20 Salesforce Marketing Cloud questions you should expect in a job interview
15 min
Heartiest Congratulations on picking Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) as your career! You've made a great choice indeed, as SFMC is the land of opportunities. There are various types of jobs available in SFMC, like developer, Team lead, Consultant, and Email specialist.
One thing that separates you from your dream job is an interview. Interviews provide an opportunity for potential candidates to showcase that their skills and character align with the company's needs and culture.
I am sure you must have done all the research work but would still like to pen down some points on making oneself ready for your interview in general.
- Before the interview, you should consider:
- If face to face: Plan your route to the interview so you arrive on time.
- If Online: CHeck that your internet connection is working well, have a quiet place for that moment, that your background is neat and with good light.
- What you will wear.
- Research the company.
- Review the job description and how it suits your resume.
But the cardinal point is preparing your subject well and practicing interview questions. The target of this read is to make you excel in the interview.
Maybe you have an interview lined up for you, or even if you don’t, you never know when an opportunity knocks at your door. So it’s always better to be prepaid for it. Ask yourself the following questions so they are off the top of your head and will help you to a great extent.
For beginners:
1. What do you understand about SFMC and the term “Customer Journey?
Ans: SFMC is a provider of digital marketing automation and analytics software and services. It consists of various studios and builders (like Email studio or Journey Builder) that help users control communication with customers through multiple channels like email, SMS, ads, and push. It also has features like tracking and reports and can be integrated with any external system like web analytics, data warehouses or CRM systems.
Customer Journey is how a customer feels when they interact with your team or your website and their experience when using your product.
SFMC helps in mapping customer interactions with the company for the entire lifecycle, thus giving a better picture of the customer’s journey with the company.
2. How can we enable Marketing Cloud in Salesforce?
- Steps
- Go to ‘Set Up’.
- Under ‘Manage App’ choose the ‘Connected Apps’ option and then select the ‘Salesforce Marketing Cloud’
- Using ‘Manage Permission Sets’, set permission for users.
3. What is Cross Channel Marketing? In SFMC, how many channels are there to communicate with customers?
Cross Channel Marketing is branching out and using various channels to communicate and spreading marketing messages with consumers.
4. Name various products available in SFMC and explain them in brief.
- Products available in Salesforce Marketing Cloud:
- Email Studio
- Social Studio
- Mobile Studio
- Data Studio
- Advertising Studio
- Pardot
- Salesforce CDP
- Interaction Studio
- Google Analytics 360°
Email Studio:
Used to build personalized email campaigns at a large scale. It performs actions like selecting the audience, creates the best emails to send, and automates the messages.
Mobile Studio:
Helps personalized interaction with the audience through mobile devices like sending consistent SMS, push, and chat app messages in real-time.
Social Studio:
Allows listening, publishing, and engaging customers through various social media like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. It helps in connecting social to marketing, sales, and service in one platform powered by AI.
Advertising Studio:
Helps develop personalized 1 to 1 advertising across Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Display at scale using Salesforce.
Pardot:
Consists of a full suite of B2B marketing automation tools which will help in creating relevant connections, generating more pipeline, and empowering sales teams to get more deals.
Salesforce CDP:
Collects and centralizes the entire customer’s data across all touch-points so the user can get a complete view of the customer.
Data Studio:
A data-sharing platform where you can get more data from other data provider sources reliably and transparently.
Interaction Studio:
Helps you track and manage customer’s real-time experience.
Journey Builder:
Gives an idea of each customer’s cross-channel experience at various stages of the campaign.
5. What can you do with Automation Studio and what are its essential activities?
Automation Studio is an application of Salesforce Marketing Cloud tools used to automate marketing activities. It helps in doing multi-step marketing activities and data management activities at the defined time. It gives the flexibility of performing the task immediately, on a scheduled time or trigger basis.
- Out of many, the most prominent activities are:
- Wait Activity
- Import File Activity
- Data Extract Activity
- Send Email Activity
- SQL Query Activity
6. Shed some light on different wait controls and various data sources available in Journey Builder. Is backward or re-entry journey possible?
Journey Builder helps in drafting customer-centric cross-channel automated marketing campaigns.
- Different wait controls in Journey Builder are:
- Wait Until Date: Specific end date/ time is mentioned for wait.
- Wait by attribute: Wait until some specific contact’s date-based attribute that you select is reached.
- Wait by duration: Wait until specified numbers of hours or days are over.
- Wait Until Chat Response: Hold until response is received to an outbound message or the maximum wait time of configure expires.
- Wait Until API Event: wait until an event, such as a purchase, occurs before moving to the next activity in a journey.
- Data sources in Journey Builder are:
- Events
- Data Extension
- Lists
- API
- Salesforce Data
About re-entry or backward Journey,it all depends on the way it has been customized.
- They can have settings like:
- No Re-entry
- Anytime Re-entry
- After exiting re-entry
7. How is Dynamic email useful to marketing people?
Dynamic email content is any customized part of a mass message that needs to be changed based on the subscriber’s behavior or data. Some of its advantages are that it saves time, you can send segmented relevant segmented content, avoids trouble updating email list based on the selected content and helps in making different email templates for a different audience
8. What is the use of sender profiles, delivery profiles, and send classification?
Marketing Cloud allows three components a user can use to standardize email messages and include all the necessary (and legally required) components.
Sender Profile:
It provides the From name and email address information for an email to be sent. Users need not select it each time they’ve sent an email. Users also can create different sender profiles plus use personalization strings or AMPscript to populate the field.
- It consists of three items:
- From Name
- From Email
- Reply Email (can be same as ‘From Email’)
Delivery Profile:
It includes vital information about the message that needs to be sent, like footer and header information, IP address and an unsubscribe link.
- User has can:
- Select default profile
- Different delivery profile
- Forgo the delivery profile
Send Classification:
It allows users to create sender and delivery profiles, and then join them together in whatever combination you need for your sends.
9. Are Send Flow and Guided Send different or the same?
A Guided Send is the process used in Classic Content. Send Flow replaces Guided Send for Content Builder emails in Email Studio. Send Flow allows you to see what you are sending to reduce errors, and consolidates all major sending functionality into a simple, highly visual interface.
For intermediate level:
10. What’s the difference between Contacts and Subscribers? What are various lists available for Subscription?
Contacts are the information of a person or company stored in the database of Salesforce Market Cloud and they will receive the messages through any of the channels of this cloud. Subscribers are part of Contacts that are stored in Email Studio. These contacts have opted to receive messages and its channel like Email, SMS, push, etc. Various lists related to this are:
All Subscriber List:
Every contact inside Email Studio is a Subscriber and they all are included in the All Subscriber list. It holds details about the subscriber like Subscriber key, its subscription or unsubscribe status, email address etc. They will receive emails from Marketing Cloud through various channels like Email, SMS, or push notifications.
Publication List:
This list is a subset of All Subscriber List that is used to manage opt-ins for your email account in Email Studio. It helps in controlling the way subscribers receive the various types of emails. Examples are like Newsletter Publication List, birthday or anniversary Publication List. Users need to select this list when sending email or SMS messages to a sendable data extension. Subscribers added to a Publication list, are added simultaneously to All Subscribers list. Similarly, if a subscriber is unsubscribed in the All Subscribers list, the subscriber is unsubscribed from all Publication Lists.
Suppression List:
It stores the email address of the subscriber who doesn’t want to receive your email communication.
Exclusion List:
It stores the email address of the subscribers who will not receive a particular email campaign based on their geography, gender, or customer type. Suppression and Exclusion List serve different purposes. Suppression lists store email addresses that are permanently excluded from all future email campaigns.
Exclusion Script In this it is decided at run time whether to include or exclude a subscriber from sending an email.
11. What are the benefits of syncing Marketing Cloud with Sales Cloud?
The alliance between the sales and marketing enables an increased ongoing businesses performance and makes room for progress. Marketing Team generates leads through various activities and also provides marketing material for Sales teams.
‘Marketing Cloud Connect’ is used in Salesforce to sync these two clouds. When clouds are synced then there is no need to import data from Sales to Marketing Cloud.
- The data flow from Sales to Marketing cloud into the Data Extensions called Synchronized DEs.
- Integrated Sales and Marketing Efforts: Marketing people can take advantage of Sales data to reach out by email or other channels to potential clients or enhance existing customers. It has a single data model and helps in targeting and tracking emails for clients.
- The collaboration between Sales Cloud and SFMC extends to the advanced email marketing capabilities of the Sales team by combining contact and lead data from your Sales Cloud org with Marketing Cloud campaigns.
- This integration helps in getting a single view of a customer’s journey with your business. That is 360 View of a customer
12. Out of the data model/structure available in Salesforce, which one will you use where?
There are two different data models/ structures in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
List:
A list is a collection of subscribers that receive your communications. It’s a good practice to categorize subscribers in various lists.
- It can be fruitful for companies with the following requirements:
- Less than 500,000 subscribers
- Less number of attributes for subscribers
- Simplicity over performance
Data Extension:
It is a table inside the database of an application and stores data that needs to be sent to subscribers like lists or just to house relational data.
- It is fruitful in the following requirements:
- More than 500,00 subscribers
- Separate definitions are required for multiple subscriber data sets.
- High speed
- use the SOAP or REST APIs
- Flexible subscription model
- More field required
- Triggered sends
13. What can you do with a content builder in Email Studio?
Content Builder is a cross-channel content management tool that helps in consolidating images, documents, and content in one place for use in the Marketing Cloud. It's an easy to use, drag-and-drop interface which makes it more effective. It features:
- Susceptive Email Templates and Content Blocks: Different types of content blocks can be created like Text, Image, Freeform, Button, HTML, and Dynamic content block. The main advantages are :
- Layout page filling automatically adjusts to every device and email services.
- Pre-built layouts.
- Interactive Email Content: It helps in increasing customer’s engaging experience It have two parts:
- Email Form: It captures subscriber data such as reviews and preferences
- Image Carousel: For customers using Apple Mail or iOS Mail, the user can add up to 5 rotating images into the email body to provide a visual overview
Email customization
14. What are various options available in Salesforce to send email?
Single Email Send:
It’s a simple way, open an email, click send, and choose the target audience and other configurations, and send.
User-Initiated Send:
In this user can select email, audience and time to send the email.
Triggered Email Send:
This email is sent to the subscriber when he/she perform any action. It is used to customize, automatize customer’s responses on the company’s website. Emails are traceable, targeted, and sent in real-time.
For Experts:
15. What is statistical significance in split testing (A/B Testing)? Which part of the email can be varied for this testing? Can we control customers entering a particular category while testing?
Statistical significance measures the probability of an outcome – whether it is accurate or simply due to luck or random chance. For example, when one states that a customer's interest in the product has increased by 4% with a statistical significance of 95% confidence, it means that results are 95% trustworthy.
A/B Testing for an email can be done for Email Subject Line, From Name, Emails, Content Area, Email Preheader, and Send Time.
A/B testing works by random split once the test distribution is defined. So which customer enters which grouping is not in our control.
16. How would you leverage Lead Scoring and Lead Grading systems in Salesforce?
Both of these are commonly used techniques to qualify leads from marketing to sales.
Lead Scoring is a way to automatically rate the lead in numbers to show how interested he is lead in the company’s product. Rating criteria are set based on the action lead performance like shown interest for a demo or visited pricing page.
Lead grading is similar to lead score but in this grading is done from A to F depending on factors like lead’s location, industry, job title, etc. Lead is passed from Marketing to Sales when it matches the company’s ideal customer profile.
Both of them are very effective techniques to make sure that only the most qualified leads get passed from marketing to sales.
17. A manager in a company set a time & date limit for A/B testing. The manager waits till that time/day reaches. How do you think Manager should decide which out of two emails should be selected?
Managers should always keep an eye on results as they may be highly skewed in one direction (i.e. the test variation’s conversion rate is consistently much lower than the control and there is a strong indication that it will not improve over time). So they can decide whether to end the test early to preserve the health of the company.
There are two options available to pick the better email: Click-through rate (CTR) Or Open rate
18. What are the levels of SFMC Reports and what are their kinds?
- Name some standard Email reports
- The three given levels are: Activity Reports, Impact on Customer Reports and Return on Investment for Marketing.
- Different kinds of reports are: Tabular reports, Summary reports and Matrix reports.
- Some of the standard Email reports are: Email Send, Subscriber Engagement, Account Sent Summary.
19. What is the use of the Update Job Links feature?
This feature can be used to edit a link mentioned in an email after an email send completes. Just open the send from tracking and change the URL.
20. How can the active status of the subscriber in the All Subscriber list change to unsubscribed?
When any of the following occurs:
- Through email subscriber clicks unsubscribe link.
- On clicking “Marketing Cloud Unsubscribe” on a contact, lead, or person account record in Sales or Service Cloud.
BONUS:
What is the difference between Pardot, ExactTarget, and Marketo?
These are different type of marketing automation software.
They have many similarities between Pardot and Maretobut talking about their difference, they differ in following ways
- If you’re specifically looking for Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist job, then other than above questions interviewers may ask you questions related to following topics:
- Email optimization
- CTR (Click-through rate)
- CAN-SPAM Act
- Type of Reports
- Ways to Unsubscribe
- Master-detail, Many-to-Many, Look-up, External Look-up and Indirect Look-up relationships
- And if you are interested in a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developer role, then including the above questions some of the favourites topics of the interviewer are:
- List
- Attributes
- Data Model
- Contact ID, Subscriber ID, Contact Key, and Subscriber Key
- Metadata, Soap, Streaming, Bulk, and REST API
- Ways to Unsubscribe
- SOQL
- Terms like AMPscript, Auditing, Phishing, and Malware
When preparing for interview questions for Marketing Cloud in particular, there are no straight forward questions. These questions cover most of the area so you will be able to answer interviews in fabulous ways.
Best wishes. Hope you pass your interview with flying colours.
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