Salesforce invests in email capabilities with new Content Block SDK for email marketing

Despite a multitude of online channels available for businesses to communicate with their customers, Salesforce continues to invest in one of the oldest: email.

The CRM company unveiled its Marketing Cloud Content Block Software Developer Kit (SDK) on Wednesday morning. Developers can use the SDK to build a number of custom email content widgets, which marketers can then drag and drop into their emails.

I spoke to Joanna Milliken, SVP product management for Salesforce’s marketing cloud, a few weeks before the announcement.

“We spend a lot of time really focused on our email marketers, mainly because despite all the other channels out there and all the other stuff going on in the world, email remains the highest ROI marketing channel,” Milliken told me. “But it’s really noisy.”

“We have lots and lots of inbox competition, and email marketers, they’re just always looking for new tactics and ways to engage their consumers and continue to make those emails more and more relevant,” Milliken said, citing data from the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), which says that email marketing delivers the lowest cost-per-acquisition (CPA) of any digital marketing channel.

“As an industry leader, we’re really constantly trying to innovate there, and this launch is really aimed at helping solve the specific problem of finding … new tactics, new ways to innovate in that highest ROI,” Milliken said.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud dashboard example of an email content block with an option to watch a video.

According to a blog post by Milliken announcing the move, the Content Block SDK also gives marketers access to Salesforce’s artificial intelligence (AI) engine: Einstein.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud customers using Content Block SDK can also tap into the power of AI with Salesforce Einstein to deliver predictive and personalized email communications within the custom content blocks they build. For example, a ski resort that’s using Salesforce Marketing Cloud could include the real-time weather forecast in its area by using a content block in a promotional email campaign that’s going out to a targeted group of consumers that have expressed interest in skiing ahead of a winter holiday weekend.

Marketers that need additional resources to create sophisticated email content can tap into Salesforce AppExchange for partner applications that can take them further in their Marketing Could campaign development.