At Digital Response, we believe that the team should always be growing and training. The sector is evolving rapidly and many of the guides that were useful to us last year are probably outdated. In this process of updating, one of the important milestones in the area of email marketing has been the evolution of technology from email sending platforms to complex automated marketing systems. A few years ago, our job consisted of executing more or less massive campaigns for our different clients, working on the design, target definition and monitoring of sending and results. In this first phase, we worked with a personalization based on fields that can now even be rudimentary. The platforms have evolved to allow us to treat users individually, not only according to demographic data, but linked to their activity and engagement with brands.
In this scenario, advanced platforms such as Oracle's Responsys and Eloqua or Salesforce's Pardot and Marketing Cloud emerge . Today we will talk about the latter, and I will tell you about my experience acquiring one of the most in-demand certifications in our sector: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultant. This type of certification requires prior training (which you can do on your own or with specialized providers) and the completion of the exam, with a cost of $200, which can be done in person at centers associated with Salesforce or online, fulfilling a series of requirements. To request your exam in one or another format you must open an account on Webassesor , where you will find the associated centers and all the requirements to take the online exam. To reach this certification, we need to pass a first step: the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultant exam.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist.
In this first certification we will get to know Email Studio in depth , one of the main Marketing Cloud tools, which will allow us to send emails, manage segmentations, review results, integrate with some external services... in short, the basic aspects of any sending platform, with the added potential provided by Salesforce, which we will learn to exploit to the maximum once we reach the rank of Consultant.
After passing this first exam, we will be able to access the certification of
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Consultant
It is considered by many to be the most difficult exam to pass for certifications on this platform, and in turn, it is one of the most in-demand, since the knowledge it provides allows us to have a broad and deep perspective of the possibilities offered by this technology. In addition, it is not just about technical knowledge, but it largely addresses strategic issues and good practices.
The exam consists of 60 multiple ceo email lists choice questions that must be answered within 105 minutes. To pass the exam you must obtain a score of 68% of correct answers. The topics included in this exam and their weighting in the exam are as follows.
Some of them refer to technical issues of the platform (Journey Builder, Contact Builder, Account Configuration...) and others, as we say, have much more to do with strategic aspects or conceptualization of the account structure, depending on the type of data we have and the treatment we are going to give them.
Personally, what I find most complex about this exam are the questions on strategic issues, since the answers are closed and in many cases we could argue that they are debatable. This, added to the fact that Salesforce does not give you the correct “official” answers, makes it quite difficult to find the correct solution to some questions. In many cases, there are open discussions on the Internet about questions found in the exam in which some users contribute their arguments about different answers chosen (and sometimes all the contributions are perfectly valid). Even after the exam you do not get to know which questions you failed, since you only receive the percentage of correct answers in each area. Perhaps for this reason, so many people talk about the difficulty of passing this exam.
What is very true is that experience with the platform and solving different situations with real clients helps you to solve many of the questions . You can pass the exam without having used the technology in depth, but it is much more difficult. In fact, I chose to spend a few months working on a project with Salesforce Marketing Cloud before taking this second exam, which has helped me a lot. Salesforce even states that the certification is aimed at professionals who have worked with Marketing Cloud for a minimum of 6 months. In short, the certification is the basis for thoroughly understanding the most important aspects of the platform, but experience with it is vital to take advantage of the technology. Likewise, if you have experience but not the certification, it is easy to have shortcomings when implementing solutions . In this case, you have not had the opportunity to have a perspective on all the possibilities offered by Marketing Cloud and its integration with third parties or with Service and Sales Cloud, as well as the first-hand indications that Salesforce offers for different types of implementations.
If you are thinking about taking the Marketing Cloud Consultant certification, my advice on how to approach this exam would be these:
If you've never used Salesforce Marketing Cloud, use Trailhead to learn the basics and move forward little by little.
Take ad hoc training . There are various training providers that make the path to certification much easier for you. It is possible to do it on your own, but it will take a lot more research and dedication.
Look up exam questions online, it will be very useful to know what kind of questions are asked and the answers given by different users. But take this as a guide and never trust 100% of the answers provided by users or online services. The debate is on!
Read the notes provided by various users on the net. My favorite (I think that of almost all the people who introduced ourselves) is Atilla Wohllebe .
If possible, introduce yourself when you have a few months of experience with the platform. If you don't have the opportunity to have wide access to the tool that allows you to try out the different builders, try to find videos with experiences, tutorials, etc.
In our case, we thought that certification in Marketing Cloud (as well as Eloqua, Responsys…) was a basic step to face the future of the email sector . Being able to carry it out in parallel with the actual implementation of different solutions with clients has allowed us to have a broad perspective and grow much more quickly in the use of the tool.
Following this certification and the experience we have gained in recent months, in the near future, our mission will be to exploit the potential of Marketing Cloud and guide the client in data processing and the implementation of automations and flows that allow them to make their email strategy much more efficient and profitable.
