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How to Use Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio) to Retain Customers
• Date: May 2024 •
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
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Suppose you've attracted leads to your website or app. Some of them converted into prospects. You carry on gathering data, but they keep unsubscribing or choosing your competitors. Most of us now share the same thought: "I have no idea what's in their heads." Perhaps the issue is caused by the wrong tools you use to figure it out.
To retain your leads, you need to get a complete picture of their journey and intents. Think of all their possible touchpoints: website, mobile app, socials, email and ad campaigns, physical store, etc. Every interaction leaves you with important information that contributes to creating a full-fledged customer profile.
Imagine sending an offer for a product to a customer that has just obtained the very same product. The probability that they will stick with your service is close to zero. When your data is siloed and disconnected, these situations happen more often than you want.
That's where Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (Salesforce Interaction Studio) enters the stage.
It transforms each interaction into a personal, human-like dialogue with personalized messages based on an analysis of previous customer interactions. It also automates repetitive tasks like email and ad campaigns, content distribution, and social media planning.
Of course, to make marketing automation work, you need to have consistent data and a strategy in place. Each strategy is unique to each business, and if you want to discuss how automation can help with your particular case, contact our marketing consultants.
The main goal of this article is to show you some actionable tactics that we've found effective across Twistellar's marketing cloud integration and customization projects.
We hope that you will be able to add this to your strategy as well. So, let's dive in.
Contents:
- What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
- What Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization?
- Challenges Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization Solves
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization Use Cases
- What Type of Data Does Marketing Cloud Personalization Capture?
- What are the Benefits of Salesforce Personalization for B2B and B2C?
- FAQ: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful modular platform that consists of several applications that help you build personalized customer relationships across all touchpoints.
We have already outlined the possibilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud in our article SFMC Overview.
Now, let's have a quick overview of how marketers use Salesforce Marketing Cloud:
- Keep an updated contact database from various systems besides Salesforce
- Track customer interactions and define their place in the customer journey
- Design adaptive landing pages, create personalized ad and email campaigns
- Re-engage customers with relevant offerings for more upselling and cross-selling
- Tie their social accounts and start listening to reviews and mentions of the brand
- Tailor marketing campaigns according to audience segments
- Measure the ROI of all marketing activities
As a result, you have a unified platform with all the relevant information about your leads and customers, which is connected to other departments, channels and your business activities and campaigns.
You can argue that tracking your prospects is no breakthrough. However, collecting this data while they interact with your brand and adapting campaigns in real time is definitely know-how.
And that's exactly what Marketing Cloud Personalization is for.
What Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization, previously known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio and Evergage, has been renamed to better align with Salesforce's mission and vision.
What makes an unforgettable experience for your customer? Fast and effortless engagement. Your customers want to be heard and are not willing to repeat their intent.
Salesforce's Marketing Cloud Personalization is a real-time interaction management solution within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud that enables organizations, particularly marketers, to deliver tailored product and service promotions. This tool allows for personalized offers across various channels, such as web, email, and mobile, ensuring relevancy for each customer and prospect.
Marketing Cloud Personalization leverages real-time, scalable AI-driven personalization to enhance Marketing Cloud Engagement's comprehensive customer data, audience segmentation, and engagement capabilities. It fosters increased loyalty, engagement, and conversions through a highly relevant customer journey.
Combining Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP) with other Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) solutions allows you to:
- Send personalized emails (Email Studio)
- Deliver content in mobile apps (Mobile Campaigns)
- Create tailored advertisements (Marketing Cloud Advertising)
Integration with Salesforce Data Cloud for Marketing allows you to use segmentation data to enhance your customer data platform (CDP), a central database for user-level data.
Regarding Salesforce Marketing Personalization pricing, MCP is available in two editions: Growth ($108,000 Org / Year) and Premium ($300,000 Org / Year), each offering different functionalities. An additional Data Warehouse add-on provides access to retail data within the system.
Organizations (especially marketers) can promote relevant products and services to their customers and prospects in real time across web, email, and mobile channels.
Here's what Marketing Cloud Personalization can do for your brand:
- Boost conversions through targeted campaigns, personalized content, and strategic offers
- Enhance onboarding with lifecycle insights and optimization
- Improve first-call resolution and reduce call-handling time with self-service support
- Retain customers through renewals, timely campaigns, and targeted offers
- Foster brand loyalty with loyalty programs, enhanced experiences, and proactive support
- Increase lifetime value with effective cross-selling and upselling tools
In general, Marketing Cloud Personalization allows you to listen to how your customers interact with the brand, predict their next move, and act on the insights gathered.
Challenges Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization Solves
Customers want personalized approach
Many businesses experience the 'symptoms' listed below before adopting Marketing Cloud Personalization.
Scattered Customer Data
Customer information is dispersed across various systems, making obtaining a unified view of each customer difficult. This fragmentation hampers the ability to understand and predict customer behaviors effectively.
Outdated System Constraints
Legacy systems often need more capability to handle web-scale data, real-time engagement, personalized orchestration, and the activation of machine learning insights. This limitation restricts the ability to deliver modern, data-driven customer experiences.
Channel Inconsistency
Customer data is frequently siloed within specific channels, leading to fragmented and disconnected experiences. This inconsistency means customers might receive different messages or offers depending on the channel they interact with, undermining the brand's coherence.
Disconnected Engagement
When channels are not integrated, brands fail to provide a seamless experience across online and offline touchpoints and inbound and outbound interactions. This disconnection results in a lack of continuity in the customer journey, frustrating customers and diminishing their overall experience.
Inconsistent Customer Experiences
Marketers cannot deliver consistent interactions, which hampers their ability to provide actual value to customers at every touchpoint. Inconsistent experiences can lead to confusion and dissatisfaction, weakening customer loyalty.
Internal Silos
Scattered teams often face difficulties in accessing data and understanding customer needs. This lack of collaboration and shared information prevents the development of a holistic strategy to deliver consistent value. Internal silos hinder the ability to create cohesive and personalized customer journeys.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization Use Cases
Your primary focus for Marketing Cloud Personalization is identifying business challenges and use cases. This helps develop personalization hypotheses so your implementation partner has a clear picture of your planned use cases.
To help you understand your use cases, let's see how a variety of industries put Marketing Cloud Personalization to work:
Retail
Imagine the marketing team of an online clothing store struggling to deliver consistent offers to customers who are ready to check out their website.
With Marketing Cloud Personalization, real-time decisions across channels allow the team to share the exact personalized offers on the website as in email campaigns. This consistency helps track revenue more effectively.
Hospitality
In this case, a luxury establishment like a club is looking to optimize agent bookings. The issue was booking agents receiving anonymous calls, which caused VIP guests to feel undervalued.
Marketing Cloud Personalization enables agents to recognize VIP callers and tailor their conversation scripts accordingly. Agents can also trigger personalized booking information via Journey Builder right after the call, enhancing the VIP experience.
Financial Services
A banking prospect consistently receives irrelevant email offers, reducing engagement and causing unnecessary frustration.
Marketing Cloud Personalization updates the prospect's profile based on online behavior, ensuring they receive relevant emails and web recommendations. This real-time adjustment helps regain the prospect's interest by focusing on their preferred products.
What Type of Data Does Marketing Cloud Personalization Capture?
Fast engagement and responsiveness are what makes an unforgettable experience for your customer. Your customers want to be heard and are unwilling to repeat their intent.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization uses cookies to track customer data and match it to the information they have already provided. This way, you can customize interactions and navigate your prospects or customers to the most relevant products and services.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization Example
Data collected by Marketing Cloud Personalization includes time spent on site, actions, purchases, and browsing history across multiple channels, providing real-time, relevant insights on consumer behavior.
Another type of data collected is behavioral data for recognition that expresses real behaviors and desires across offline and online touchpoints—such data fuels Einstein's Recipes, Personalization's machine learning algorithms, for creating meaningful experiences based on customer profiles.
This comprehensive data profile allows for personalized recommendations, helping to determine the next-best action, call to action (CTA), or content that will most effectively engage the consumer. Real-time interaction management (RTIM) enhances engagement by identifying which offers, content, or messages are most likely to inspire customer interaction.
What You Can Do With Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization?
With Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio), you can:
- Record individual insights
Convert leads into prospects, and then customers by linking their activities across every channel, both online and on the premises
- Identify accounts
Identify consumers across offline and online touchpoints, collecting data that expresses real behaviors and desires. You can match anonymous and known customers to their profiles to keep the consistency and relevance of your information.
- Customize in real time
Make personalized decisions with the algorithms that interpret the data
- Test and analyze
Run A/B testing, use AI for reporting and analysis
- Engage effectively
Nurture your contacts by triggering relevant interactions
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization InterfaceScreen: 1 - Reports, 2- Channels & Campaign, 3 - Audiences, 4 - Catalog, 5 - Machine Learning
Source: Marketing Cloud Personalization Basics
Source: Marketing Cloud Personalization Basics
What are the Benefits of Salesforce Personalization for B2B and B2C?
- Revenue growth: The platform boosts marketing campaign effectiveness by personalizing offers for each client. It also allows for testing and analysis, continuously improving conversion rates.
- Increased customer loyalty: Personalizing communication ensures that customers receive timely, relevant offers, fostering a sense of individual attention and loyalty to the brand.
- Preventing missed opportunities: Understanding customer behavior helps identify sales opportunities, enabling timely offers directly or through sales representatives.
- Optimized customer service: The system identifies potential customer issues and recommends solutions while equipping customer service representatives with the necessary information to resolve tickets quickly.
- Better business decisions: Access to detailed customer knowledge at both individual and segment levels enhances understanding of customer needs and preferences, informing better business decisions and personalized offers.
Both B2B and B2C companies can take advantage of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization. Here are some examples:
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization for B2C
- Adaptive landing pages
Anonymous or not, you can capture the information about your customers, such as their location, interests, and attributes, and your landing page will be tailored to their specific needs in real time.
- Personalized notifications
You can choose the timing for your message, for instance, when your customer is engaged. Reengage contacts through push, SMS, paid media based on their history: affinities, geolocation, or items left in cart.
- Consistent recommendations at a point of sale
When a customer checks out at the register, logs in to a self-service kiosk, or uses an ATM, they will receive only the data they are looking for.
- Help for call centre agents
If your customers have an issue, triggering notifications to the call center will help agents solve it faster. These notifications are based on customers' onsite or in-app behaviors and historical data.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization for B2B
- Engage your visitors with the most relevant content
Tailor the content visitors see on your website to their industry, size, or previous engagements. Highlight those events, e-books, and posts that will inspire them to take action.
- Make timely sales
Alert your sales reps about your prospect activities to recommend a follow-up. Recognize and target high-value visitors to leverage your ABM strategy. Moreover, your email campaigns can be adapted to the user's website experience, not when it's sent, but when it's opened, depending on the latest interactions.
No Matter the Industry, Personalize
By tapping into the personalization tools within Salesforce Marketing Cloud, businesses can not only meet these lofty customer expectations, but also drive tangible results in the form of increased conversion rates, higher average order values, and stronger brand loyalty.
Whether you're a B2B or B2C organization, the ability to leverage rich customer data, deliver hyper-targeted content and offers, and create a truly tailored brand experience is a true game-changer.
So why wait?
Fill out the form below to get Marketing Cloud Personalization Implemetation Tips from Twistellar's experts.
FAQ: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization
Marketing Cloud Personalization in Salesforce is a tool designed to deliver real-time, personalized experiences across multiple channels. It uses data-driven insights to tailor content, offers, and interactions for each customer, enhancing engagement and driving conversions. Integrating with other Salesforce products ensures a seamless and consistent experience throughout the customer journey.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization Builder is a feature that allows marketers to create and manage personalized content and campaigns. It leverages customer interactions and behavior data to deliver relevant and timely messages. With Personalization Builder, you can easily segment your audience, automate personalized journeys, and optimize your marketing efforts to meet individual customer needs and preferences.
Personalization Strings is a Marketing Cloud feature that allows marketers to customize and tailor their communications to individual recipients. By using personalization strings, marketers can insert dynamic content into emails, landing pages, and other communications based on data stored in their Salesforce Marketing Cloud account. This data can include subscriber information such as first name, last name, email address, or any custom data fields.
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Feeling like teaming up with us at Twistellar? We are excited too! Whether you'd like to customize your org, build a bespoke application or integrate a third-party tool, Twistellar is ready to help you.
Get in touch to discuss your Salesforce ideas!