Looking at Exact Target / Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Exact Target / Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a range of digital marketing automation and analytics software tools, covering e-mail, mobile, social and online marketing.

(The company was founded as Exact Target, offering services based on the Salesforce Cloud, and was acquired by Salesforce for $2.5bn in June 2013).

It includes tools to build a ‘single view of your customers’, build customer ‘journeys’, connect to customers with many different devices, make the most of data.

Specific industries served include retail, travel / hospitality, financial services, media / entertainment, technology, and education / non profit.

So for example in the travel / hospitality sector, its tools can be used to work with customer data (CRM, web analytics, purchase data), monitor marketing campaign success, provide personalised services (welcome emails, birthday emails, post purchase emails, customer loyalty programs).

In the education / non profit sector, its tools can be used to share content in digital communications, create email marketing messages, automate customer ‘lifecycle’ communications.

In the media sector, its tools can be used to build a view of customers, send personalised content.

In financial services, its tools can be used to share data between business units and understand customers.

For UK broadcasting company Sky, the service was used to develop a SMS survey tool, and use data generated.