How Einstein Copilot for Marketing and Merchants Helps Brands Personalize Content with Data and AI
Marketers and merchants are always looking to deliver highly personalized omni-channel experiences to customers. That’s because 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services, and 56% of customers also expect offers to be personalized – on every channel.
Unfortunately, brands struggle with delivering omni-channel experiences and often rely on different solutions to solve the problem for them. And with many different systems in play, few companies have built a single source of truth with their data to help them better understand and serve their customers.
Enter two new innovations announced at Connections 2024: Einstein Copilot for Marketing and Einstein Copilot for Merchants.
Built on the Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform, these new Copilots are powered by company-specific data stored in Data Cloud. They’re connected to Salesforce data and metadata, which means that marketers and merchants can ask Copilot questions and receive trusted responses based on the complete context of a customer’s brand relationship.
We sat down with Salesforce SVP and General Manager of Commerce Cloud, Michael Affronti, to learn more about how marketers and merchants can use these trusted AI assistants to drive more consistent and personalized campaigns and experiences across every channel. Here’s what he had to say:
Q. What is Einstein Copilot for Marketing and how does it support users?
Einstein Copilot for Marketing is a trusted campaign creation assistant with grounded responses based on a user’s brand voice and their customer data. It can answer questions but also generate content, marketing briefs, and email campaigns.
Importantly, Copilot for Marketing can boost productivity with a trusted, conversational AI assistant that aligns every campaign component to a single brief and provides powerful campaign creation capabilities with responses that are grounded in brand guidelines and reflect a deep understanding of customers.
Q. What problem does Einstein Copilot for Marketing solve for businesses?
Engaging with customers in real time and building and retaining trust with customers are the second- and third-biggest challenges marketers face. By automating tedious tasks, Einstein Copilot for Marketing helps tackle these pressing issues, giving marketers more time to build richer relationships with their customers. Instead of doing everything the old-fashioned way, marketers can focus on building intelligent campaigns that fit all of their business’s marketing needs in one simple brief. They can use customer and brand data to create personalized campaigns that really resonate with their target audiences.
Q. What is Einstein Copilot for Merchants and how does it support users?
Another trusted AI assistant, Einstein Copilot for Merchants, guides users through every step of the Commerce Cloud experience. It helps optimize sales, build ecommerce websites with natural language prompts, and generate personalized promotions.
From a financial perspective, this Copilot is especially relevant because it’s able to surface actionable insights to make products more discoverable by customers online and boosts sales with AI-assisted SEO. This gives merchants more time to build experiences that delight customers, boosting conversion rates.
With the click of a button, users can write targeted product descriptions, and adjust for tone, seasonality, and even the geography of a storefront. This is a massive step forward in productivity because it used to take days or weeks to generate fully translated and fully optimized product descriptions across merchandise.
Q. What problem does Einstein Copilot for Merchants solve for businesses?
A top-five challenge for marketers this year has been creating a cohesive customer journey. Einstein Copilot for Merchants gives brands the ability to automatically generate product descriptions, web pages, and promotions tailored to each individual customer and build beautiful, engaging storefronts that customers will love. These capabilities that support discoverability and personalization are mutually beneficial to both businesses and customers looking to find one another.
Commerce leaders can also benefit from Copilot for Merchants to save time on everyday tasks that can be time-consuming and draining for merchants. This is all about solving for productivity, efficiency, and conversion. Gone are the days of having to spend hours building a custom website for your store and testing the perfect copy to increase visibility.
Q. How do these new Copilots fit into Salesforce’s overall AI and data strategy?
Copilot for marketers and merchants are important parts of our AI and data strategy. They bring commerce and marketing together on the Einstein 1 Platform and help customers of all technical skill levels quickly take advantage of AI. There’s an easy to use conversational interface where all a marketer or merchant needs to do is pop in a question and they’ll get actionable responses and insights, grounded in their own customer data and metadata, that they can put to use in their daily jobs.
For example, in Commerce Cloud, users might ask Copilot for Merchants to help them write a marketing brief to accompany a buy-one-get-one-free promotion. The Copilot could then automatically connect to Marketing Cloud and initiate the creation of the campaign brief, which would help to improve the customer experience and make it easier for people to manage promotions and campaigns.
Q. Why is it so advantageous for marketers and merchants to have trusted, real-time data from Salesforce’s Data Cloud?
For most businesses, marketing and commerce go hand-in-hand. Data about customer buying habits will often inform the marketing content they see. Conversely, the marketing content a customer engages with can inform their purchase journey. Data Cloud makes all customer and enterprise data and metadata accessible to the business so it can deliver proactive personalization at every customer touchpoint.
A customer recently told me they thought that, with the advent of all of the marketing and commerce technology we’ve been building around Data Cloud, they can finally deliver the true omni-channel experiences customers have been searching for all these years. With a unified data experience underpinning marketing and commerce capabilities, users can now provide a highly personalized experience to customers on every channel they interact with you, starting with the first marketing touchpoint.
That’s the power of having Data Cloud running underneath Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and even Service Cloud. It’s one customer experience, and one customer profile that allows users to drive conversion and follow up with really personalized care to every one of those journeys.
That’s the power of having Data Cloud running underneath Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and even Service Cloud. It’s one customer experience, and one customer profile, that allows users to drive conversion and follow up with really personalized care to every one of those journeys.
Q. How do the Einstein 1 Platform, Data Cloud, and Einstein Copilots come together to make marketers and merchants more successful?
By bringing Data Cloud and Copilots together on the Einstein 1 Platform, every marketer designing a campaign is pulling from the same database and getting the same customer view as the person running the merchant experience, designing the storefront, and personalizing customer journeys. Users no longer have to share data or come up with complicated ways to make sure promotions on their commerce site match the same ones they’re running in Marketing Cloud. It’s all the same data and customer underneath.
These applications can talk to each other to create a truly dynamic and personalized experience without the user having to do extra work. It’s the ultimate experience for marketers and merchants, all the way from promotion through conversion to care.
Q. What makes Salesforce’s approach better than the competition?
We’ve brought together the key workloads businesses need to deliver so they have a great customer experience. Most of Saleforce’s customers who come to our Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud platforms are moving away from a constellation of point solutions that they’ve had to connect themselves.
This makes it difficult to solve for that personalized omni-channel experience their buyers are demanding. That’s really our biggest differentiator that, together, our products work very well. And now, with Copilots various workloads like marketers and merchants, for each of our individual application workloads, users can talk to these experiences in natural language and use automation and AI to help with efficiency.
Q. How is Salesforce safeguarding all of the data that drives AI in Einstein Copilot?
Salesforce has been protecting customer data for over 25 years, and it’s no different with AI. The Einstein Trust Layer sits underneath every AI interaction users have in the platform, from Copilots to Prompt Studio, ensuring that all data is safe and secure the entire time.
With the Einstein Trust Layer, users can confidently deploy AI and know the information shared stays confidential, as customer data used in prompts is securely retrieved and masked before even reaching the LLM, even with third-party models. With our zero retention policies, user data is never stored by the LLM, always staying in the user’s possession. The Trust Layer also ensures safety from toxicity, hallucinations, and bias with clear audit trails to track how your AI interacts with your teams and customers for complete transparency.
Salesforce is the only company to offer this protection, making AI safer and more accessible for businesses just starting out, while also bringing transparency to AI.
Read more:
- Learn more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Learn more about Salesforce Commerce Cloud
- Watch Connections on Salesforce+ to learn more about Einstein Copilot for marketers and merchants from Salesforce
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