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BBCRM with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Joseph Styons

Has anyone out there used Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Blackbaud CRM?

What was your experience like? Was the final result satisfactory?

I have been in discussions with clients who are considering it, and I want to know what pain points to anticipate if they decide to move forward with it.

Many thanks

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Comments

Ray Bergman

Moving this to the Blackbaud CRM community

Rick Root

We've recently started using it, we're still kind of in the IP Warmup process but we've been sending emails since early June.

A couple of things worth mentioning - they don't have a good segmentation tool. We are continuing to use Marketing Efforts and Correspondence Processes to generate lists, and we've built a customization to make pushing lists to SFMC relatively painless.

We are sending a lot of data… nightly file feeds from CRM, pushed to the SFMC SFTP folder (using PSCP called from SSIS since SSIS doesn't support SFTP)…. and then automations to import the files into SFMC.

We're also pulling files back for email jobs, sends, opens, etc… again, using SSIS and PSCP to get the files and load them into staging tables then processing them from there.

Happy to talk more.

Joseph Styons

Thank you Rick, that's really helpful. When you say "they don't have a good segmentation tool", what do you mean?

Dean Barrett

@Rick Root - I am curious what the advantages of SFMC are if you are still having to rely on BBCRM for the segmentation.

Rick Root

If I figure that out I'll let you know. ?

Some advantages I do know.

Merge tags in subject lines
Merge tags within URLs
Journeys
Relatively easy to use email builder
Conditional Content

None of these are possible with BBCRM. Well, I guess conditional content is, but it lives within the HTML editor which isn't a good idea to use at all really.

Stacey Segal

From my point of view, SFMC isn't a segmentation tool and neither is their CRM. Most of our customers who use SFMC still use BBCRM Marketing Efforts to do all of their direct mail and some do the same that Rick is doing with email lists. However, SFMC takes the approach that email (and other digital marketing) is based on the attributes of a person and how a constituent interacts with email. The Journeys are what drive who gets what email. Instead of traditional segmentation, or list building, the Journeys decide who gets what email and when. You set up the Journey and what you want to accomplish with the Journey and the idea is that SFMC and the Journey you set up decide who gets what and when. If your team wants to control the lists, who gets what, when they get it, etc, then SFMC is probably much more than you need.

On the flip side, as a note, all of our clients who use NPSP and want to do direct mail, do it outside of SF systems altogether. They either use a data warehouse or marketing vendor to produce their direct mail segmentation.

As Rick said, you do need to send over large quantities of data on a daily basis and bring a lot of data back in. The nice thing is that you don't need SFCRM (NPSP) to use Marketing Cloud. Like Rick's team, and many others, you can both BBCRM and SFMC.

I don't know if that helps you @Joseph Styons … happy to chat more if you'd like. You know where to find me.

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