Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Companies engage with their users to deliver positive brand experiences, support their business goals, and build long-term relationships. You can coordinate all your engagement campaigns within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) Journey Builder . And you can consume Airship’s events in SFMC, adding Airship-gathered engagement data to your CRM system.

This is a two-way integration:

• Integrate Airship into SFMC’s Journey Builder — With this integration, you can send Airship App, SMS, and Web messages from an SFMC journey. You can also send custom events from an SFMC journey to Airship and set tags on named users to trigger automation or sequences. You can personalize both your messages and custom events with information from your SFMC Contacts model.

  • Create A Compelling Campaign In Minutes — Initiate campaigns with easy-to-use tools that don’t require a development team. With Airship, you can add mobile, SMS, and web messaging to any customer journey that will deliver in-the-moment value to your app audience.
  • Create Automated Journeys Triggered by Cross-Channel Events — Send targeted campaigns to onboard, activate, retain and re-engage your customers. Easily zero in on the insights necessary to drive targeted actions in other systems.
  • Use multiple Airship Projects in SFMC — Most companies have different Airship projects for different purposes — now you can add all your projects to SFMC use them in individual campaigns.
  • Add Actions and Extras to Message Payloads — Do more with your messages by adding Actions (Deep Links, Landing Pages, Tagging, etc.) and Extras (Key/Value pairs available to the app upon direct open).
  • Re-engage Users — Use cross-channel marketing to re-engage users when they uninstall your app or convert on their mobile device or web browser.

• Integrate SFMC with Airship’s Real-time Data Stream to send events from Airship’s to SFMC, incorporating your audience’s message activities into your CRM environment.

  • Track Airship user engagement in Salesforce — Understand and leverage how and when your users are using (or not using) your app in the Marketing Cloud interface.
  • Trigger SFMC journeys from Airship engagement events — Take advantage of Airship’s Real-time data streaming events in SFMC, to trigger new journeys and keep your audience engaged.

Named User Requirements for SFMC Integrations

This integration requires Named UsersA customer-provided identifier used for mapping multiple devices and channels to a specific individual. . Named users map IDs from your CRM or another backend system (like SFMC) to device IDs. The named user IDs you set must map to a data extension in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Airship cannot target devices if you do not set named users appropriately.

See our Named User documentation to set the named user ID for a device via the iOS SDK, Android SDK, or the server-side API.

Configuring SFMC in Airship

This process enables Airship to send events from the Real-Time Data StreamingA service that delivers engagement events in real time via the Data Streaming API or an Airship partner integration. into your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance.

You must have your SFMC account information ready to configure the integration. If these items are not available to you, contact your SFMC admin.

• An API user account username and password — Create an API user in SFMC with privileges needed to add, edit, and insert data into Data Extensions.
   Tip

  Check Setup » Security » Security Settings and verify that “Enable Username and Password for Web Services” is set to “Yes.”

  The specific permissions needed are:

  • Email » Subscribers » Data Extension » Create
  • Email » Subscribers » Data Extension » View
  • Email » Subscribers » Data Extension » Manage Data
  • Email » Admin » API Access » Webservice API

• SOAP WSDL — Click your username in the upper right of the SFMC interface, and go to Cloud Preferences. Copy the SOAP WSDL URL.
• MID — This appears when you hover over the business unit menu in the upper-right corner of the SFMC interface:

  

In Airship:

1. Go to Settings » Project Configuration and click Manage for Real-Time Data Streaming.
2. Under Real-Time Data Streaming, select Salesforce AppExchange. Previously configured integrations are listed under Enabled Integrations.
3. Follow the onscreen instructions to configure the integration.

After a short time, Airship will create a directory called airship in your Data Extensions root folder. The folder will contain data extensions representing all of Airship’s Real-time Data Streaming event types. Only the data extensions corresponding to the event types you selected when setting up your integration will be populated.

Unlike other event types, the Tag change event type is represented by two data extensions: TAG CHANGE_EVENTS and TAG_ACTION_EVENTS. The TAG_ACTION_EVENTS data extension lists added and removed tags.

Configuring Airship in SFMC

1. Go to Settings » Project Configuration and click Manage for Partner Integrations.
2. Select Salesforce Marketing Cloud. If the SFMC tile is not visible, please fill out our interest form .
3. Click Configure for the inbound integration and follow the onscreen instructions to:
   • Create Tag GroupAn array of tags that you can associate with both channels and named users. sfmc-integration and an authentication token. All tags set from Salesforce appear in this tag group and it is how you will reference Salesforce tags in the API. SFMC uses the token to communicate with your project in Airship.
   • Configure the Airship integration in SFMC.

Adding Airship Projects to SFMC

Add your Airship projects to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You can add more than one project and select the project that you want to send messages from when configuring activities in SFMC journeys.

1. Open your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance.

2. Hover over AppExchange and click Airship.

3. Click New Project. You can edit the settings for an existing Airship project by clicking  .

   

4. Enter your Airship project name in the Project field.

5. Enter your App Key. You can find this in Settings in your Airship project.

6. Enter the Auth Token you created when Configuring Airship in SFMC.

7. Enter an Email Address. This address will be notified if there are any issues with sends.

8. Navigate to the Data Extension containing the field that you want to map to your named users in Airship, displayed as they are represented in your SFMC Attribute Groups. If you need assistance with this step, contact your SFMC administrator.

   

9. In the Named User box, select the field in your Data Extension External Key that maps to your named users in Airship.

10. Click Add Project.

If your Airship project supports SMS, you can now configure your SMS senders.

Configure SMS Senders for SFMC

If your project supports SMS, you can add your sender long- and shortcodes after you configure your Airship project in SFMC. You must know the Airship long- or shortcodes that you want to support in Salesforce to configure SMS.

1. Log in to Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

2. Go to AppExchange and select Airship.

3. Select the Project containing your SMS senders and scroll down to SMS Sender.

4. Under Sender Info, enter a Name. The name helps you identify senders in Salesforce.

5. Enter the Number for your sender. This is the long or shortcode you want to send messages from.

6. Toggle on Enable MMS if you would like to send MMS messages in your SFMC Journey Builder.

7. Click   to add your sender.

Repeat this process to add multiple senders.

Adding a Message Activity to a Journey

You can personalize your messages by referencing the fields in Data Extensions that are linked by Attribute Group to your Salesforce Contacts model (Attribute Sets) using the AMPScript syntax. For example, if you have a field called customer_name, you could use the value from that field in your custom event with %%customer_name%%.

If you have multiple fields in the model with the same name, you should reference the data extension name to select the correct field, using the format %%data_extension_name.field_name%%.

1. In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, go to Journey Builder » Journey Builder.

2. Select an existing journey or click Create New Journey.

3. Go to Activities » Messages and drag the Airship icon into your journey.

   

4. Click the Airship activity in the journey to configure your message.

5. Select the Project you want to send a message from.

6. Click the Channel for your message.

   1. If you select App, select the type(s) of app messages you want to send — Push Notification and/or In-App Message.
   2. If you select SMS or MMS, pick the senderThe alphanumeric code that your audience will see when they receive messages from you; it is essentially the phone number or name that your SMS messages come from. Members of your audience subscribe (opt in) to each individual sender ID they want to receive messages from. you want to use to send your message.
       Note

      If you don’t have the option to send SMS or MMS messages, you may need to Configure an SMS Sender for your Airship-SFMC integration.

7. Scroll down to enter your Message Content.

   • For Web, MMS, and App messages, you can also enter the URL for media you want to include with your message.

     • URLs must begin with https://.
     • Allowed formats and size limits:
       • Images — JPEG, GIF, PNG
       • Audio (10 MB) — AIFF, WAV, MP3, M4A
       • Video (50 MB) — MPEG, MPEG2, MP4, AVI

   • For SMS and MMS messages, you can enable Shorten Links for your message. Link shortening converts HTTP/HTTPS URLs in your SMS messages to unique, shortened URLs for your recipients. The shortened URLs reduce the total number of characters that links consume and produce click tracking metrics, helping you determine how effective your SMS messages are in driving traffic to your links.

     

   • For MMS messages, make sure to provide a message in the SMS Fallback Text in case sending an MMS should fail.

   • For Web and App messages, you can add predefined interactive buttons and configure them to add or remove tags. For any button with a configurable ActionA configurable behavior that occurs when a user interacts with your message, e.g., opening a web page. , also select what action should occur when they press the button: Home, Web Page, or Dismiss.

8. (Optional) For your App and Web channels, set an Action to determine what happens when a user taps or clicks your notification. When you select an action, you can also set TagsMetadata that you can associate with channels or named users for audience segmentation. Generally, they are descriptive terms indicating user preferences or other categorizations, e.g., wine_enthusiast or weather_alerts_los_angeles. Tags are case-sensitive. and Key Value PairsAdditional key-value pairs in your push notification payload for use by custom code in your app. You can use custom keys to pass additional campaign identifiers for analytics, pass user information to the device, control the look and feel of the app, provide image links, etc. (Custom Keys in Airship).

   1. Select an ActionA configurable behavior that occurs when a user interacts with your message, e.g., opening a web page. : Home, Web Page, Landing Page, Deep Link, or Share.
   2. (Optional) Set tags for users who interact with your message. Enter your tag name, click  , and then determine whether you want to Add or Remove the tag.
   3. (Optional) Set key value pairs for this message. Enter the key name and value and click  .

9. (Optional) Add message Campaigns if you want to track this message as a part of a larger messaging campaign in Airship.

10. Click Review for a summary of your setup and a preview of your message. Then click Done.

Sending a Custom Event from a Journey

Within a journey, you can send custom events to Airship to trigger automated messages in Airship and associate additional information with your Airship named users.

When you set up a custom event in your journey, you can determine the properties that you want to send with the event; your custom properties appear in the body.properties object in the event.

You can personalize the event name and any properties in your custom event using the fields in your Salesforce Contacts model using AMPScript syntax. For example if you have a field called customer_name, you could use the value from that field in your custom event with %%customer_name%%.

If you have multiple fields in the model with the same name, you should reference the data extension name to select the correct field, using the format %%data_extension_name.field_name%%.

To issue a custom event to Airship as a part of a Salesforce journey:

1. In Salesforce, go to Journey Builder » Journey Builder.

2. Select an existing Journey or click Create New Journey.

3. Go to the Custom section and drag Airship Events/Tags into your journey.

4. Select the Airship project you want to send your custom event to.

5. Click Custom Event.

6. Enter an Event Name. This name appears in the body.name of the custom event that SFMC sends into Airship.

    Important

   Event names cannot contain uppercase characters. Airship rejects events with uppercase characters in their name with a 400.

7. Click Add Property to add up to 10 properties that you want to send to Airship. These properties appear in the custom event’s body.properties object.

   1. Enter a Property Name.
   2. Enter a Property Value, and select the value’s type. Selecting the wrong value type can prevent Airship from successfully receiving the event.
   3. Click Add Another Property to add more properties to your event.

      

8. Click Done.

Adding or Removing Tags in a Journey

You can add tags to, or remove tags from, named users as they progress through your Salesforce journey.

Before you set tags from Salesforce, you must create a tag group with a Group Key of sfmc-integration. All tags set from Salesforce appear in this group. Setting tags on your audience results in tag_change events in Airship that you can use as message triggers or to track changes to your audience.

To set tags in Airship as a part of a Salesforce journey:

1. In Salesforce, go to Journey Builder » Journey Builder.

2. Select an existing Journey or click Create New Journey.

3. Go to the Custom section of the builder and drag Airship Events/Tags into your journey.

4. Select the Airship project containing the audience you want to set tags on.

5. Click Tag Change.

6. Enter the name of the tag that you want to set or remove and click  . Repeat this step to add or remove multiple tags.

7. Determine whether to Add or Remove the tag.

8. Click Done.

SFMC Data Extension Schemas

See: SFMC Data Extension schemas for RTDS.