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Interactive “next-gen” emails coming soon to Salesforce

Interactive “next-gen” emails coming soon to Salesforce

Last month it was announced that Salesforce is acquiring the email startup company Rebel. Rebel is an email platform that allows businesses to create interactive, next-gen emails that greatly enhances their direct marketing services. What is an interactive email? Recipients of interactive emails can shop, play interactive games, write reviews and more, all directly within the email. This takes email marketing to a different level, and explains why Rebel billed themselves as “email that doesn’t play by the rules”

Specifics on the acquisition haven’t yet been released, and most importantly, we aren’t sure when the Rebel email features will be available for use in Salesforce. What we do know is that this addition will be integrated into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, significantly enhancing any B2C marketing efforts for anyone using Salesforce.

Email marketing is growing

Ask any experienced marketer and they will tell you the simple truth, that the more your prospects or customers engage with your content, the more likely they are to buy. And the humble email could definitely use a little more pizzaz to compete with all of the other interactive media we see nowadays.

Suprisingly, email marketing has been growing of late. According to Salesforce’s ‘State of Marketing’ report, email marketing has increased by 106% in the last 2 years, as marketers are testing new channels in conjunction with proven ones to find combinations that work best for their consumers. Which is what Rebel is all about, getting many different channels, such as video, websites, and mobile shops, all aligned to create a more immersive marketing experience.

Currently, Marketing Cloud is Saleforce’s smallest division, bringing in  It $452 million in revenues last quarter. This puts marketing well behind revenues for Sales Cloud ($1 billion), Service Cloud ($892 million) and Salesforce Platform ($712 million). While marketing doesn’t seem to be the primary focus of Salesforce’s efforts, they are certainly committed to being a revolutionary platform, and one that could potentially lead the way in whatever they do. Rebel emails are another piece of the puzzle, and should be a nice addition to the platform.

 

The outlook for the future

Currently, Rebel has pretty much shut down their website as the transition looks to be underway.

Prior to the acquisition, Rebel featured 4 main products:

  • Rebel Shop: which allows users to browse and purchase items directly from an email
  • Rebel Mail: which puts many standard web functions, such as quizzes, directly into emails
  • Rebel Actionable API: which allows developers to create an email entirely in JSON, making it a platform for app type functionality, such as booking appointments.
  • Rebel Lite API: similar to above, but as a lighter version, with reduced analytics and functions.

However, there is a good chance Salesforce will change all of this as they integrate it into the Marketing Cloud

No matter how Salesforce deploys the Rebel features and API’s, one thing is for sure, those next-gen emails, with super cool interactive features, will soon be available on a Salesforce org near you.

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

Using Forms to Your Advantage in Salesforce

Using Forms to Your Advantage in Salesforce

Digital forms are a very simple but important part of online business. In fact, they are one of those small things that many of us really don’t give a second thought to. But we should! After all, it’s our forms that capture all that essential data about our leads, clients, and prospects. When it comes to building out a sales pipeline, having good data, and an easy way to process it, is absolutely essential.

To get the best results from your data, you really shouldn’t use a one-size-fits-all form! If you want your data to transfer into Salesforce cleanly and efficiently, you need to think about exactly what your needs and uses are, and then define a custom form to meet these specifics! Got a complex use case? Never fear, there are plenty of form helpers on the AppExchange, and if you have more than just a simple data or form issue, the Salesforce Experts at CloudMyBiz are always happy to help. No matter what your specific needs, correctly using forms will give you better data, and that is truly the foundation for a quality business.

Want to learn more? The team at SalesforceBen has put together a great breakdown of some advanced form uses cases that may be just what you are looking for.

Check it out here!

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 

 

User Adoption Dashboards from Salesforce

User Adoption Dashboards from Salesforce

This week’s App of the Week, isn’t so much an App, as a Salesforce add-on that you should definitely know about. User adoption is the subject of much discussion in the business world, with hundreds of different theories, approaches, and strategies for getting the best user engagement. Well if you are using Salesforce, this add-on dashboard gives you a powerful tool for tracking, analyzing and understanding just where your users are in their adoption journey.

Great user adoption doesn’t just happen! The Salesforce Adoption Dashboards provide visibility to relevant user login history & trending, adoption of key features such as accounts & opportunities, and critical sales and marketing productivity enhancers.

Check it out here!

How to Integrate Google Places to Your Forms

How to Integrate Google Places to Your Forms

 

Automation saves time and prevents human error. On most forms, entering the address is a manual process where the street, city, zip, and country must be entered individually, and without verification. However, if you want your form to be better than most, you can make your address inputs smarter with Google Places. By using Google places you speed up the submission process, prevent mistakes and add an additional layer of address verification to just about any form.

Google Places utilizes the vast Google and Google Maps database to autocomplete the location details in the form, from only a few keystrokes. With this feature enabled, as you type in the address field you will see suggestions for the full address and can easily pick the correct address and watch as the Street, City, State, Postal code, and country are populated automatically. Not only is this a faster way to define the location, but it ends up being more accurate too!

 

From a developer standpoint, the addition of Google places is relatively simple. Users need to first sign up for a Google Places API key https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/places/ – Google gives you unlimited API calls if you are just using them for the basic simple places address autocomplete (https://developers.google.com/places/web-service/usage-and-billing#standard-usage-limits-for-places-api) Then in the backend, reference the Google Places library and set which fields you want it to apply to.

Click here to learn more about Google Places

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team

 

Tip of the Week – Google and Salesforce: Together at Last

Tip of the Week – Google and Salesforce: Together at Last

Did you hear? Google and Salesforce have partnered to take over the world. Well, maybe just the marketing world. On May 17th, an integration was announced between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360. This integration will allow marketers to finally enjoy the combined benefits from two of the top marketing tools available.

This is the first time Google has partnered with a third party to integrate Google Analytics 360 and the potential boost for marketers is pretty enormous. Expect to see greater insights into customer journeys, more customized experiences and piles and piles of data. Most importantly, this partnership will enable marketers to coordinate between their channels while the customer is in the marketing funnel, bringing prospects the most relevant content, at the appropriate time.

Click here to learn more!

 

-Ryan and the CloudMyBiz Team