Contact Builder in Marketing Cloud

Organizing contact data model within SFMC

When aiming to personalize your marketing campaigns on Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Contact Builder plays a crucial role. It is the source which gathers and organizes contact data to use it for further marketing activities.

What is Marketing Cloud Contact Builder?

With the Contact Builder app marketers can control data about contacts. It gathers all information of the consumer, based on its interaction with the brand. Based on all these information, which is gathered during a customer interaction, a single view of the contact is established for the organization. Such a single view can, for instance, contain email addresses and phone numbers of the contacts. A contact is any individual whose information is stored in the Marketing Cloud account or any individual the organization targeted.

Why Marketing Cloud Contact Builder?

Due to having personal information of the customers, organizations can personalize their marketing and target their customers and leads directly and personally. Marketing Cloud segmentation will be more precise. Customer data facilitates building a one-to-one relationship with contacts. This will lead to an increased customer loyalty as it is proven that this is strengthened by customized customer interactions.

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Audience Builder Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Audience builder uses the data of the Contact Builder. Based on this, the Audience Builder creates audiences which are comparable to segments. An audience consists of a group of contacts which all share similar attributes and fits the Audience Builder rule. These are used to build an audience. Such a rule determines what kind of contacts should be included in the audience for instance, an audience rule could include all contacts living in the Netherlands. Audience Builder attributes help to distinct whether a contact matches a rule since the Contact Builder collects audience attributes about all contacts. The attributes determine the value of each contact. Attribute values are basic information like the place of living or gender etc.

Features of Marketing Cloud Contact Builder

The Contact Builder includes multiple tools:

Contact Configuration: It regulates the way Contact Builder operates relevant contact information.
Data Designer: Data Designer specifies knowledge about the contacts and links that data directly to the contact. This is done with data extensions.
Data extensions: It establishes and controls data extensions that contain contact information.
Imports: This establishes the process of relocating contact information into the data extensions.
Data sources: This is the place where attributes get attached to the single sources.

Contact Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Where can you use the data?

Contact data of the Contact Builder is particularly used in Journey Builder, Mobile Connect, Mobile Push and Group Connect. MobilePush helps with the activation of an increased use of the company’s own app. Thus, marketers can send messages from their self-created app. On the other side, GroupConnect enables sending messages over messaging apps like Facebook Messenger as Mobile Connect is able to send, receive and track SMS/MMS messages. Journey Builder allows marketers to customize interactions with the customer based on their needs and wants. It tailors a customers journey by a personalized frequency, order and content of messages designed with the Journey Builder.

Salesforce Mobile Connect

Salesforce Mobile Connect is one of the tools which is organized based on Contact Builder data. It builds a possibility to create sms/mms messages within Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Mobile Studio. It provides multiple functionalities like importing and managing contacts, creating messages and managing messages.

Due to the Contact Builder, Mobile Connect allows to interact with contact information for a person or contact. Messages can be created by the use of templates in Mobile Connect. The management of these messages likewise forms a relevant part of sms marketing since this process discovers whether any mistakes appeared, who received the message and who opened it. Furthermore, this provides the chance of optimizing the campaigns.

Get started with Contact Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

If you are already a Salesforce Marketing Cloud user, however, you obtain Contact Builder for the first time, you eventaully have to change the data structure to the Contact Structure. On the other hand, complete new customers will directly obtain contacts in their Contact Builder. The next step to get started with Contact Builder in Salesforce Marketing Cloud is to establish attribute groups. This leads to a more facilitated way of organizing your data within Contact Builder. In order to achieve this, you have to incoporate all essential data extensions by connecting existing data connections to either the contact record or another data extension. The last step which has to be completed in order to activate its capabilities is to use the Contact Configuration screen. In order to import data into the Contact Builder, the imports screen should be used.

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