Marketing Cloud Personalization rebranded in April 2022. It was formerly know as as Salesforce Interaction Studio, is a real-time solution for personalisation and interaction management offered by Salesforce's Marketing Cloud suite. Its primary role is to empower organisations to deliver personalised offers and promotions to customers across a multitude of channels such as web, email, and mobile, enhancing the overall customer experience.
Harnessing the Power of Marketing Cloud Personalization
Consider this: your customers browse through your website, viewing different pages. Marketing Cloud Personalization captures these interactions, subsequently altering the product recommendations, offers, homepage visuals, and other content suggestions visible to the customers in real-time. This essentially makes your website a dynamic platform, unique to each individual customer.
But that's not all. Marketing Cloud Personalization's capability to gather and analyse data provides invaluable insights into customer behavior. It aids in understanding both individual and macro level website behavioural trends, giving a clear picture of what products or offers attract customers, ultimately leading to sales. This gathered data can further be used to follow up with customers through emails, SMS messages, or push notifications. Being a Salesforce product, it seamlessly integrates with Journey Builder and Sales Cloud, enabling smoother customer journeys and making information readily available for sales representatives.
In the competitive world of marketing, capturing and retaining a customer's attention is the ultimate goal. Without personalisation across channels, customers may feel overlooked and ultimately abandon your platform. This is where Marketing Cloud Personalization plays a vital role.
Marketing Cloud Personalization: What Does It Do?
Marketing Cloud Personalization boasts several use cases, from hyper-personalising your website to data and analytics capabilities.
Personalising Your Website Experience: Imagine a website that alters its homepage image or blog content based on a customer's past browsing history or purchases. That's what Marketing Cloud Personalization can do. It allows you to present relevant offers based on past purchase history, recommend blog content based on the product pages visited, and even generate pop-ups for sign-ups.
Email Personalisation at Open-Time: Marketing Cloud Personalization lets you adapt email messages according to a customer's latest actions, purchases, or browsing history. The recommendations can be implemented not just in Marketing Cloud emails, but also in other email service providers using HTML code snippets.
Data and Analytics: Marketing Cloud Personalization collects a plethora of data, including time spent on the site, actions taken, purchases made, and browsing history. This data aids in creating Einstein "recipes" for meaningful customer experiences and facilitates advanced A/B testing.
Customer Service Interactions: The use of Marketing Cloud Personalization isn't confined to digital channels. With the Marketing Cloud Personalization Connector for Sales and Service Cloud, organisations can provide agents with a customer's profile, recent web pages viewed, and Next Best Recommendations, enhancing the customer service experience.
Getting Started with Marketing Cloud Personalization
To leverage Marketing Cloud Personalization, your organisation needs a well-structured plan and some preparation. Below are some steps to consider;
Assemble Your Project Team: Your team should comprise representatives from the marketing team, the CRM team, the web team, and the data analytics team. Clear communication of responsibilities and decision-making roles will ensure a smooth project flow.
Understand Your Website: Identify the pages and sections where your organisation can enhance the customer experience. These regions are where you will use dynamic content and offerings.
Identify Data Collection Points: Determine where on your website customers can fill out a form. This data can be used to create a unified customer record in Interaction Studio.
Import Your Assets into Marketing Cloud Personalization: Feed data, such as product catalogs, content catalogs, and customer identity data points, into Interaction Studio.
Achieving Success with Marketing Cloud Personalization
Now that you have a comprehensive understanding of Marketing Cloud Personalization's capabilities and what's required for its successful implementation, it's time to set your organisation's objectives and strategy for utilising this platform alongside your other marketing initiatives.
Setting Goals: Initiate a brainstorming session with your team and key stakeholders to identify the challenges that Interaction Studio can help overcome. Discuss the benefits of this technology for both your business and your customers.
How can it enhance your existing customer journey?
Identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Once you've outlined your objectives, the next step is to determine how to measure the success of these goals. What metrics will indicate a successful implementation of Marketing Cloud Personalization? These could include enhanced conversion rates, increased cross-selling or up-selling activity, or a boost in revenue.
Mapping Customer Journey: Identify the typical path your customers take when interacting with your website or other marketing channels. Then, pinpoint where Interaction Studio can make a significant difference in enhancing the customer experience. Which interactions could benefit most from Interaction Studio's features?
Creating Content: After pinpointing where Interaction Studio can make a difference in the customer journey, start developing the content and business logic needed to personalise each touchpoint.
Adopt a Gradual Approach: For a successful implementation, it's crucial to take a gradual approach. While it may be tempting to implement all of Interaction Studio's features simultaneously, this can often lead to failure. Concentrate on one or two key improvements in your customer journey and begin with those. Through testing and data analysis, you can assess the improvements and build upon your success.
Adding Triggered Campaigns
Triggered campaigns offer a multitude of opportunities to reach your customers. Engage shoppers who have shown interest in a product but haven't completed a purchase. Alert customers when a favourite item is back in stock. Encourage visitors who have shown interest in an offer, such as a content asset or promotion, but haven't converted. Offer an online chat with a representative to a prospect who spent a significant amount of time evaluating a specific policy, but left the site without completing an application. Alert your sales reps when target prospects spend a certain amount of time on your site, indicating their interest. Remind new SaaS application users to complete on-boarding steps. Alert customer success team members of an existing client showing signs of churn.
Impact & Benefits of Marketing Cloud Personalisation Across Industries
Marketing Cloud Personalization is revolutionising how various industries engage with customers throughout their journey. It delivers relevant experiences at crucial interaction points, enhancing customer engagement.
Benefits Across Industries:
Retail: Recognise both known and anonymous users, building precise customer profiles for effective personalisation. Retailers can boost engagement and sales by displaying personalised product recommendations, leveraging customer browsing history or location for targeted promotions.
Healthcare: Utilise patient data for customised treatment plans and effective care delivery. Healthcare providers can send personalised health materials, aiding patients in making informed decisions, alongside reminders for appointments and medication refills.
Banking and Finance: Gain insights into each customer’s financial profile to offer tailored financial products and services. This includes custom investment advice for high net worth individuals and personalised credit card offers based on spending patterns.
Travel and Hospitality: Analyse customer behaviour and preferences to offer custom travel recommendations, loyalty rewards, and special offers that align with individual tastes and needs.
Conclusion
In today's marketing environment, providing a personalised customer experience is paramount. The era of mass marketing and using a single promotion, channel, or message for all customers is long gone. Tools like Interaction Studio can support your marketing team's efforts to create meaningful interactions with your customers across multiple channels. When implemented correctly, Interaction Studio can enhance the experience for both new and existing customers, ultimately building a more loyal customer base. For more in-depth insights into how digital personalisation can transform your customer experience, visit our services page. Looking to understand the basics of Sitemaps for Marketing Cloud Personalization? Check out our blog post for a step-by-step guide with practical code examples.