.

References:

Salesforce Help: Email Performance by Domain Report

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Understanding Email Deliverability

To honor the opt-in communication method of subscribers in Journey Builder, Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO) should create one Entry Source for each messaging channel (email and SMS). This ensures that the journey can differentiate and respect the preferred communication method of each subscriber based on how they opted-in. Each entry source can then be used to trigger the appropriate welcome series content for the respective channel. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation

 

To collect information from users obtained through social channels, marketers can use Web Studio to capture query parameters from social media links. This involves creating landing pages or forms that capture data when users click on social media links and are redirected to these pages. This data can then be used for future mailings and targeted marketing campaigns. Web Studio provides tools for creating and managing landing pages, forms, and microsites that can effectively capture and process user data from various sources, including social media.

To ensure that the Email Address field values are unique in a data extension, the marketer should mark the Email Address field as the Primary Key. In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marking a field as a Primary Key ensures that each value in that field is unique and cannot be duplicated within the data extension.

When the file delivery cadence changes to multiple times a day, it is efficient to replace the existing schedule-based automation with a File Drop automation. This setup triggers the automation whenever a file matching a specific filename pattern is dropped into the SFTP, thereby minimizing network usage and ensuring timely processing of the files as they are received.

To view a dashboard showing the success rate of customers that have been through a Welcome Series Journey in the last 7 days, Northern Trail Outfitters' leadership should look at Datorama Reports - Journey Performance. This tool provides comprehensive insights and performance metrics for journeys, including success rates and engagement over specified time periods.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Datorama Reports

Creating a data filter on the data extension is a low-code solution that allows marketers to segment their audience based on specific criteria. In this case, the marketer can easily filter subscribers aged 64 to 65 who are opted into email. Data filters are part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud's standard tools for segmentation and are explained in detail in the platform's documentation on creating and managing data filters.

Einstein Copy Insights is a tool within Salesforce Marketing Cloud that provides analysis and suggestions on the effectiveness of email copy, including subject lines. This tool analyzes the tone, length, and structure of subject lines to determine their impact on engagement metrics such as open rates and click-through rates. It uses AI to offer insights that can help marketers optimize their email content for better performance. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation

To ensure that the content within email templates adheres to branding guidelines, you can configure restrictions within a Content Area to limit the types of content blocks that can be used. This ensures that only approved types of content are used in the email, maintaining consistency with branding guidelines.

The Auto Suppression List in SFMC is used to automatically suppress subscribers who meet certain criteria, including those with a status of 'Held'. When a subscriber is marked as 'Held', it means that the system has detected delivery issues with that email address, such as a hard bounce. This can cause the subscriber key to appear twice in the _subscribers data view, once with the status 'Active' and once with 'Held'.

References: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Auto Suppression Lists

A key differentiator for requiring a dedicated IP address is the sending volume. When an organization sends more than 250,000 emails per month, it benefits from a dedicated IP to establish a consistent sender reputation, which can improve deliverability rates and sender reputation management.

The Engagement Split activity in Journey Builder allows you to branch contacts based on their level of engagement with your emails. Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO) can use this activity to differentiate content for their most engaged customers versus their least engaged customers, ensuring a personalized experience for each segment. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Engagement Split.

To meet the requirement of sending a daily report of all subscribers emailed in the last 24 hours to the Enhanced FTP Export folder, the following activities should be configured in Automation Studio:

SQL Query: To select the unique email addresses of subscribers emailed in the last 24 hours.

Data Extract: To extract the data into a file format suitable for transfer.

File Transfer: To move the extracted file to the Enhanced FTP Export folder.

This combination ensures that the data is queried, extracted, and then transferred as needed. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation

To import the Not Sent extract into a data extension and use it as an exclusion audience, the correct sequence of steps in Automation Studio involves:

Tracking Extract to get the Not Sent data,

File Transfer to move the extracted file to the safehouse or appropriate location,

Einstein Messaging Insights is a tool within Salesforce Marketing Cloud that leverages artificial intelligence to provide real-time insights and alerts about the performance of your email sends. It identifies anomalies and provides recommendations on how to improve engagement and deliverability. This tool helps marketers by automatically detecting any issues with email sends and offering actionable advice to rectify them. It is specifically designed to enhance the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns through intelligent data analysis.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation: Einstein Messaging Insights