Top Reasons for Non-Profits to Use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Just like commercial organization, non-profits have to actively market themselves to reach out to their target audiences that are crucial to their existence such as volunteers, donor, prospects, partners, etc. This means that there is immense pressure on non-profits to send out the right message to the right audience at the right time. With the help of advanced tools like the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a lot of these activities can be streamlined so that the non-profit is in a better position to achieve its objectives. Some examples of how a typical non-profit can benefit from the Marketing Cloud features:

Creation of Email Templates

Email is usually one of the principal ways in which a non-profit communicates to its target audience. With the help of the Marketing Cloud’s tools for dragging and dropping content and the facility of creating email templates that are mobile optimized, non-profits can very easily create customized appeal emails, periodic newsletters, event invitations, and other communication without the need to employ anyone with computer programming skills. The facility of creating emails that are optimized for mobile devices is especially important because of the increasing tendency of subscribers to access their inboxes from mobile devices rather than desktops. When emails can be easily read on the smaller screens of mobiles, it increases the chances of conversion, such as donating funds, extending support or even signing a petition.

Building of Relationships on a One-To-One Basis

The Marketing Cloud’s Audience Builder tool allows campaign managers to build personalized relationships with constituents. This means that they are able to send them communication containing specific content that is of high interest to them by collecting and managing critical demographic data through the CRM package and integrating the Marketing Cloud with Salesforce or any other external system like Flosum.com using the Salesforce Connector.

Carry Out Deep Segmentation of Constituents

Every non-profit collects specific data on its constituents as a matter of course since it helps them to understand their profile better and reach out to them with specific messages. However, the extent of message customization that is possible depends on how deep the segmentation can be done. Using manual methods, it can be quite difficult to manage the multiple parameters involved in segmentation; however, by using Marketing Cloud, it is possible for the segmentation to involve multiple criteria.

Content Personalization

Using the predictive analytics capabilities of Marketing Cloud, non-profits can customize the content of communication they are sending out to different audiences based on the unique preferences and behavior they have displayed during their previous interactions. For example, it is possible to find out which pages of the non-profit’s website a particular visitor visits more frequently or spends more time on and use that insight to send communication with content of interest. Similarly, if it is found that a particular recipient clicks on emails more often during a specific period, it is possible to use the Marketing Cloud to schedule the email transmission to that time.

Communication Efficacy Testing

Since the messages sent out by the non-profit need to compete intensely for attention with other communication that is targeted at the audience, it is essential to find out what exactly motivates a recipient to click on an email in his inbox and read the mail. The difference could lie in the email subject lines, the content or even the images. With the advanced capabilities of Marketing Cloud, the non-profit can test various options of subject lines to discover which one seems to have the best appeal to achieve its objective that could range from donations to volunteering and more.

Conclusion

Given the multiple features of Marketing Cloud that a non-profit can hugely benefit by, the adoption of Marketing Cloud seems to be a no-brainer. Apart from being able to refine and customize contents, non-profits can also use the extremely advanced metric-gathering capability to generate reports of what performs best so that the marketing and communication strategies can be tweaked accordingly for maximum impact.

David Wicks is a digital marketing expert with extensive experience of implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud in commercial as well as non-profit environments. He has also advocated the use of change management agents like Flosum.com in many of his articles.