Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing automation and analytics tool. It allows you to understand your customers better, and design personalized digital marketing campaigns to engage them throughout their product journey.

RudderStack allows you to integrate your source to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and send data to Salesforce Marketing Data Extensions.

Getting started

Before configuring your source and destination on the RudderStack, please verify if the source platform is supported by Salesforce Marketing Cloud by referring to the table below:

Once you have confirmed that the platform supports sending events to Salesforce Marketing, perform the steps below:

• From your RudderStack dashboard, add the source. From the list of destinations, select Salesforce.
• Give a name to the destination and click on Next. You should then see the following screen:

Salesforce Connection Settings

Settings

• Client Id, Client Secret: To get the clientId and clientSecret, follow these steps.
  • After logging in to your Salesforce marketing account, go to the Setup page.
  • Under Platform Tools, you will find Apps where you can select Installed Packages.
  • Click New to create a new package. We recommend giving it a name such as RudderStack.
  • Click Add Component and select API Integration.
  • Select the Server-to-Server Integration Type.
  • The following permissions are needed to configure the destination correctly. Otherwise, you'll get the insufficient Privileges error from SFMC:
    • Email: Read, Write
    • Web: Read, Write
    • Automations: Read, Write, Execute
    • Journeys: Read
    • List And Subscribers: Read, Write
    • Data Extensions: Read, Write
    • Tracking Events: Read
    • Webhooks: Read, Write
  • Click Save.
• Subdomain: From the URL received, such as https://mxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.rest.marketingcloudapis.com/, mxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx is the subdomain.
• Do not create or update contacts: To disable creating or updating contacts during an identify call, set this option to true.
• Identify Data External Key: Use this setting if you would like RudderStack to send identify events for creating or updating data extensions in Salesforce Marketing. The External Key of the data extension is needed for mapping the data.

Salesforce Connection Settings for Track

• Map events to External Key: This setting is for mapping track events to a certain Data Extension in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. For the "Event Name" field, enter the name of the event that you want to send to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Then, for the "External Key" field, enter the Data Extension's External Key that you would like to route the event data to. Click "Add More" and repeat for all track events you would like to send to SFMC.

• Map events to Primary Key: For all events going to a Data Extension, there needs to be a Primary Key. By default, if you do not use this setting, RudderStack will create a Primary Key called Contact Key and assign it to the userId of the event. If no userId is present, then it will be assigned to the email. Use this setting if you would like to map your own Primary Key. In the "Event Name" field, indicate the name of the event you would like to choose your own Primary Key for. Then choose what key from the event payload you would like to act as the Primary Key. The key should be present in your event.properties and ensure that it is set as a Primary Key in your SFMC Data Extension. You can add multiple primary keys by separating them with commas.
• Event Name to UUID: This setting is for assigning a UUID as a Primary Key for a specified event. If an event name is given in the "Event Name" field and the toggle is turned on, RudderStack will generate a UUID and pass it through to SFMC as the value for a Primary Key called Uuid for the given event. Using this setting will override any action taken for the Map events to Primary Key section above, for the specified event.

Creating Data Extensions in SFMC

We recommend creating a Data Extension in SFMC to store the identify and track calls coming from RudderStack. For each trait (in case of identify calls) or properties (in case of track calls) that you want to send to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you should create an attribute on the Data Extension in the interface.

In SFMC, keys that are not present in the selected data extension are ignored, so those attributes must be created before you send them to SFMC. If you send a trait/property "phone": "99999" with your data, but there's no matching phone column in SFMC's table, that trait or property will be ignored. All of the traits/properties in an identify or track call are not needed to be created as attributes in data extensions only the required ones should be created.

For setting up Primary Keys in Track calls, you can set up different primary keys for various events. If no primary key is set, the default primary key will be Contact Key. You can specify multiple, comma-separated primary keys if you have multiple primary keys in your data extension.

When creating data extensions, the Is Sendable box should be checked if you want to send emails or push notifications based on this data. If this data is used to send emails, email attributes will be set, which will be called EmailAddress. Copy the External Key for the particular Data Extension, which you will set in the destination setting of RudderStack.

Here is an example of a Data Extension for an identify call that will store email, first name, and last name, and phone traits.

Identify

The following code snippet demonstrates a sample identify call in RudderStack:

Copy
rudderanalytics.identify("userid", {
  name: "John Doe",
  title: "CEO",
  email: "name.surname@domain.com",
  company: "Company123",
  phone: "123-456-7890",
  state: "Texas",
  rating: "Hot",
  city: "Austin",
  postalCode: "12345",
  country: "US",
  street: "Sample Address",
  state: "TX",
  createdAt: new Date().toJSON().slice(0, 10).replace(/-/g, "/"),
})

Track

The following code snippet demonstrates a sample track call in RudderStack:

Copy
rudderanalytics.track("Event Name", {
  Plan: "plan value",
})

Enter your external key and the primary key against each event. If no primary key is set, the default value of the Contact Key is taken. Multiple primary keys can be set by separating them with commas.

Data Formatting and Mapping

The RudderStack SDKs and libraries will automatically collect context properties which can be passed as properties in SFMC as attributes for the data extension. To use context properties, the attributes in the Data Extensions with specific naming conventions should be set.

The table below lists the RudderStack context properties available for SFMC and the Data Extension attribute names that they map to.

Contact us

If you come across any issues while configuring Salesforce Marketing Cloud with RudderStack, please feel free to contact us. You can also start a conversation in our Slack community; we will be happy to talk to you!