This article was updated on December 11, 2025 with an up-to-date FAQ section.
Today the SalesWings B2B Studio team is speaking with an expert of all things Marketing Cloud, Roxana Shershin. Roxana is the President & Co-Founder of Digital Additive, an Atlanta-based email and eCRM focused agency specializing in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. In this interview, Roxana will give her takes on implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketing automation trends, and how to make the most out of SFMC.
SalesWings: Roxana, I’d like to start this interview with a quick word on Digital Additive. Can you tell us more about its history, challenges, and what makes your agency unique?
Roxana Shershin: Digital Additive is celebrating our tenth anniversary this year, and even though we’ve grown significantly and continue to evolve, the growth has been thoughtful and intentional. We’ve built our success on real relationships without straying from the core values and ideals that define us. Digital Additive was founded in 2012 with a focus on relationships: both ours with our clients, colleagues, and partners as well as those between our clients and their customers.
Our passion and expertise lie in leveraging data to offer a true one-to-one experience through email, SMS, mobile push. We work exclusively within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform; that choice allows us to focus our efforts and hone our expertise to help our clients make the most robust use of the platform and put their data to work.
SalesWings: What trends in the marketing automation industry do you foresee for the future when talking to your prospects and customers? How do you see Salesforce Marketing Cloud fitting into this?
Roxana Shershin: When looking to the future, we expect to see the continued integration of data from multiple and disparate data sources. What may have seemed like a huge undertaking in the past, is becoming more accessible and a true reality — offering brands a more comprehensive view of their customers and the communication that most resonates with them. We also anticipate the speed with which data is collected, analyzed, and the learnings acted upon to continue to increase at a rate that will make automation no longer an option, but the mandate.
In part, this increased pace can be attributed to constantly improving AI with ever more relevant and personalized customer interactions. And to keep up with the increase in the quantity and speed of data, Salesforce is constantly expanding its product suite to accommodate with the inclusion of Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, Marketing Cloud Personalization, and Marketing Cloud Intelligence.
SalesWings: Talking about Salesforce Marketing Cloud, what are the key points of a successful implementation? What are the challenges Digital Additive encounters when implementing SFMC for clients?
Roxana Shershin: The first step of a successful implementation truly requires a clear understanding of a client’s future vision and goals. SFMC is a powerful tool but like all technology, it’s success is predicated on a setup that truly reflects the business. No two implementations are the same. It is crucial to design and implement solutions that account for both the business needs of today and allow flexibility for the scale of tomorrow.
Part of that success formula is putting in the hard work to ensure that the correct and relevant data for a campaign is accessible, actionable, and up to date. Sure you can import one-off lists to power one-off campaigns, but effective automation and personalized communications requires thoughtful data architecture. Any effort at personalized, one-to-one communication is doomed from the start without accurate data.
We also strive to make setup as marketer friendly as possible. Writing and understanding queries and AMPscript isn’t in everyone’s toolbox, so setting up data in a clear, non-cluttered way allows marketers to focus on communication strategy without being hindered by the technology required.
There are really only two challenges to consider when implementing SFMC. The first is actually how truly flexible the platform is; there isn’t just one way to do something. The platform is built to allow brands and partners like ourselves the ability to create programs in a manner that reflect each company’s unique structure and processes. With flexibility comes options… lots of options. This can sometimes present a challenge and compensating through stringent planning becomes even more critical.
The other challenge can be in replicating the lead scoring and tracking behavior capability found in other marketing automation ESPs. While not fully native within SFMC, strategic partnership with solutions like SalesWings allow us to close the gaps and deliver best-in-class, relevant communications.
SalesWings: Data collection and data activation are the fuel of any great marketing strategy… To that matter, do you feel Marketing Cloud allows brands to truly connect with their customers along their journeys? What should operation managers keep in mind when designing journeys and personalization strategies with SFMC?
Roxana Shershin: Marketing Cloud offers a wealth of opportunities for meaningful customer connection. Journey Builder provides operation managers with a highly visual tool to plan customer journeys across channels. Plus, SFMC ensures that data is readily accessible whether within the platform or by seamlessly connecting with outside sources and platforms. Some smart steps to ensure impactful journeys include consistently identifying the customer and their data to tie behaviors together into a cohesive picture and qualifying customer actions as indicators of intent and engagement to better inform the messaging and pacing of the journey. Additionally, nothing beats testing to really optimize a journey and determine what resonates best with the customer – and SFMC makes it easy to strategize, execute, and analyze the results of your testing plan.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What should my SFMC roadmap include?
- Whatvimplementation pitfalls tend to occur and how do we avoid them?
- What options are there for lead scoring & tracking in SFMC during implementation?
- What marketing automation trends can I expect in Salesforce Marketing Cloud for 2026?
- What tips do you have for data-driven email personalization?
- How should we structure our data?
- What AMPscript skills are required?
- How can we design journeys with Journey Builder?
What should my SFMC roadmap include?
Your roadmap should cover clear objectives, data architecture, channel priorities, governance, integrations, and a phased rollout with measurable milestones.
Start with business goals and map capabilities to studios/builders you’ll actually use in the first 90 days. Define audiences, consent capture, and source-of-truth systems, then document naming conventions, access controls, and QA processes. Plan integrations (CRM, web, ads, product data) and agree on SLAs for data freshness. Finally, outline a testing cadence and training for marketers and admins.
Tip: align phases to quick wins (welcome, re-engagement, alerts) before complex personalization. See a practical overview of SFMC studios.
What implementation pitfalls tend to occur and how can I avoid them?
The biggest pitfalls are unclear data ownership, over-customization, weak governance, and launching journeys without testable entry/exit criteria.
Prevent issues by defining who owns data models, subscriber keys, and consent flows before build. Avoid unnecessary scripting early; prefer configuration and modular content you can maintain. Introduce a governance checklist covering naming, versioning, approvals, and deployment steps. Validate journey entry sources, re-entry rules, and failure handling to stop loops or over-messaging. Establish a rollback plan and limit initial scope to mitigate risk.
Tip: run “table-top” simulations of journeys with real scenarios before activation.
What options are there for lead scoring & tracking in SFMC during implementation?
SFMC lacks native B2B lead scoring, so combine a scoring mechanism with behavioral tracking or add a specialized solution.
Many teams sync engagement data to CRM and rely on Account Engagement (Pardot) or Einstein Scoring to prioritize leads; others augment SFMC with website behavior, intent signals, and fit models. If you need granular web and email behavior inside SFMC for activation and handoff, consider a dedicated scoring and tracking layer that plugs into your journeys and CRM.
Tip: define “Marketing Qualified” thresholds collaboratively with Sales to reduce handoff friction.
What marketing automation trends can I expect in Salesforce Marketing Cloud for 2026?
Expect heavier use of real-time data, AI-assisted content, and cross-channel decisioning with tighter analytics feedback loops.
Generative and predictive features increasingly support subject lines, copy variants, and content selection, while real-time event data drives timely triggers. Marketers are consolidating reporting to attribute revenue and optimize journeys faster, reducing manual analysis. These trends favor smaller, continuously iterated journeys over monolithic programs, with governance ensuring responsible AI and consent compliance.
Tip: designate an “AI librarian” to curate approved prompts, templates, and exclusions for your teams. See recent Einstein capabilities.
What tips do you have for data-driven email personalization?
Start with reliable identifiers and a minimal profile, then layer decisioning rules and content automation as data quality matures.
Establish a durable subscriber key, normalize consent, and capture behavioral signals (opens, clicks, web events) alongside lifecycle attributes (stage, product interest). You can also use data views and synchronized CRM objects to power segmentation, then introduce templates with content blocks, dynamic rules, and send-time optimization. As confidence grows, expand to real-time triggers and product/content feeds. Keep fallbacks for missing data to avoid broken experiences.
Tip: document personalization tiers (basic, contextual, predictive) so stakeholders agree on what “good” looks like. Review AMPscript basics for personalization.
How should we structure our data?
Use a single subscriber key, normalized data extensions, and governed integrations; reserve complex unification for Data Cloud when necessary.
Center on a unique customer identifier across channels, separating profile, subscription, and behavioral data into purpose-built extensions with clear keys and relationships. Keep critical fields consistent with CRM. For real-time unification, enrichment, and activation across ecosystems, it might be worth adopting Salesforce Data Cloud (formerly CDP) and define activation pathways to ads and messaging. Document refresh cadences and error handling so marketers trust the data.
Tip: start with a lightweight conceptual ERD and evolve only as use cases demand.
What AMPscript skills are required?
Marketers need comfort with variables, conditionals, lookups, and error handling; developers should handle advanced functions and performance.
Begin with outputting fields, defaulting values, simple IF/ELSE logic, and Lookup functions to fetch data. As programs mature, add functions for date math, string manipulation, and personalization strings, plus guardrails to avoid null errors. Ideally you’ll be reserving heavy transformations, complex queries, or API orchestration for technical owners to ensure maintainability and send performance.
Tip: standardize reusable snippets and code reviews to reduce defects at scale.
How can we design journeys with Journey Builder?
Design compact, goal-oriented journeys with explicit entry criteria, re-entry rules, exit conditions, and measurement plans.
Define the journey purpose (onboard, nurture, upsell) and the success metrics before building. Choose an entry source you can govern, add decision splits with clear eligibility, and enforce suppression for frequency control. Use versions to iterate rather than bloating a single canvas. Automation Studio could be paired for data prep and set holdout tests to quantify lift. Lastly, document reprocessing and failure handling for scale.
Tip: create a one-page runbook for each journey and keep it updated.
