Quality data is the lifeblood of successful marketing. How we collect, structure, and maintain this data determines the effectiveness of our marketing activities, especially in automating customer journeys. That's why tapping into Salesforce Data Cloud for marketing brings so many benefits. In this blog, we will show you the benefit of using Salesforce Data Cloud in Marketing, and how to use it.
The Marketer’s Mission
The mission for marketers is to create a highly personalized customer experience that builds loyalty and trust in your brand. To do this, you must manage your known and unknown data across all channels. With a limited budget, you need to optimize spending and keep costs low. To prove your success, you must show the impact of your work on the business.
This is a big task, but you don't have to do it alone. We have the intel to help you succeed, including ways to unify your data from various sources to create a single, comprehensive view of your customer. Let’s explore the systems and products that make this possible: Salesforce Data Cloud.
What is Salesforce Data Cloud?
Salesforce Data Cloud is a data platform that unifies all the company’s data onto Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform, giving every team a 360-degree view of the customer to drive automation and analytics, personalize engagement, and power trusted AI. Salesforce Data Cloud creates this holistic customer view by turning volumes of disconnected data into a single, trusted model that’s easy to access and understand. This includes diverse data sets, like telemetry data, web engagement data and more across your organization or your external data lakes and warehouses. This unified view helps Sales, Service, and Marketing teams build personalized customer experiences, trigger data-driven actions and workflows, and safely drive AI across all Salesforce apps.
Read more: What is Salesforce Data Cloud?
Regardless of where data comes from - internal apps, systems, channels, external data lakes, and even emails, images, or PDFs – Salesforce Data Cloud can bring it all together, creating a unified customer profile that helps the business team better understand what customer needs today, and anticipate what they may need tomorrow. This helps teams across business organizations use all the company’s data to boost productivity and deliver deeper customer value.
Using Salesforce Data Cloud, businesses can consistently provide personalized customer experiences that lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth. Salesforce Data Cloud ensures that every employee has the right information at the right time to deliver what customers need, in near real-time, across the entire customer journey.
What can Marketers do with Data Cloud?
Marketers can significantly enhance their strategies with Salesforce Data Cloud. By unifying data from across the business, you can power every touchpoint in the customer lifecycle. This means marketers make their content more relevant, their recommendations more personalized, and their customer experiences more connected.
Salesforce Data Cloud helps reduce costs by enabling advanced segmentation and targeted advertising. Understanding customer behavior and preferences allows marketers to create highly targeted campaigns that reach the right audience at the right time, maximizing the impact of their advertising spend.
They can also boost conversion rates with AI-powered next-best offers and personalized customer journeys. Real-time data analysis enables Salesforce Data Cloud to suggest the most relevant products or services to each customer, increasing the likelihood of purchasing.
Furthermore, Salesforce Data Cloud supports building and maintaining loyal customer relationships. Marketers can use real-time data to drive proactive service interactions and recommend up-sell offers that resonate with customers. This enhances the customer experience, fosters long-term loyalty, and increases revenue opportunities.
How Salesforce Data Cloud benefits Marketing
Operational Customer Profile
Harness all customer data, from any source across the business, to gain insights into customers and increase their lifetime value. Here's how Salesforce Data Cloud makes it possible:
Data Mapping
With Salesforce Data Cloud, marketers can prepare new data for seamless consumption by downstream systems. Using a click-and-drag interface, they can standardize and map incoming data to the data model in Data Cloud. This enables them to kick off personalized journeys in Salesforce Marketing Cloud or update Contact records in the Sales Cloud effortlessly.
Zero-ETL Data Access
Salesforce Data Cloud allows marketers to unify and leverage non-CRM or third-party data, such as inventory or click data, without needing to physically move or copy it. Through two-way data access between Salesforce and partners like Snowflake or Google BigQuery, they can integrate and use data efficiently.
Out-of-the-Box Connectors
Reduce the need for custom integrations and maintenance that can hinder marketing teams from using data in campaigns. Salesforce Data Cloud provides native connectivity to Salesforce apps (Marketing, Sales, Service, Commerce), prebuilt integrations to cloud storage like Amazon S3, and the ability to connect to any system with MuleSoft. This simplify the process of ingesting and combining customer data.
Identity Resolution
Understanding how different types of data tie back to a single individual is crucial. Salesforce Data Cloud helps marketers determine that seemingly disparate data points, like atl@salesforce.com and al123@nto.com, are associated with the same person. Using user-defined rules, you can link disconnected records together, providing a unified view of each customer.
With these capabilities, Salesforce Data Cloud empowers marketers to create comprehensive operational customer profiles, driving more personalized and effective marketing strategies.
Real-Time Data Access for Marketers
Increase speed to market with the trusted data marketers need to segment audiences, power AI, and analyze performance at your fingertips. Salesforce Data Cloud offers a suite of tools designed to enhance marketing efforts with real-time data access.
User-Friendly Segmentation
Create targeted audiences faster without needing SQL or data requests by using generative AI to translate plain language descriptions into functional segments in seconds. Utilize a no-code builder to create and prioritize audiences with Waterfall segmentation to avoid over-marketing. Expand their campaign reach by finding new customers like your high-value segments using Einstein Lookalikes.
Foundation for Marketing AI
Embed data from Data Cloud into Marketing Cloud AI without custom integration or manual handoffs to save time and increase productivity. This allows marketers to deliver more relevant content and journeys, such as generating email imagery based on past purchases and optimizing message send times so customers receive them when they're most likely to engage.
Bring Your Model
Break down barriers between marketing users and data science teams with direct integrations between Data Cloud and external tools like Amazon SageMaker. This enables marketers to consume predictions and scores, such as propensity to buy, generated by custom AI/ML models that can inform personalized engagement.
Segment and Calculated Insights
Minimize the number of external analytics tools needed to understand customers and how they respond to campaigns. Use Calculated Insights in Data Cloud, built with customer profile data, and out-of-the-box dashboards that combine customer and revenue data. This helps marketers understand and optimize segment performance across activations, such as Google Ads campaigns.
With these capabilities, Salesforce Data Cloud empowers marketers to access real-time data, streamline their processes, and create highly personalized and effective marketing strategies.
Seamless Activation to Any Channel
Personalize every touchpoint in each customer relationship with AI recommendations, decisions, and journey automation. Salesforce Data Cloud enables seamless activation to any channel, ensuring marketing efforts are highly relevant and effective.
AI-Powered Recommendations
Enhance the relevance of AI-powered recommendations and offers using unified profile data from every engagement with a business brand. For example, marketers can show customers personalized product recommendations on their website based on customers’ browsing behavior, in-store purchases, past service cases, or sales inquiries.
Data-Driven Customer Journeys
Make every journey touchpoint more relevant and timely by activating Data Cloud audiences with data points that influence channel, content, and frequency. Automatically trigger educational journeys when customers are not using key product features and refresh journeys with the most up-to-date data and segment membership as changes occur.
First-Party Advertising
Reduce wasted spend through more relevant advertising campaigns and by suppressing ads when it's not the right time, using consented data from customers. Reach customers directly with activation integrations to ad partners like Google, Meta, Amazon, and LinkedIn. Enrich profile data and optimize programmatic media buys with apps from AppExchange partners like Acxiom and The Trade Desk.
Natively Built on CRM
Integrate the operational customer profile into every workflow across business with a single platform built on CRM. The same unified data powers alerts to sales reps, personalized e-commerce experiences, next-best-action service recommendations, and more, ensuring consistency and relevance in all customer interactions.
Salesforce Data Cloud empowers marketers to deliver personalized, timely, and relevant experiences across all channels, enhancing customer relationships and maximizing marketing effectiveness.
Conclusion
Salesforce Data Cloud simplifies marketing by bringing together data from all sources into one easy-to-use platform. This means marketers can quickly access real-time insights, personalize their messages, and optimize their campaigns across different channels. With features like smart segmentation and AI-driven recommendations, Salesforce Data Cloud helps marketers target the right audience and improve engagement. By making data management more straightforward, it allows businesses to create better customer experiences, build stronger relationships, and see greater results from their marketing efforts.
