Today’s post of the Marketing Cloud Consultant Prep series covers 2 topics – Account Configuration and Automation Studio– both holding 10% and 8% weightage respectively in the exam.
Account Configuration : This section is all about testing your knowledge on the MC features around how you setup your MC Account, Business Units and underlying user roles & permissions.
Business Units: The feature of Business Unit (BU) in Marketing Cloud is to mainly control access to information and sharing of data. You can setup roles and users within a BU as well as define criteria for subscriber data. Useful resources & tips to refer for your prep:
· Official Salesforce Knowledge article on MC Business Units
· Enterprise 2.0 and Business Units
· Understand the implications of using separate business units
· Using business units for different scenarios like – Distributed Messaging, organization with multiple brands etc.
· Type of customer scenario requires the creation of a business unit. (E.g. Publication types, demographic, workflow processes, organizational structure etc.)
Sender Authentication Package (SAP): SAP is an important concept in the MC application. Fundamentally, SAP is a collection of tools that help ensure that your messages reach the intended audiences.
Use the official Salesforce Article on SAP to know more about this concept. Key areas to cover under SAP are:
– Private Domain
– Account Branding
– Dedicated IP Address
– Reply Mail Management (aka RMM)
You will be getting scenario based question on what elements of SAP to be considered while setting it up. While on this topic, drill down further into RMM. RMM lets you manage and control the replies that you receive from subscribers and how should the system act on them. This is mainly for filtering and handling of out-of-office messages, manual unsubscribe requests etc.RMM also lets you forward incoming emails to one or more users (depending upon the type of reply) as well as conditionally trigger auto-replies.
Read on more about RMM using the official Salesforce documentation on RMM. A classic question on RMM would ask you to troubleshoot the RMM setup, as it is not handling the replies of subscribers as expected.
You should also be familiar with the concept of “Send as Multipart MIME”. This feature allows you to send a text version of the email to subscribers, where the recipients email client does not support support HTML. You can also use multi part MIME format for international sending, as it allows use character sets other than US-ASCII. This automatically sends a text version with the HTML version along with your text version.
Going back to the topic of SAP, make sure that you are fully across the following characteristics of SAP:
– Use of Sender and Delivery Profiles and what are they used for. You will find them under Send Classification (another important topic to cover)
– Who needs a new SAP? Can we have more than 1 SAP in a single MC Account? Can we have more than 1 SAP in a BU?
– Can we share SAP across multiple MC Accounts? Can there be more than 1 IP assigned to an SAP?
Roles: To begin with, you should understand the concept of “Roles” in the context of Marketing Cloud. Unlike Salesforce Roles, the definition of Roles in MC is slightly different. Roles are collection of permissions that lets you manage and control access to actions that can be taken against data in the application. For example – you may have a Content Creator role in MC, who can create Email content/templates, but does not have the permissions to send out emails from MC
Refer to the following knowledge article from Salesforce to understand the following concepts about Marketing Cloud Roles:
1. Definition of MC Roles
2. Role Types
2.1. User – Permissions that remain with the user, irrespective of the BU assignment
2.2. Business Unit – Permissions assigned to a BU. Will be inherited by any user assigned to that BU
2.2. Individual – Permissions specifically assigned to an individual user
3. What is the impact of assigning permissions to an Individual Role v/s a BU role
4. Standard (Predefined) v/s Custom Roles in MC
5. Managing User Access in Marketing Cloud – There is an excellent video on this topic by Salesforce – https://www.salesforce.com/video/305067/
Typical questions on roles (again scenario driven) would be a business scenario with a given user access requirement, and you will need to determine whether a predefined role (with tweaks) can address that, or do you need a custom role.
Automation Studio: While I already covered Automation Studio in my last post, let’s revisit (and drill down further) on this topic again.
Automation Studio is a Salesforce Marketing Cloud application used to execute multi-step marketing and data management activities on an immediate, triggered, or scheduled basis. Read up everything on Automation Studio and the activities that it supports. Useful information on this topic:
Official Automation Studio documentation by Salesforce and Automation Studio Activities
Familiarize yourself on the differences between Triggered and Scheduled automation, and which is the optimal one to choose, given the business scenario. One example here is that a Triggered automation gets fired when a file is dropped in the MC Enhanced FTP folder, while a Scheduled one gets fired on a pre-defined date/time
Like I mentioned in my last post, for Automation Studio, you should be able to articulate the correct sequence of activities, based on what each activity can/cannot do, for a given scenario. Therefore, it is important that you are fully across all the Automation Studio Activities. The following reference guide from Salesforce is a good source on this topic
That pretty much summarizes my notes on these topics from my prep. My next post under this series will cover the remaining exam topics (Reporting, Email Build and Marketing Cloud Connect), so watch this space!
