Speaker 0: There we go. Just making sure that it toggles back and forth. Is that full screen? Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It is full screen. Yeah.

Speaker 0: Perfect. And that

Speaker 1: was perfectly fine. Alright. And, uh, we go live in ten seconds.

Speaker 0: Okay. Cool.

Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome everyone. We are so excited to have you join us today. My name is Joel Alfonso from Sercante, and I will be monitoring today’s session. Before we get started, I have a few housekeeping items to cover. Yes. These sessions are recorded and will be available on demand for after the event. We’ll be also following up with an email with the link. Have any questions? Post it to the q and a tab above. Lastly, use the chat. There’s emojis, GIFs, and more. We want to hear from you. Now let’s get started. I’d like to introduce to you our speaker today, Vicky Moritz Henry, who has an awesome session ready for us today on one marketing cloud key to rule them all. Over to you, Vicky.

Speaker 0: Thanks, Jay. Hi, everybody. Happy to be here with you all today, and, uh, thanks for the awesome intro. My name is Vicky. I’m based in France, so a little bit farther along in my day than all of you, but really happy to be joining people from everywhere in these sessions. And I’m a certified instructor with Salesforce. I deliver Trailhead classes. Was just teaching one before I came on here with all of you. And I’m also a consultant. I do architect work as well, especially in the marketing space.

So yes, one of the topics that I talk about pretty often is this concept of one key to rule them all. So So I was really, um, excited to be able to come here to share it with all of you. This is actually my third year in a row speaking at MarDreaming, so love coming to this event. Love all of our awesome presenters and sponsors, and we wouldn’t be here without them. So just a moment to thank all of the amazing organizations that you see here, and do make sure to check them out because, um, really these organizations that that get involved as sponsors are how events like this keep on going.

So what we are going to be talking about here today is all about, um, well, marketing cloud and this idea of our keys. So we have all of these different keys and what are they? What’s a subscriber key? What’s a contact key? We’re going to start with our foundations and just make sure we have our definitions underneath of us that we know what is what, and then we’re going to go through Astro’s example. So for any of you who have ever sat through a class with me, you might have heard this little spiel already, but, um, it really helps to see a scenario and walk through it to understand how our key architecture is going to impact the rest of our marketing that we do in Marketing Cloud. And we’ll bring it all back to this idea of one key to rule them all. Yes. That does come from the Lord of the Rings. So for any of my other Lord of the Rings fans out there, this one’s for you.

So first off, what is a subscriber key? So when we’re talking about Marketing Cloud, we have this idea of a subscriber key, and I’ve included screenshots in here, but I’ll also just bring us into the platform so that we can see everything. And a subscriber key is what we store on all subscribers in Marketing Cloud. It’s going to be in the channel that we’re looking at. So here we’re looking at email, we’re in email studio and it’s going to be a unique identifier for that individual. So we’re always coming back at a subscriber level to this idea of consent. We have three things on all subscribers that’s important to us here, email address, status, subscriber key.

Now what the system does when we send to somebody for the first time is that, um, we are a permission based marketing tool, which means that we assume consent. We assume opt in. We’re not supposed to get people into marketing cloud that haven’t opted in. So the first time that we send them an email, they get added to the all subscribers list with a status of active, like we see up here at the top. And they remain active until they have bounce events that move them to bounced or held or undeliverable, or until they take the action of moving to unsubscribed. So we have this notion of consent. We want opt in to receive our marketing communications. The subscriber key is how the system says, hey, we’re going to look against this unique individual when we’re doing a send. Gonna see if it’s a commercial send, and if it is, I’ll check to see if they’re already on the all subscribers list, checking against the subscriber key. And then I know what email address to use to do the sending, and I’m also going to check to make sure that I have permission to be able to send to them. The system will only send commercial emails to somebody with a status of active or bounced, not of unsubscribed.

So that’s the first part of it and just to bring us into the platform, I took screenshots because I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get access up. Sometimes, uh, live demos are, um, a bit of a loose barrel there, But we’re in email studio in Marketing Cloud in our subscribers and our all subscribers, and this is what we’re going to be seeing. So we do see other stuff, and this is what I wanted to highlight here, things like our profile attributes, all kinds of things. But what we’re really interested in here is these three things and this idea of consent.

So heading back into our presentation, we have another key in the system. We actually have three. We’re only gonna talk about two here today. The other key is going to be our contact key. So we have to get all of these straight and understand what they’re used for. And it’s not easy because a contact key is a unique identifier as well, a unique identifier for the contact. So what is the difference here? Well, the difference is going to be that, first of all, the place I look. I’m in contact builder and all my all contacts list. And here I’m going to have my contact key and then I’m going to see the channels of communication that the contact is engaging on. Here I can see that everybody on my list, I’m using only email right now so this is normal for me, But I see the email address, and I see the little channel icons over here. And that contact key is my unique identifier for the contact. I have no notion of consent, of opt in, opt out. I can’t see that at the contact level.

So again, going back into the platform really quick to show where we are, We’re in audience builder, contact builder this time. This is where we can see our contacts, and I have all of my contacts for my email channel here. I can see the even a little bit more like the modified date. I had clipped some things out for the screenshot, but we can see the email address and then the channel that they’re on. I can also see spaces for device ID, mobile number. We can fill all of this out as we’re gathering information and as people are engaging with us on these different channels.

So back on in here, what does all of this mean to me? Well, we have a relationship in between the two. We have the contact at the top level and we have the subscribers underneath. Well we have a subscriber for each of our channels, we have subscribers over here for email, maybe we have subscribers for our mobile lists, sometimes we call those contacts too, but for the sake of simplicity I call them subscribers here, and we set our subscriber keys at the subscriber level. So we’re going to set or let the system default to the subscriber key here and it rolls up to become the contact at the contact level. This becomes the contact key.

So the important concept to keep in mind here is that we have the subscriber key that we’re setting. We have control over this. We have no control over this contact key. It’s just rolling up. Each time that we add somebody new as a subscriber, they get rolled up and created as a contact up here. So at a subscriber level, what can I see? Well, I can see who has opted in to receive communication. I can see who has opted out of communication. We don’t send commercial messages anymore. I can see who has bounced and, um, according to the bounce algorithm, you can find that in help articles, um, we will either attempt or not attempt to deliver future communications with that individual depending on the type of Bounce, where it came from, whether with a trusted ISP, all of that good stuff. And we can target individuals for personalized messaging on this channel and report on how the individual has interacted with this particular channel too, all of this at the subscriber level.

At the contact level, remember it’s a level up. I can see which channels an individual has engaged with. I can target people based off of the communication they received across all channels, making sure that they don’t get any of those pesky duplicate messages, things like that. And I can also report on how they have engaged across their entire, um, customer life cycle with me. This level, it’s the contact level that counts against my billable contacts. I have a certain number of billable contacts that are in my contract with Salesforce that I’ve purchased, and I wanna make sure I’m not going over that. Otherwise, I might get a nice bill at my door. My manager might not be so happy with me.

So what is all of this going to help me to do? Well it’s going to help me to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time on the right channel. This is our little tagline that we like to use in Marketing Cloud.

So now that we’ve gotten some foundations, some groundwork under us, we’re gonna meet Astro and go through a little example here. Here. So Astro is here to bring us along. He’s all dressed up in his best costume for Halloween or just his everyday clothes. And we are going to be working with Northern Trail Outfitters. Why not? Because we end up using this a lot, um, or otherwise we can say MarDreaming. So we can be working with MarDreaming. We’re an organization just using Marketing Cloud, and Astro is going to go ahead and opt in to email. Well, we have this idea of the contact at the top with the subscriber underneath. At the subscriber level, what were those three things that we saw before? Well, we saw we needed the subscriber key, the email address and the status. So Astro opts in with a status of active. Of course, his email address is astrotrailhead dot com. And if we don’t do anything, if we don’t set a subscriber key ourselves, the email channel defaults to what it has available as a unique identifier. What do I have right now if I don’t have anything else? I have Astro’s email address. I’m going to let it default to astrotrailhead dot com. That’s my subscriber key that uniquely identifies Astro as being Astro. So Astro, in all of his wonderful astroniffs, rolls up to the contact level with a contact key. The subscriber key comes over and becomes the contact key here. We’re going to have a contact key of astrotrailhead.com. Unique identifier tells us that Astro is Astra. So we’re all good here. Astro’s getting email communications. We at MarDreaming are really happy and, um, able to send this rich personalized communication and have a really great one to one experience with Astro as an individual.

Astro is so excited, so are we, and, um, we end up going ahead and getting mobile studio. Now we wanna be able to send MMS and SMS messages to our customers, including Astra. Astra is so excited that he goes ahead and signs up right away, opts in to get our mobile messages. We get Astra’s opt in for mobile. Well, on this side of things, we have the email subscribers still. Astra is still getting those email communications, still a contact with his email address. And then we add on that Mobile Connect subscriber or Mobile Connect contact sometimes we’ll say. So the key on that side of things, while we have a status of active, we have consented, we are actively getting those SMS, MMS messages. Astro has a mobile number of 867-5309. And for those of you who don’t know that song, we’ll have a little hint later on. But for those of you who do, you’re welcome for getting the song stuck in your head. And mobile. Well, what do we have on this channel as a unique identifier if we don’t have anything else? Well, we have the mobile number, so that becomes the key over there. 867-5309. And this is not Jenny, this is Astra. So we have another contact. That subscriber key rolls up and becomes the contact key. Sorry, I thought I had an error there. Um, but we have another contact key over here. Well, now we’re starting to get ourselves into trouble. We’ve got two different versions of Astra. Marketing Cloud doesn’t do duplicate management, not like Salesforce, where we have duplicate rules and matching rules and we can merge contacts. We can’t do that over here. Now we have two billable contacts. We’re getting billed twice. We have skewed reporting metrics. They’re not going to be quite as valid or as reliable as before. And then from Astro’s point of view, you’re starting to get some really disjointed messaging because you might get the same message on email and then an SMS about the same promotion. It’s like, okay. Enough’s enough. I got it. I have that code, and I’ll use it if I want to. So, um, just a little hint for anybody who didn’t get the reference before, uh, some good old Jenny humor here.

And then we keep on going. We go a step further and Astro opts into everything. Astro’s really going home with us despite our disjointed messaging. And now we’re going to add Marketing Cloud Connect. MCC Marketing Cloud Connect. This is the connector that connects Marketing Cloud to Sales Service Cloud, whatever Salesforce CRM that we’re using. It can be help cloud, government cloud, whatever we’re using over there. Now when that happens, I can synchronize my data from Sales Cloud into Marketing Cloud, which is really cool because then I can embellish on it. I can bring in my other objects and find out all of the opportunities and cases that Astra has, use all of that for my marketing content, all of the products that he’s purchased, all kinds of fun things. But as soon as I synchronize that data over, we get another subscriber key as the lead or contact record ID. This gets added as a contact. If we get even more gung ho than that, we start to use mobile push. Mobile Push works with a custom application that maybe we made with MarDreamin. So we worked with an app developer, created a MarDreamin app, really excited about it, all custom coded, all nicely built there. And we asked our, um, web developer to implement mobile push SDK. They did so, and now we’re getting all of those individuals coming in from mobile push. Well, again, if we don’t designate otherwise, what does it default to? Device ID. And, uh, one thing to note about the Marketing Cloud Connect key is that this happens no matter what. So if we’re using Marketing Cloud Connect, if we synchronize that person over into Marketing Cloud, this is going to be created and count as a contact even if we never sent to them before. Email is still there. So we’ve got an email subscriber key, a Mobile connect subscriber key, and now we’re getting into trouble. We’ve got four different versions of Astro, four different contact keys. They’re all rolling up to the contact level. Billable contacts through the roof. Imagine multiplying our entire audience that we expected to have by four, then we’re not going to be, um, very happy. Our metrics are all over the place. We’re getting very disjointed communications with Astro. It’s just a mess.

So So now we’ve got trouble. We’ve got all of these different Astros going on. Um, we have these duplicate records, too many available contacts, no 360 degree view of our customer, siloed communication on each channel, and unreliable analytics.

So we’ve seen the problem. How do we fix it? One key to rule them all. Gollum had it right this whole time. My precious. We want to hold on to that key. We want it to be our precious for as long as we can. We want to stay consistent across all of our channels of communication when we’re working with our keys. Ideally, in a perfect world, we want to choose one consistent unique identifier and let that system do the driving. We want that system to be setting the unique identifier for us and using it consistently as we go forward. Now that might not always be the case. We might need to go into, um, duplicate management, which again doesn’t exist in Marketing Cloud, but we might have to have contact delete processes and things like that to delete a duplicate version. However, once we delete that version, we lose all of our history as well, so it’s really not an ideal scenario. We wanna avoid it if we can.

I’ve given us an example here of what it might look like if we let Sales Cloud Service Cloud, the CRM Salesforce CRM, do the driving. So this is our Marketing Cloud Connect example, the connector being what connects Sales Cloud to Marketing Cloud. If we say that we have our contact key, I’m going to let this be the leader record ID. Well, now I have Astro who comes in, fills out a web to lead form on the website. He’s assigned a lead ID in Salesforce. That lead record is brought into a synchronized data extension, and we let that lead ID be used as the contact key. And if you’re not using leads, then you can use contacts too. Marketing Cloud does work with that process of transferring from a lead to a contact, so we have our conversion in there too. And then we can start to send out all of our messages through our various channels. Now that I’ve gotten my key established, I can send out email, I can send out SMS, I can even push people into add on products like advertising, formerly known as Advertising Studio, and push them into paid advertising campaigns. I can do some really cool things here.

So not all of us are using a sales cloud service cloud. Marketing cloud is a product agnostic tool, meaning that we can use it with anything, and it doesn’t really matter as long as we’re staying consistent with our key across our systems. It doesn’t matter who’s doing the driving. It might be a point of sale system. It might be our custom app that’s creating a customer ID for us, a unique identifier that we can piggyback off of. Maybe even a non Salesforce CRM because, hey, that does happen sometimes as much as we wish it didn’t, and any other system that has the ability to set a unique identifier for us that we can capture and then use to send out all of our communication across all of these different channels.

So I did put a disclaimer here. This is a very big architectural decision, so, um, um, you may very well make the decision to let each channel default to the comp a different contact key, but we need to think about what that effect that is going to have everywhere else that we saw. We might need to enable contact delete and set up a contact delete process to handle those duplicates. But as I said before, that might mean that we lose our reporting and all of those historical metrics there that we have in our marketing cloud instance. It might be that we just have those duplicates in the system, and we assume that. Um, we just wanna make sure that we know what we’re doing, that we’re doing it for a reason, and that we’re making this informed decision.

So I think we’re pretty good on time here. We have about nine minutes left, so we’re gonna have plenty of time for q and a. I did this on purpose so that I could answer any questions that you have in here. But in summary, we want to make sure that we’re designing our system landscape with a contact key strategy in mind. I see this with many customers that you might not be informed about this when you’re first getting started. And if we’re not thinking about our contact keys and we’re just saying, okay. I’m gonna write an API in to from the website and we’ll use the email as the to send to, it’s going to default to the email address if we don’t have a unique identifier. And then we’re going to have duplicates if we’re also sending that data into Salesforce into Sales Cloud and allowing it to come back in. So we just wanna make sure that we’re thinking really high level here and at that architectural system level of how our data flow is going to happen and where we’re going to be identifying these keys. Consistency across all of our channels of communication is key here, and we want to use one key to rule them all. So I put in our little, uh, shout outs to all of our Lord of the Rings fans. One key to rule them all, one key to find them, one key to bring them all, and in the darkness, bind them from Lord of the Rings, and a great way to remember how we should be managing our keys in marketing cloud. So I know that we have a little bit of time left. I’ll go ahead and open it up for for any questions at this point. I do have my social information here, so I am on Twitter or X for the moment, but you can find me easier on Linkedin when I’m not teaching classes, I’m answering my questions, uh, messages, or answering questions in my messages there.

Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you, Vicky. And that was indeed an amazing session and great content. Uh, it looks like we do have a question in the q and a. I can read it out for you. And for the rest, uh, if you have more questions, please do use the q and a tab to ask any questions to Ricky. So I noticed you said marketing cloud works with lead or contact conversion. Can you explain how that works? I was under the impression they would count as, uh, they’d count as multiple contacts in SFMC, both leads and contacts.

Speaker 0: Yeah. So I actually have this bookmarked as one of my teaching tools here because that question comes up so often. But there is a really great article about how this works because back in the day, it did count as duplicates, but we do have the contact alternate key store that comes into the internal architecture of how Salesforce handles this process now. And, um, we it does look like we can, um, enable the the, uh, contact delete to delete the converted lead, but it is going to bring over that contact ID as well. So it is going to allow us to, uh, use the contact from there on. But I put this into the chat, uh, anybody else who’s watching from home who doesn’t have access from the chat, you can go ahead and, uh, grab that URL. You can type it out, pause the video, whatever you’d like.

Speaker 1: Thanks for that wonderful answer, Vicky. We’ve one more question that says, what does the process look like for removing a contact from all contacts list? Will removing a subscriber from the all subscribers remove it from all contacts as well?

Speaker 0: No. So we actually delete on the contact level. And when we’re deleting, um, you have to enable contact delete. So I’m not sure yeah. I don’t have it on here because I’m in a child business unit right now. But it would be enabled at the parent level on whatever, uh, Marketing Cloud instance you’re on. And it’s something that’s in disabled by default because we don’t necessarily want to be deleting contacts because it does have a very big impact on everything that we’re losing there. There. We’re losing all of our audit information, all of this historical data. So that’s why it’s not enabled by default. So you first of all have to enable it, and then you can either build a coded developer process to, um, delete your contacts or you can enable contact delete from your parent business unit, and it cascades down into your child business unit. So it’ll take care of deleting the all subscribers for, um, the contact, the subscriber from all subscriber, and it’ll also remove the individual from any of our sendable data extensions. So if we’re concerned about GDPR and you’re doing the contact delete for a GDPR reason, the right to erasure, we need to delete all personally identifiable information. That’s where we’re still responsible for checking in on any other systems that might be connected here and then any nonsendable data extensions that might have personally identifiable information because the system can’t map to those.

Speaker 1: Thanks for that answer. And, um, yeah, it’s I think those are the only questions that we have so far. So we have a few minutes. If anyone has has any questions, please use the q and a tab to ask a question.

Speaker 0: Yeah. And I see some chat messages too, not necessarily a question, but confirming that, yes, you wanna make sure that with the Marketing Cloud Connect that you are, um, um, being very careful because as soon as you synchronize those data extensions in, they are going to be counting. And, uh, for the switch over, yeah, that’s a much bigger question. You might be deciding to delete your contacts that you have and switch over. There’s no way of changing the contact ID, so we are going to have to start new with the new Salesforce ID and then either choose to to keep or delete all of those email, um, email subscribers who have their email address being set as the subscriber key, the contact key there. So it’s not necessarily pretty, but that’s why sessions like this hopefully will get us thinking about this from the get go and, uh, maybe avoid any of those situations after. Oh and I realized that I put the help article from before into the Q and A, so I will throw that into the chat here, the session chat as well.

Speaker 1: Thanks for sharing that link, Vicky.

Speaker 0: No problem.

Speaker 1: We’ll give thirty seconds more for any new questions before we, uh, move on to the next session.

Speaker 0: If we’re any better at singing, I’d give you the jump Jeopardy theme song, but I’ll spare you all. Oh, I saw a couple messages in the chat just saying thanks. Thanks for attending. And, um, yeah, feel free to stay in touch on LinkedIn, throw any questions that you have over there. I’m always happy to get in touch. Oh, and somebody who knows my classes. So, of course, the dancing Brandy for the end. We wouldn’t be a marketing cloud session without it. Got to do a brand new dance.

Speaker 1: Alright then. Uh, with no further questions, uh, that concludes today’s session. Thanks again for joining us, everyone, and a special shout out to our sponsors for all their support. Without them, modeling wouldn’t be possible. We have some great sessions on the next up session coming up in a few minutes. Uh, you can head in there. Otherwise, head to the agenda to check out what session to join next. See you soon. Thank you, Vicky. Nice talking to you all. Bye. Bye,