Marketing-Cloud-Email-Specialist Questions and Answers

 In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, once an email is approved using Content Builder Approvals, any subsequent changes require the approval to be withdrawn first. This ensures that any modifications are tracked and re-approved if necessary. By withdrawing the email approval, you can make the necessary changes and then resubmit the email for approval. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Content Builder Approvals.

Send Preview is a feature in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that allows marketers to preview how their emails will render across different email clients and devices. This tool helps ensure that email content is displayed correctly and consistently, regardless of the recipient's email client. By using Send Preview, marketers can identify and fix rendering issues before sending the email, thus enhancing the email's visual appeal and effectiveness.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation: Send Preview

Multilingual Content Blocks in Salesforce Marketing Cloud allow users to manage and send localized content efficiently. This feature supports creating content blocks in different languages and automatically selecting the appropriate block based on the subscriber's language preference. This method simplifies the process of sending localized content without needing extensive email developer resources. The use of Multilingual Content Blocks is well-documented in Salesforce Marketing Cloud's resources on creating and managing content.

Journey Builder is the appropriate tool for implementing single-audience drip campaigns and conducting iterative tests with random audience splits. It allows marketers to design and automate customer journeys, incorporating different messages and testing variations to optimize performance over time.

 To ensure that each email is fully sent before the next begins, each Send Email activity should be added to different steps in the automation. This sequential approach ensures that the next email activity will not start until the previous one has completed. This method is supported by Salesforce Marketing Cloud's documentation on building automations in Automation Studio, where the best practices for structuring sequential email sends are described.

The _Open data view in Salesforce Marketing Cloud contains detailed information about all email opens, including subscriber data and timestamps. This data view can be queried to identify subscribers who have opened emails within a specific timeframe, such as the past year, to target them with a "thank you" offer.

The DoNotTrack attribute can be configured to ensure that no tracking information, such as clicks or opens, is recorded for a specific customer. This complies with customer requests to avoid tracking their interactions. For comprehensive details, refer to the Consent Management documentation.

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.

To improve email deliverability, it is effective to scale back sending to specific ISPs where issues have been identified. This approach helps in maintaining a good sender reputation and avoiding potential blocks or filtering by the ISPs. By reducing the sending volume to problematic ISPs temporarily, you give the infrastructure time to resolve the issues, which can then help improve overall deliverability rates. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Email Deliverability Best Practices.

 The Verification Activity in Automation Studio is used to set additional guardrails before an email send occurs. This activity helps ensure that the audience criteria meet certain conditions and prevents sending to more subscribers than intended. According to Salesforce Marketing Cloud documentation, the Verification Activity can check for audience count thresholds and prevent sending if the audience exceeds the specified limit.

Verification Activity in Salesforce Marketing Cloud ensures that specific criteria are met before an automation continues. In the context of Northern Trail Outfitters, using a Verification Activity can check if all necessary data extensions are present and correctly populated before proceeding with the automation. This step is crucial to prevent the automation from completing with missing data, which would result in inaccurate reports.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation: Verification Activity

When importing a daily feed of active customers into a data extension, the "Overwrite" option should be used to ensure that the data extension only contains currently active customers. This import option replaces the entire data extension with the new data, removing any records that do not appear in the latest feed and ensuring that only the most current and relevant data is retained.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Data Extension Import Types

To schedule a report to be sent weekly to an Azure Blob regarding the performance of a holidays campaign, the marketing manager should use the Tracking Data Extract file transfer. This tool allows the extraction of tracking data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which can then be transferred to an external storage location such as Azure Blob. By setting up an automation in Automation Studio, this process can be scheduled to run weekly, ensuring the performance data is consistently sent to the desired location.

To ensure that emails are accessible, the email designer should follow best practices such as using contrasting colors. High contrast between text and background colors helps people with visual impairments or color blindness to read the content more easily. This practice is a key aspect of meeting accessibility standards and making content accessible to a broader audience.

Using the "Preview and Test" feature in Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to simulate how an email will appear to specific subscribers. By selecting a targeted subscriber, you can ensure the dynamic content and AMPscript are functioning correctly before sending the email to actual recipients. This method builds confidence in the dynamic email capabilities by allowing internal team members to see exactly what the end user will see. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Preview and Test.

To ensure that the Email Address field values are unique in a data extension, the marketer should mark the field as the Primary Key. By setting the Email Address field as the Primary Key, Salesforce Marketing Cloud enforces uniqueness for this field within the data extension, preventing duplicate email addresses from being entered.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation: Data Extensions

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.

To automatically refresh a filtered data extension on a scheduled basis, a marketer should use a Filter Activity in Automation Studio. This activity allows you to apply a filter to a source data extension and save the filtered results to a target data extension. By scheduling this activity within an automation, you can ensure that the filtered data extension is refreshed automatically at the desired frequency, such as daily before sending an email.

 To ensure that the most up-to-date content is included in each email, Northern Trail Outfitters should use a Reference Content Block. This type of content block allows you to create content once and reuse it across multiple emails. By referencing the content block in different emails, any updates made to the content block will automatically reflect in all emails that use it. This ensures consistency and timeliness of the content, which is especially useful for special events and content that change throughout the year.

To ensure that new custom fields on the Salesforce Contact object are available for segmentation, the first step is to edit the fields in the synchronized data source. This involves mapping the new custom fields in the synchronized data extension within Salesforce Marketing Cloud, making them available for segmentation and other marketing activities. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation

Content Detective is a tool in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that helps identify words, phrases, and patterns in email content that may trigger spam filters. By running Content Detective before sending an email, the marketing team can get insights and suggestions on how to modify the content to avoid common spam triggers, improving email deliverability.

References: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Content Detective

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.

To review last year's holiday engagement compared to this year's engagement, Northern Trail Outfitters' marketing department should use an SQL activity using data views. Data views in Salesforce Marketing Cloud provide access to detailed tracking information and historical engagement data. By writing SQL queries, the marketing department can extract, compare, and analyze the engagement data from different time periods, enabling them to understand trends and performance.

To target a portion of the population within a filtered data extension, the marketer should copy the filtered data extension and then apply additional filter criteria. This approach allows for the creation of a more specific subset of the original audience, ensuring that the upcoming send reaches the desired segment without altering the primary filtered data extension. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Data Extensions and Filtering.

Automation Studio in Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows users to automate various marketing tasks, including sending emails. By configuring an Email Activity within Automation Studio, a marketing specialist can schedule and automate the sending of a weekly newsletter to subscribers. The tool supports including additional audiences, such as a partner seed list, by specifying multiple data extensions within the same activity. Reference: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation

 As a good first step in adding automation to its email marketing, Northern Trail Outfitters should create an automation that imports subscriber data regularly and updates key data extensions. This ensures that the data is always up-to-date and accurate, forming the foundation for all subsequent automated campaigns and decisioning processes.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Automation Studio

To ensure Northern Trail Outfitters' sending reputation remains intact, implementing a Sender Authentication Package (SAP) with a Private Domain and a Dedicated IP is the best course of action. This setup provides greater control over the sending environment, allowing the company to build and maintain its sending reputation without being affected by other customers sharing the same domain or IP. It also facilitates the use of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication protocols.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Sender Authentication Package

To provide the analytics team with data for monitoring email performance across the company, the best approach is to use Tracking Extracts. Tracking Extracts in Marketing Cloud allow users to extract detailed tracking data such as opens, clicks, bounces, and more. This data can be automatically extracted and processed on a daily basis to feed into dashboards and reporting tools.

References:

Salesforce Help: Tracking Extract

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Automation Studio and Data Extracts

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

To ensure no production emails are sent with the TACO prefix in the subject line, Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO) should add the word TACO to the Subject/Preheader Validation section of Email Studio. This validation step allows marketers to configure checks that will flag or prevent emails with certain keywords or phrases in the subject line or preheader from being sent, thus preventing test indicators like "TACO" from appearing in live emails.

To ensure Northern Trail Outfitters' sending reputation remains intact, implementing a Sender Authentication Package (SAP) with a Private Domain and a Dedicated IP is the best course of action. This setup provides greater control over the sending environment, allowing the company to build and maintain its sending reputation without being affected by other customers sharing the same domain or IP. It also facilitates the use of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication protocols.

References:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Documentation on Sender Authentication Package

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