Personalization is crucial in today’s marketing and sales communications, as competition for customers’ attention grows. It leads to better sales, increased retention, and heightened customer loyalty. This in turn results in better business outcomes and improved conversions.
In this blog post, we investigate a tool that helps companies achieve individual-level personalization across sales and marketing communications: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization.
What *is* Marketing Cloud Personalization?
Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP) is a platform integrated into the Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud ecosystem. It enables organisations to send tailored product, content and service recommendations to customers in real-time through various channels, including web, email, phone, and in-store.
Marketing Cloud Personalization, formerly known as an Interaction Studio by Evergage, is a recent acquisition by Salesforce. The new name reflects their mission and vision for innovation in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
The platform captures and aggregates customer insights from Salesforce and third-party platforms. It uses AI to deliver relevant information and experiences across multiple channels and machine learning to continuously improve targeting and recommendations.
At its heart, it’s an exciting system with a neat and simple goal – to gather current customer information and use it to respond with relevant offers and updates, ultimately leading to goal conversion and achieving KPIs. But here is where it gets really interesting. The system has the potential to carry out these multi-directional processes to and from different channels virtually simultaneously!
How might this play out?
Let’s examine a hypothetical scenario of a visitor to a product or e-commerce website and see what happens in the background.
They land on your business homepage, spend some time exploring the website, navigating around, browsing through different products. They might consider such factors as colours or sizes (in the case of clothing), quantities (in the case of hardware or groceries), or even check out the blogs section of the website.
Marketing Cloud Personalization tracks what the visitor views, including product variety, brand, size, and quantity, as well as time spent and actions like adding items to a cart or wish-list. All that is happening in the background. For the business, the magic begins to appear when that information is combined to a single customer profile, creating data that can be visualised and analysed – and in real-time!
Let’s say, the visitor leaves the website at this point, maybe to return later. The homepage is now updated in various ways:
- With a banner reminding the visitor about what they previously viewed
- With an infobar advertising an upcoming event, specifically related to their browsing pattern
- Or with a subtle prompt to contact the business via chat
But what about Artificial Intelligence?
By utilising MCP tools such as Einstein AI and machine learning, the system generates suggestions and engages visitors with offers, discounts and other tactics, aimed at conversion and achieving KPIs. These tools collect metadata on the entire product / service catalogue and make recommendations based on previous customer behaviour.
It is at this point that, with MCP, digital intelligence is merged by aggregating anonymous and known user’s web interactions and other CRM data to create a more complete view of the visitor. This includes their marketing preferences, location, product preferences and affinities, shipping information, past orders, customer service cases, social media interaction, and so on.
Now, the visitor, hopefully drawn in by interactions, continues engaging further through other channels. These channels may include your business’s mobile app, chatbot, customer service line or physical store visit. Or the engagement can be in a form of interaction with other users, e. g. on online community board.
All this aggregated data can be pushed to and gathered from a central location point (sFTP). API events can in turn be used to configure Marketing Cloud’s Journey Builder to send appropriate responses. This can be done through mobile push messaging, email updates, and other integrated Salesforce Service Agents. All the channels can then be engaged with next-best offers, product recommendations, event information, and various messaging types to increase engagement. All that – based on whether a purchase has been made or not.
In the end, the system utilises all touchpoints to conduct real-time A/B testing and segmentation. And in doing so, it not only drives revenue and increases average order value. It also creates more opportunities to engage with the customer.
In conclusion
While many of those interactions are very similar to our own personal experiences with online commercial interactions, Marketing Cloud Personalization platform offers great tools for personalised, relevant, and engaging messaging across multiple channels. With the proper implementation, the use of the platform can enhance customer experience. It can promote loyalty, leading to improved business performance for both existing and new customers.
Want to know how to get started with Marketing Cloud Personalization? Contact us to set up time with one of our consultants.
Guide to CDP and RTIM
Read on to learn more about customer profiling in our interactive guide to customer data platforms and real-time interaction management. This guide will help inform your decision on what kind of martech you need to achieve customer-centricity.
Read on:
- Marketing Cloud Personalization Exam: Top Tips to Pass First Time – a blog by Balwinder Tank
- Salesforce Partner Learning Camp: Marketing Cloud Personalization Overview – Retail Demo Video
- What is Salesforce Interaction Studio? (Marketing Cloud Personalization) – a blog by Chris Manion on Salesforce Ben