What is Marketing Cloud Personalisation: An Overview

With inputs by Satyam Yadav, Lead Solution Engineer

When it comes to 1-to-1 customer engagement, companies move away from the conventional one-to-many campaign-driven marketing strategy and instead have consistent, contextual, and pertinent dialogues with customers across channels and touchpoints. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalisation (previously Interaction Studio) is a powerful tool that can help businesses achieve this goal at scale.

In a world dominated by audience acquisitions, clicks and conversions, it is easy for marketers to lose sight of the importance of personalisation. However, it is crucial to understand the psychology of individuals when they interact with your brand, both as anonymous visitors and as known prospects or customers. By creating personalised messaging, you can instantly build a connection with your target audience. Marketing Cloud Personalisation is one such tool that lets you create an affinity for the products and services they are interested in, resulting in hyper-personalised content getting delivered on the customer’s preferred B2B or B2C channels.

When you engage meaningfully and at a personalised level with each of your loyal customers before, during and after a purchase, you build and strengthen their emotional relationship with your brand and make them brand advocates. To accomplish this, you need to move from brand-centric messaging to one-to-one, customer-centric personalised marketing. With Marketing Cloud Personalisation, you can take the right action for each consumer on the right channel at the right time, throughout their lifecycle.

What is Marketing Cloud Personalisation (previously Interaction Studio)?

Powered by Interaction Studio, Marketing Cloud Personalisation is Salesforce’s marketer-friendly real-time personalisation and interaction management solution. It enables businesses to instantly and individually target anonymous visitors, prospects and customers with exclusive content and offers based on their interests, traits and behaviour. This can be done on online channels like a website, mobile device and email, as well as in offline mediums like a store.

Let’s assume a high-intent customer views an Instagram post and desires to purchase the classic “Little Black Dress.” After clicking on the post or the ad, she is redirected to the website, where she gets a personalised experience. This is possible because as she browses more content or shows interest in different products, an affinity gets generated in the platform based on products viewed, view time and purchase history. Whenever she interacts again with the brand – whether online or offline – she will now receive intelligent next-best offers. Plus, since the platform also connects to the call centre, service agents will get a 360-degree view of the buyer. This will help them immediately suggest the next best action to every customer and address their issues.

Also, when customers visit the store for shopping, the sales representative can guide them to the right products or categories based on their previous visits, interests and purchases. The reps can also leverage the online purchases made by them and combine special offers to delight them, ultimately increasing life cycle value and brand loyalty.

This is just one example of the multiple scenarios where Marketing Cloud Personalisation helps create a seamless and complete experience for the customer. Using algorithms and data collection systems, it stitches together different pieces of information to develop detailed behavioural analytics and affinities.

The platform’s machine learning(ML)-powered ready-to-use ‘recommendation and offer’ engine delivers unique product and content recommendations and presents real-time promotions, offers and email content to individuals. It leverages advanced ML algorithms and AI, an in-depth understanding of each visitor’s behaviour, and a contextual understanding of your business before deciding what recommendations to show.

The out-of-the-box recommendation engine has configurable algorithmic strategies that can be used to enrich and enhance content or product engagement. This can also improve the discovery of your website, mobile app, emails or onsite search and offline stores. The predictive nature of algorithms can dynamically and interactively react and adjust to shifts in consumer behaviour and take decisions within seconds. This lets Marketing Cloud Personalisation treat customers as people instead of numbers or an ID, creating customer profiles that are ever evolving. This is crucial, as consumers’ interests and buying patterns are constantly changing. Going back to the previous example, if the customer bought a black dress last week, they might feel the need to shop for a pair of jeans the next time. By looking at your customer’s browsing patterns, the algorithm picks up on their changed interest and alters the offers, recommendations and reminders they receive.

Case Study: With Marketing Cloud Personalisation, Lyca Mobile takes customer engagement to the next level

UK-based company Lyca Mobile has over 16 million customers in 23 countries, including Australia, France, Germany, Ireland, the UK, and the US. Earlier, Lyca’s teams did not have a shared view of customer journeys. This meant they could not keep track of which consumers were receiving which messages on which channels. ‘Spray and pray’ marketing strategies adversely affected revenue per customer, while lack of pop-up ads or targeted communications on the website led to an inability to draw customer attention.

Lyca Mobile deployed Salesforce Marketing Cloud to get a consolidated picture of client journeys across email, SMS, website, and other touchpoints. This enabled them to create seamless omnichannel experiences and send more contextual and relevant messages on the right channel. With Marketing Cloud Personalisation, Lyca was able to personalise interactions with customers, enhance service and sales, and use customer data better to leverage upselling and cross-selling opportunities. This targeted customer engagement helped them increase conversions by over 30%, and decrease opt-out rations by 15-20%.

How was Lyca able to keep its customers engaged and incentivised? By using several key features and functionalities of Marketing Cloud Personalisation, Lyca could predict what exactly the customer was looking for and create authentic, personalised and relevant brand experiences.

So, what are the unique features of Marketing Cloud Personalisation?

1. Provides insights into and enriches customer profiles

Marketing Cloud Personalisation enables identifying people and accounts across different digital assets, match anonymous and known users to named profiles, customise identity-matching policies for customers, and create more precise customer records. By monitoring digital and offline behaviour, you can understand each client’s interests and intent, which helps strengthen your relationship marketing strategy.

2. Leverages AI-driven optimisation

Using Salesforce Einstein, the platform’s AI engine, you can make recommendations for items and content based on each consumer’s distinctive characteristics and interests. Use advanced AI and robust real-time segmentation to identify and provide contextually relevant experiences that motivate your customers to act. Marketing Cloud Personalisation has a marketer-friendly approach to AI, which enables you to adjust, manage, and customise the algorithms driving your personalisation tactics. For example, you can promote blog material based on the product pages your prospects visited and show relevant next best offers based on their past purchase history. You can also automatically adjust email content based on their most recent activities, purchases, or browsing history.

Einstein (Platform’s AI engine} also helps provide next-best offers and deals to customers. These are not only aligned with their interests but also factor in the value to business.

3. Offers cross-channel engagement

There are critical micro-moments in the customer’s journey when people act on a need to learn something, accomplish something, discover something, watch something, or buy something. These are strategic times when choices are made and preferences are formed. If you can offer the appropriate goods, services, knowledge, or experiences at this moment, you can build a stronger connection with the customer and get a quick sale.

However, when digital activity is combined with conventional brick-and-mortar interactions, it can be challenging to offer real-time engagement, let alone obtain a comprehensive understanding of the buyer’s journey. This not only makes it harder for you to understand how customers behave, but it also gives them a fragmented and incomplete experience.

Marketing Cloud Personalisation creates an omnichannel consumer experience by fusing online and offline touchpoints like contact centres, ATMs, and in-store POS. You can keep track of these interactions and guide the customer through the most appropriate path, initiating interactions where they are or through the channel they choose. By providing consistent, timely, and relevant messages across web, app, email, and human channels, you can meet customer expectations for a connected experience.

4. Offers testing and analysis capabilities

In addition to being an effective promotional tool, Marketing Cloud Personalisation also offers the option to harness data and use it to learn more about your customers’ behaviour. It gathers information — such as actions taken, transactions made, browsing history, etc — across channels, letting you push up A/B testing, easily segment audiences and compare engagement levels. You can also set important campaign benchmarks and objectives, such as a rise in sign-ups, purchases and downloads or gain in-depth insights using simulations and machine learning models.

The days of mass marketing—using a single promotion, medium, or message to reach all your clients—have long passed. You must tailor your brand’s message specifically to your customers and their interests to build meaningful encounters across channels. One-to-one marketing solutions like Marketing Cloud Personalisation can deliver relevant and timely experiences to both existing and new customers, ultimately leading to successful, long-term customer relationships.