Integrating Salesforce CRM with Magnolia

Introduction

Priocept’s customers often ask for support with integrating Salesforce with various Content Management Systems (CMS) and Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs).

Salesforce is the leading cloud solution for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and has been widely adopted by businesses of all sizes. Over the years Salesforce has acquired various supporting applications and we have seen an increased demand for integrating with many of these.

Magnolia is one of the leading DXP solutions and Priocept are the leading implementer of Magnolia in the UK. It’s a common requirement on many of our Magnolia projects to integrate with Salesforce services.

This article explains some of the options available for integrating Salesforce with Magnolia.

Salesforce Forms Integration

Magnolia has recently released a built-in connector for Salesforce (available as of version 6.2, released April 2020) as part of their Marketing Automation Connector that also works with Adobe Marketo. It allows forms and form fields to be integrated from Salesforce into Magnolia. By configuring the connector, a website editor can directly insert a complete form from Salesforce into a page in Magnolia. Alternatively, they can use individual fields from Salesforce to populate a form.

Data from integrated forms will be persisted back to Salesforce where it can be further nurtured for lead generation and used in a wider marketing campaign that includes additional channels such as social media and email.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud Connector

E-commerce systems are the best way to manage a product catalogue for your transactional site, but web content managers can find themselves frustrated by the content editing experience offered by these systems. Salesforce Commerce Cloud (formerly Demandware) is a SaaS product and is a great solution for setting up scalable online stores.

Magnolia integrates with Salesforce Commerce Cloud to allow management of product catalogues from directly within the CMS, allowing content editors to build a rich web application in Magnolia, whilst benefitting from the deeper e-commerce capabilities of Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

By installing the connector, Magnolia provides a REST API to abstract the shopping cart functionality from Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This allows the purchase process to be initiated from Magnolia, but served by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. This abstraction also makes it possible to swap out the underlying shopping cart implementation with another service, if and when required.

Salesforce Connector for Personalization

Magnolia’s connector (officially known as the Salesforce Connector) allows content editors to use a Salesforce Campaign or Opportunity as a personalization trait. In other words, the connector makes it possible to serve different page variants to website visitors based on campaigns defined in Salesforce.

It is worth noting that, at time of writing, this connector is not supported in Magnolia after version 5.7, but can easily be patched. For support with this integration, please get in touch.

Salesforce Pardot Forms Integration

Salesforce acquired Pardot in 2012. Pardot is a B2B marketing automation platform that allows the creation of complex campaigns with multiple touchpoints. An extension is available that allows Pardot forms to be used within Magnolia. This is very similar to the natively supported Marketing Automation Connector, and provides effectively the same functionality, but is a third-party extension that was developed to provide integrations with Pardot, rather than Salesforce Sales Cloud.

By using the Salesforce Pardot connector, Pardot form handlers can be inserted directly into Magnolia pages. This means that form fields, functionality, design, and data gathered are controlled outside of Magnolia, as part of a wider campaign in Pardot. This enables marketers to keep full control of their campaigns in their marketing automation platform of choice.  

Custom Salesforce Integrations

In addition to the connectors that are readily available, Priocept have also been involved in developing many custom integrations, including surfacing filtered CRM data from Salesforce into web pages in Magnolia, and persisting marketing data from Magnolia to Salesforce at various steps in user journeys. Whatever the requirement, an automated integration is usually possible due to the extensibility of Magnolia and the extensive APIs available from Salesforce.

If you have an integration in mind that is not covered by the connectors, or are interested in discussing integrations to other DXP, CMS or CRM products, please get in touch.

References

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