Salesforce Certified Marketing Cloud Administrator should have knowledge of the features available to end users and the configuration options available in Marketing Cloud. Candidates should be able to maintain the Marketing Cloud platform, respond to common business requirements, and perform administrative functions within Marketing Cloud.
1. About the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Administrator Exam
- Content: 60 multiple-choice/multiple-select questions
- Time allotted to complete the exam: 90 minutes
- Passing score: 67% (41 Questions out of 60)
- Registration fee: USD 200, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
- Retake fee: USD 100, plus applicable taxes as required per local law
- Prerequisite: None
2. Exam Guide
3. Marketing Cloud Administrator Exam Certification Trail
4. Exam Outline
Digital Marketing Proficiency: 13%
- Describe governance and compliance in relation to digital marketing.
- Recognize security best practices for data, permissions, and PII.
- Describe Marketing Cloud product inventory and product offerings.
Subscriber Data Management: 18%
- Given a scenario, describe the contact model.
- Given a scenario, evaluate data quality.
- Explain preference and profile center concepts.
Setup: 38%
- Given a scenario, implement the configuration of business units, users/permissions, and security/passwords.
- Given a scenario, determine how to configure integrations.
- Describe the features in Setup Home.
- Describe Marketing Cloud extension products.
Channel Management: 16%
- Given a scenario, describe the configuration of Mobile Studio.
- Given a scenario, describe the configuration of Email Studio.
- Given a scenario, describe the configuration of Social Studio and Advertising Studio.
- Explain the concepts and typical use cases of Journey Builder.
Maintenance: 15%
- Given a scenario, describe solutions for data extraction and report generation.
- Given a scenario, monitor a Marketing Cloud account and provide system availability.
- Given a scenario, evaluate benefits of additional Marketing Cloud products.
5. Important Topics for Marketing Cloud Administrator Exam
5.1 Digital Marketing Proficiency: 13%
- Describe governance and compliance in relation to digital marketing
- Password Best Practices
- Eight or more characters
- Mix of letters and numbers
- Mix of uppercase and lowercase
- Special characters
- Expire every 90 days
- Basic Audit Trail is available to all Marketing Cloud accounts and provides 30 days of information for all users in your account such as
- User authentication
- IP addresses
- Changes to users, roles, and user permissions
- Changes to Security Settings, such as logins, password changes, and logouts
- SSL Certificates can be used to secure:
- CloudPage URLs
- Landing pages in your account
- Links included in email messages from Email Studio
- Portfolio content
- Field Level Encryption – converts encrypted fields to plain text at the time of sending
- Data at Rest Encryption (Transparent Data Encryption) – encrypts data at rest using SQL Server’s built-in data protection technology
- Tokenized Sending – take information from your own data systems and transmit it to the Marketing Cloud only at send time via an API call. Instead of storing sensitive information in your Marketing Cloud account database, your account stores a single token per send attribute. This token resembles a standard email address or phone number but does not include any information about the contact
- Data at Rest Encryption is not available forPredictive Intelligence
- Audience Builder
- Social Studio
- Marketing Cloud Shield combines security products to provide trusted encryption solutions with advanced Audit Trail functionality
- Marketing Cloud supports PGP or GPG decryption and encryption
- Marketing Cloud Products
- Opt-Out link and Company Physical Address must be included in all commercial emails to comply with CAN-SPAM Act
- Sender Authentication Package (SAP) is a Marketing Cloud account branding tool that allows you to customize links and images to match branding for the authenticated domain you’re sending email from. SAP is right for any customer who sends more than 250,000 email messages per month.
- SAP features include
- Private Domain for Email sending
- Custom Domain for CloudPages
- Account Branding with view-as-webpage, link and image wrapping
- Dedicated IP Address
- Reply Mail Management
5.2 Subscriber Data Management: 18%
- Data Studio
- Preference and profile center
5.3 Setup: 38%
- Business units
- Marketing Cloud Tenant Types
- Enterprise 2.0
- Enterprise
- Core
- Agency
- Permissions
- Marketing Cloud Connect
- Safehouse – Marketing Cloud’s secure file transfer location
- Automation Studio Starting SourcesSchedule
- File Drop
- Automation Studio Activities (imp for cert)
- Data Extract
- File Transfer – to move, unzip, encrypt, or decrypt a file
- Filter
- Import File
- SQL Query
- Send SMS
- Send Push
- Wait – Duration or Specific Time
- File Drop Automation File Naming Pattern: %%BASEFILENAME_FROM_TRIGGER%%
- How can a Marketing Cloud SFTP user be exempt from Password Expiration? Update FTP User Expiration Policy using Security Settings -> Exclude FTP Users from Password Expiration
- Journey Builder – is a campaign planning tool that enables you to design and automate campaigns that guide customers through their journey with a brand
- Journey Types
- Multi-Step Journey – Build a journey that sends messages across any channel based on marketing logic and audience behavior
- Single Send Journey – Quickly build and send a single personalized message in any available channel
- Transactional Send Journey – Instantly send messages once an event occurs. Trigger personalized transactional messages with an API event
5.4 Channel Management: 16%
- Three components of Mobile Studio
- MobileConnect – Send targeted mobile marketing offers with personalized SMS and MMS messages
- MobilePush – Manage mobile messages across iOS and Android mobile apps, and targeting based on geolocation and beacon technology
- GroupConnect – Engage in personalized conversations using text, stickers, and rich messages on group messaging apps like LINE
- Data extensions appear in MobileConnect only if they meet these criteria:
- Marked as sendable
- Contain only one phone field
- Contain only one locale field (five-character locales)
- Subscriber key, not subscriber ID, is used for the send relationship
- Four Pillars of Mobile Messaging
- Audience
- Data
- Content
- Channel
- SMS Code Types
- Short Code – A short code (typically 5 to 6 digits long) is used in one country or market. Two-way support
- Long Code – A long code (typically 11 to 13 digits long) is used in multiple countries and includes a country code prefix. One-way support
- Private or Dedicated Code – A code assigned to your company for a specific purpose
- Shared Code – A code that is shared across multiple clients from different verticals, not available in USA
- MobileConnect can manage multiple short and long codes in the same account
- A mobile subscriber opts out of a single code (not a keyword). If you have multiple brands, it may be best to have a code per brand or per business unit, as subscription is managed at the code and business unit level
- Opt-in Types
- Single Opt-in
- Double Opt-in
- Age Validation
- SMS messages are 160 characters and any messages over 160 characters count as two messages
- One SMS is equal to 10 super messages in US. Each country has a different super message multiplier ranging from 10 to 95
- STOP, QUIT, CANCEL, END, and UNSUBSCRIBE are considered global STOP keywords
- A message is designated undeliverable after 48 hours of attempting to deliver the message and failing
- MobileConnect Message Template Types
| Template | Description |
| Outbound Message | Send an SMS to your subscribers |
| Outbound Media | Send an MMS to your subscribers |
| Mobile Opt-in | Invite people to subscribe to your SMS or MMS messages |
| Email Opt-in | Invite people to subscribe to your emails |
| Send Email | Invite people to receive a triggered email |
| Vote/Survey | Invite recipients to vote or respond to a survey |
| Text Response | Create an automatic SMS response to incoming messages |
| Media Response | Create an automatic MMS response to incoming messages |
| SMS Keyword Opt-out | Unsubscribe people from receiving SMS messages based on a single keyword |
| Info Capture | Prompt recipients to provide information to store as contact attributes |
MobileConnect Message Template Types
- MobileConnect OOB Reports
- SMS Account Summary
- SMS Message Detail Report
- SMS Message Summary
- Email Studio
- Social Studio – helps you manage your social account posts. It connects your in-house marketing, sales, and services teams to your customers through popular social channels
- Social Studio User Roles
- Admin Only User
- Super User
- Full User
- Basic User
- Social Studio Workspace Member Role
- Admin
- Contributor
- Limited Member
- Social Studio Plays
- Social Customer Service – create case from social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram)
- Social Listening – Identify and analyze behavior of social audience personas
- Social Insights – unify Social Studio insights with marketing data
- Social Studio uses topic profiles for monitoring the discussions of your company’s social accounts and broader conversations. A topic profile includes three main components:
- Keyword Groups – keywords used in social posts
- Filter – languages, media types, and regions
- Source Groups – an RSS feed, Twitter handle, or URL
- Sentiment analysis, the process of categorizing words in posts, can help you understand public sentiment. Social Studio has a scoring algorithm that processes posts to determine the overall sentiment
- Advertising Studio
- Advertising Studio supports Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat. You can also use partner networks, such as Audience Studio, LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Viant, and Neustar
- Lookalikes can only be created in Advertising Studio for Facebook. Lookalikes can be created directly in Google and Twitter
- Advertising Studio uses CRM data to personalize digital advertising, creating one-to-one customer experiences. Ad Studio can be used to:
- Deliver personalized, cross-channel customer experiences by connecting digital advertising with CRM data and securely connecting that data to advertising
- Coordinate digital advertising across marketing, sales, and service
- Increase return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Boost customer satisfaction scores
- Decrease wasted advertising spend and employee operating time
- Advertising Studio Capabilities
- Harness customer data – Uses first-party data available in Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Pardot, and Service Cloud to help shape and guide digital advertising
- Connect channels – Finds new customers with lookalikes, aligns email and ad campaigns, and reach customers on any advertising channel with ease
- Generate more leads – Connects with Pardot and Sales Cloud, automates leads from social channels, creates ad campaigns in Journey Builder, and optimize Google Search
- Automation Studio
- Automation Studio Starting Sources
- Schedule
- File Drop
- Automation Studio Activities (imp for cert)
- Data Extract
- File Transfer – to move, unzip, encrypt, or decrypt a file
- Filter
- Import File
- SQL Query
- Send SMS
- Send Push
- Wait – Duration or Specific Time
- File Drop Automation File Naming Pattern: %%BASEFILENAME_FROM_TRIGGER%%
- How can a Marketing Cloud SFTP user be exempt from Password Expiration? Update FTP User Expiration Policy using Security Settings -> Exclude FTP Users from Password Expiration
- Journey Builder – is a campaign planning tool that enables you to design and automate campaigns that guide customers through their journey with a brand
- Journey Types
- Multi-Step Journey – Build a journey that sends messages across any channel based on marketing logic and audience behavior
- Single Send Journey – Quickly build and send a single personalized message in any available channel
- Transactional Send Journey – Instantly send messages once an event occurs. Trigger personalized transactional messages with an API event
- Journey Builder
- Entry Sources
- Activities
- Does not have Import Activity
5.5 Maintenance: 15%
- Data extract
- Report
