Ever since that first corporate website found its way onto the Internet, the marketing universe has been expanding and changing. One after another, things such as text-message marketing campaigns, social media marketing, and mobile apps have come on the scene. Suddenly, even email marketing — which was in its infancy only a generation ago — is now just the tip of the iceberg of what today's marketers need to know how to do.

Fortunately, sophisticated tools, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, have evolved at the same time to help you manage all these marketing channels. Marketing Cloud makes an online marketer into a superhero. But, of course, it has its own learning curve. That's where this book comes in: We want to show you around a product that we adore, help you get started, and sprinkle in a few insider tips that we've picked up over time.

About This Book

This book is born of love. We both had the pleasure to be actively involved in the early development of the software that is now known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and the experience led to career opportunities and new friendships. Rarely do you have the opportunity to work with such talented people, all of whom are dedicated to their clients' success.

Now we're thrilled to have the chance to share our knowledge — and dare we say wisdom — about Salesforce Marketing Cloud and online marketing in general. We've been accumulating experience for close to a decade. With the help of Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies, we can transfer what you need to know so you can hit the ground running on your own Marketing Cloud adventure.

Like all the titles in the Dummies series, this book provides tools for people who are confident enough to say, “I don't know what I'm doing (yet).” We give you no-nonsense answers to how to think about your audiences and data, as well as practical step-by-step procedures to get your marketing messages out the door.

You can read this book from cover to cover, or jump directly to an individual chapter about the functionality you're currently working on. Marketing Cloud contains many apps, so keep this book nearby for a quick refresher when you need to get back into a part of the tool that you haven't used in a while.

Foolish Assumptions

You can tell from the title that we wrote this book for people who are new to using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, including Basic, Pro, Corporate, and Enterprise Editions. However, almost anyone interested in learning more about online marketing can find useful information within. Any time you write instructions, though, you have to make a few assumptions. In your case, we assume the following:

• You're familiar with how to operate a computer, a keyboard, and a mouse.
• You've used enough software to recognize conventions such as opening menus, clicking buttons, and pausing your mouse pointer on something to make a tooltip appear.
• You know the definitions of words such as email, URL, and social media.

If any of these assumptions leave you scratching your head, we recommend visiting your local library, where a librarian can point you in the right direction.

Icons Used in This Book

You'll see the following icons as you read the chapters of this book. This section describes what they mean.

The Tip icon indicates a tidbit of information that may not be necessary to the procedure you're working on but may make things easier.

Remember icons refer to information that we talked about before but that's especially important to recall at this point in the chapter.

Technical Stuff gives you a peek at how the Marketing Cloud application works behind the scenes. You can skip over this information and still use the product just fine, but reading and understanding it will help you know what to expect from Marketing Cloud.

The Warning icon means watch out! It tells you when doing something wrong could damage your data or put your sensitive information at risk.

Beyond the Book

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a large online documentation site. You can click a link right inside Marketing Cloud to get to the documentation. (An Internet search will probably get you there as well.) You'll find a lot of the same information in the documentation that you see in this book, but there are definite benefits to reading the book. We have the freedom, for example, to point out things that don't work as you might expect them to and suggest shortcuts.

We've provided a few handy cheat sheets: a glossary of terms, a sample pre-sending checklist, and a diagram to help you when you're mapping out your customer journeys — it'll make more sense when you get there! To get to the cheat sheet, go to www.dummies.com, and then type Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies cheat sheet in the Search box. This is also where you'll find any significant updates or changes that occur between editions of this book.

Where to Go from Here

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is more like a platform than an application. That is to say, Marketing Cloud has a few bits of its own functionality, but the real power of your account is in the apps you can open in the Marketing Cloud platform.

The first part of this book is about getting around the Marketing Cloud platform itself and using the tools available there. If this is the first time you've used Marketing Cloud, you'll definitely want to start here.

The second part of this book is about subscriber data: understanding what you already know about your customers, figuring out what you need to learn about your customers to execute the best campaigns, and setting up Marketing Cloud to hold and use that data. Don't miss this part if you're an admin or in charge of designing the over-arching journey your customers take while interacting with your brand. Having said that, we'll also say that anyone at any level of the organization can get a better foundation in where your data comes from and how you use it by reading the chapters in this part.

Most of the rest of the chapters dive deep in to the day-to-day operation of each of the apps. If you're just getting started using one of the apps, your next stop is the table of contents to find the chapter about the app you're learning about.

Whichever page you turn to next, we hope that it is the first page in an epic story of you and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. May your story find your customer delighted, your company thriving, and you enjoying accolades for your sophisticated and well-managed online marketing campaigns.