Salesforce Ecosystem Implementation and Marketing Cloud Automation Strategy
The Challenge
Given the large database of prospective students and the long customer lifecycle inherent in higher education, The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) needed to adopt an enterprise-level, integrated marketing and sales platform that could handle both complex top-of-funnel nurturing and robust management of lifecycle stages and opportunities.
The Solution
The Information Technology, Admissions, and Marketing departments collaborated to implement a Salesforce ecosystem consisting of the SFDC CRM and the marketing automation platform, Marketing Cloud. The team-based effort included requirements documentation, backend database field mapping, and development of APIs and automations for proprietary internal systems. As the lead for and super admin of Marketing Cloud, I built a roadmap for implementation, with emphasis on scalable development of the system for daily application by non-technical marketing and sales users. Deliverables included:
- Sophisticated templates with custom content blocks for flexibility in email creation using dynamic content and AMP script.
- Email automations through journeys powered by custom entry criteria based on segmentation and attribution.
- Scalable extension building to target customers throughout lifecycle stages.
- Guides outlining best practices when using the system, including file management, naming conventions, and data entry values.
The Result
UMBC uses SFDC as the database of record, in which all admissions opportunities are tracked. This central database is connected to a robust email automation system that uses dynamic content based on customer behavior, demographics, and intent to power drip campaigns for nurturing leads and to identify deal attribution for future targeting and segmentation.
The Admissions Marketing team can now manage multiple campaigns that target more than 600,000 contacts in various lifecycle stages, with full flexibility in email content and automations that unlock opportunities for more sophisticated digital marketing efforts, including A/B split testing, goal setting and tracking, and integrations with paid advertising.