Changed MC-101 Exam Questions

The Contact Key is used to uniquely identify an individual across multiple channels in Marketing Cloud Engagement. It serves as a unique identifier for each contact in the system, allowing for the integration and coordination of marketing activities across different channels such as email, mobile, social, and others. The Contact Key remains consistent for a given individual across different interactions and campaigns, providing a unified view of the customer.

A Filtered Data Extension is the best choice when a marketing associate needs to create a criteria-based subset of an audience from another data extension without using SQL. This type of data extension allows users to apply specific criteria to an existing data extension to segment the audience based on attributes or behaviors without the need for writing SQL queries. This is particularly useful for marketers who may not have SQL skills but still need to perform targeted segmentation. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides a user-friendly interface for setting up these filters, making it an efficient way to tailor communications to specific audience segments.

For Northern Trail Outfitters to start sending personalized emails to its customers, the ideal tools within Salesforce Marketing Cloud are Email Studio and Journey Builder. Email Studio provides comprehensive capabilities for creating, designing, and sending personalized emails at scale. It allows for the use of dynamic content, personalization strings, and data-driven segmentation to tailor each email to the recipient's preferences, behaviors, and demographics.

Journey Builder complements Email Studio by enabling the creation of automated, multi-step customer journeys. With Journey Builder, personalized emails can be part of a larger, orchestrated customer experience that spans across multiple channels and touchpoints. This combination of tools allows for highly personalized and timely interactions with customers, enhancing engagement and fostering stronger relationships.

The increase in hard bounces experienced by Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO) after incorporating a new list of contacts from an industry event is most likely due to some of the newly added contacts having invalid email addresses. Hard bounces typically occur when an email address is incorrect, nonexistent, or has been deactivated. When a list is newly integrated into a sendable data extension without thorough validation or cleaning, there's a higher likelihood that it contains email addresses that are no longer valid, leading to an increase in hard bounces.

It's essential for marketing teams to perform email address validation and list cleaning, especially when incorporating new lists from external sources like industry events, to maintain email deliverability and sender reputation.