I'm seeing customers either wrapping up their upgrades or making the move to our cloud, especially with the release of Tridion Sites 10.1 last year and Tridion Sites 9.6 full support coming to a close earlier this year (see the product release policy).

When considering your upgrade to Tridion Sites 10.x, I recommend seeing if it would be a good time to evaluate your content supply chain for opportunities for improvement. Some features that can help improve your process to generate, transform, and protect your content include the newer Experience Space user interface to improve daily editorial productivity and the integration features like External Content Libraries and Translation Management.

Well integrated systems across your content supply chain can leverage existing capabilities across platforms, reduce copy & paste errors, and ultimately improve your customer's digital experiences. This post focuses on the Tridion connector for Salesforce Marketing Cloud as an example of combining the strengths of Tridion Sites and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to improve those experiences and better connect with your customers. Read on to see if an integration like this might be a good fit, with or separate from your next upgrade.

The External Content Library feature allows you to give editors the ability to use "external" content sources such as Digital Asset Management systems, YouTube, online storage, and content from other systems within your Tridion Sites pages. This feature has even been improved with the Tridion Integration Framework, which allow the ability to interact with external content over the GraphQL-based Content Delivery API. In short, while editors can pick and choose in the Content Manager repositories, your programmers can query against external assets just like Tridion content over the same familiar Dynamic Experience Delivery API.

But this doesn't have to be just content. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud connector takes advantage of such external data to let your editors create web forms for your website visitors to complete when interacting with your digital experiences.

Here you can see the form fields users can use when creating a form for a webpage.

Read more about the Tridion connector for Salesforce Marketing Cloud or check out the documentation.

This integration provides capabilities such as:

• Web forms created by editors in the Content Manager
• Campaigns triggered against the data entered into such form
• The ability to personalize the web experience using CRM data

Building the Salesforce Connector for Tridion Sites

As a previous product owner for Tridion Sites integrations, I had a chance to better understand the two parts of earlier versions of the connector. The forms building aspect that surfaced Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) fields in the Tridion Sites interface which allowed editors to create custom forms to show on the website. The idea is to not just show one all-in-one form gathering as much possibly intrusive information from visitors and customers. Rather, you could ask for just what's needed like name and email, depending on the use case. Since that earliest version of the Connector, we've added support for interacting with CRM data over the Content Delivery API.

One practical tip I can offer is using first name or a custom name field when addressing your customer. This is about reflecting back to your customer how they see, and in this case, call themselves. Credit to Peter Kjaer for pointing out that the concept of a first and last name (or surname) is popular among many, but not all, countries.

I also strongly recommend building trust and complying with privacy laws by using the forms aspect of the connector by using the CRM data that's important for the customer's use case or job-to-be-done. That might be letting them describe what they're interested in, perhaps their language preferences, or some other aspect of their experience with you.

By all means, if you'd just like to make a connection to offer follow-up information, ask for just an email.

With some data collected, you can leverage Salesforce Marketing Cloud to trigger campaigns based on the data you've gathered. Also, with the CRM connected to your Website and Dynamic Experience Delivery (DXD), you can surface known information about the user in your digital experiences. This could be to promote content that match your visitor's interest, in their right language or otherwise personalized appropriately.

Example use case

You just bought that Big Expensive Thing you've researched. Of course you want more ads for the same item, right?

Probably not!

With the Salesforce Connector for Tridion Sites or a similar integration, you can improve the entire customer experience and move beyond the sale.

You customers' journey might start at awareness to research followed by the potential purchase, using your products or services, getting support if needed, and ideally recommending you to encourage other prospects to consider you.

While the customer is researching, you can use their search and product categories to recommend similar products. But after purchasing, you could then shift to the next steps in the customer journey. They already bought the thing, so content around accessories, support, and return or exchange information would be relevant rather than alternatives to "the thing."

Or maybe a known customer is shopping again for something else. They're not looking to get support or make an exchange. Here it could be appropriate to solicit recommendations or perhaps offer a reward for referral purchases.

Your helpful, yet trustworthy experience is important, especially when you're competing against your own products or services that might be available on other platforms, resellers, Amazon, or some aggregate site.

Looking to connect your digital experience with other enterprise systems? Explore the Tridion Connectors page for other opportunities to integrate.

Or are you interested in this connector and the Professional Services package to implement it? Maybe you have some lessons learned about CRM or personalization integrations to share? Leave a comment or reach out to me at areyes@rws.com!

Further reading

See my past recommendations on taking a privacy-by-design approach while complying with GDPR:

• GDPR Introduction from a Content Perspective
• GDPR Impact for SDL Tridion DX Features (appropriate use of ambient data)