The Data Activation connector for Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) enables you to seamlessly integrate your customer data with Salesforce's powerful marketing automation platform. This integration allows you to deliver personalized, data-driven marketing campaigns across email, SMS, social media, and other digital channels, creating impactful customer experiences.
Here's how this integration adds value:
Unified customer profiles: Enrich Salesforce Marketing Cloud with first-party data, creating comprehensive customer profiles for precise targeting and segmentation.
Personalized, omnichannel campaigns: Use insights to craft hyper-relevant campaigns in SFMC, ensuring personalized messaging across email, push notifications, and social media.
Real-time data synchronization: Sync real-time customer data with SFMC to activate timely campaigns triggered by user behavior, preferences, or lifecycle stages.
Enhanced retargeting: Use dynamic audience data to re-engage customers with personalized offers, reminders, or loyalty incentives.
Cross-channel consistency: Align your Salesforce Marketing Cloud campaigns with broader omnichannel strategies, ensuring seamless and cohesive customer journeys.
Improved ROI: Optimize campaign performance by focusing on high-value audience segments, improving engagement rates, and reducing wasted marketing spend.
Actionable insights: Combine rich customer data with SFMC's analytics capabilities to continuously refine and improve your marketing strategies.
Destination connector overview
Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
Platform type | Email campaigns |
Cookie Sync | No |
Connecting protocol | REST (enhanced authentication) |
Real-time data sync | Yes |
Syncs Data On | Add, Update, Remove |
Allowed setting multiple connectors | Yes |
ProfileVars Support | Yes |
Before you begin
Because of the specifics of the Marketing Cloud Platform, preliminary setup is required within Marketing Cloud to enable pairing with Data Activation. Specifically, a user with the necessary permissions on the Marketing Cloud interface must create two Data Extensions.
SupermetricsAudienceProd
The name of the Data Extension should be SupermetricsAudienceProd. The following attributes need to be configured:
Field Name | Data Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
SubscriberId | Text | Must match the SubscriberId in SFMC. Set the length to 500 if not set. Non nullable |
SegmentId | Number | Stores the selection ID or Journey's stepId (UUID v4 string). Non nullable |
Status | Boolean | Non nullable |
EventDate | Date | Nullable |
Note
When using the connector in a Journey (Orchestration), 'SegmentId' contains the journey's stepId. This stepId is a 'String' instead of an 'Integer', as stepIds are a UUID v4.
SupermetricsVariablesProd
The name of the Data Extension should be SupermetricsVariablesProd. This data extension serves as a table designed to hold the profile data for users included in a specific selection.
The following attributes need to be configured:
Field Name | Data Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Must match the SubscriberId in SFMC. Length 500 and non nullable |
| Number | Non nullable |
| Text | Length 50, non nullable |
| Text | Length 500, non nullable |
| Date | Nullable |
Additional configuration notes
SubscriberId: If your SubscriberIds in Salesforce Marketing Cloud could contain non-numeric values, change the type of SubscriberId from Number to Text.
Tenant-specific endpoint: Make sure to only provide the subdomain for your account. For example, if you have the endpoint
https://ab-xxxinqc8hsgnywdv9j0xxxxx0.rest.marketingcloudapis.com/, configure the domain field as:ab-xxxinqc8hsgnywdv9j0xxxxx0External Key: Ensure you change the default external key in the data extension to
SupermetricsAudienceProdandSupermetricsVariablesProdrespectively.
How data flows work
When a Marketing Cloud interaction is configured in a selection:
When a user joins a selection: Data is sent to both
SupermetricsAudienceProdANDSupermetricsVariablesProdWhen profile data is modified within a selection: Data is sent to
SupermetricsVariablesProdonlyWhen a profile leaves a selection: Data is sent to
SupermetricsAudienceProdonly
Instructions
On the Data Activation platform, select Connectors in the left-side navigation bar.
Select Server to Server and click New Connector.
Select Salesforce Marketing Cloud and provide the required configuration, including your tenant subdomain and authentication credentials.
Note
It currently isn't possible to create two Marketing Cloud connectors with the same partnerNumber. If this is needed, reach out to the support team and explain your use case.
Error handling
For the Salesforce Marketing Cloud connector, we report Salesforce-specific error codes.
Error documentation can be found in the Salesforce error handling documentation.
The following error codes are Data Activation-related:
Timeout
Other error
Invalid credentials
To read more about these errors, see Using journey and audience connectors.
FAQs
Is my connector using SOAP or REST?
REST
I get a 400 bad request error.
This can have multiple causes, but please verify that the External Key in your data extension is actually SupermetricsVariablesProd and SupermetricsAudienceProd.
Can I target users based on different identifiers?
Yes, to do this you need to create two new data extensions in Marketing Cloud as well as creating a new connector with advanced settings. The Segment key and Variables key need to match the External Key of the data extensions. Please ensure that the same fields are available as described earlier in the article.