This guest blog is delivered by Leah Fainchtein Buenavida, a technology writer with 15 years of experience, covering areas ranging from fintech and digital marketing to cybersecurity and coding practices.
The demand for constant, personalized, seamless customer experiences is always growing. According to the Connected Customer report, 67% of customers say their expectations for good experiences are higher than ever.
Marketers understand the value of personalization. However, delivering personalization at scale remains a challenge for many brands. Tools like SalesForce Marketing Cloud can help you automate personalization, make data-driven decisions, and create dynamic content.
This post reviews some of the platforms included in the Marketing Cloud platform, with a focus on the Personalization Builder.
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
SalesForce Marketing Cloud is a marketing platform that provides multiple tools for managing the interaction between a brand and its existing or potential customers. The platform enables you to contact customers on the right channel, at the right time via email, SMS, or social ads, create multi channel experiences, and increase sales and customer acquisition.
This model of Marketing Cloud is based on the ME2B approach, where customers are defining the kind of relationship they want with brands. Brands need to create experiences that promote trust and strong connections with their customers. Marketing Cloud tools enable them to establish this relationship and collect important information about their users, their preferences, and opinions.
What Can You Do With Marketing Cloud?
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud consists of seven primary products that leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and predictive analytics to connect you with your customers. You can interact with customers through mobile messaging, email, digital advertising, social media, and website content. Primary products include Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Social Studio, Advertising studio, Einstein, Journey Builder, Personalization Builder.
AI-based marketing tools can turn standard content into hyper-personalized messaging. Personalized emails, for example, have a greater chance of being opened and engaged with than their traditional alternatives. Only the most relevant communication can generate a positive response from your audience. Marketing Cloud helps you place the right content into your web messaging and email along the customer journey. Machine learning capabilities enable you to continuously improve and adapt the customer journey, keeping content relevant and engaging.
Salesforce Einstein
Einstein integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology with Salesforce’s Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Einstein uses predictive analytics, machine learning, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to analyze customer data. Einstein’s AI algorithms leverage this analysis to improve its capabilities, and perform more accurate analysis. This technology can analyze user data in different sectors:
- Sales—helps to increase conversion rate by predicting the probability of a customer to purchase a product.
- Customer service—helps with predicting issues, classifying and routing of cases. Also includes intelligent chatbots to help customers resolve common problems.
- Marketing—it helps to increase conversion rates by predicting who is more or less likely to engage with an email by engagement scoring and predictive recommendations.
- Retail—uses customer data to identify the products a visitor might want, both in digital and traditional commerce. Brands can increase revenue by predicting if a consumer is more or less likely to purchase a specific item.
Salesforce Personalization Builder
The Salesforce Personalization Builder is based on Einstein. It uses predictive analytics to deliver personalized content to customers based on their preferences. The Personalization Builder shows you the behavioural history, real-time interactions, and buying preferences of customers. You can use this data to predict how they will act in the future, and understand the motives behind their actions. These insights can help you improve your customer engagement strategy across all relevant channels.
You can use Salesforce Personalization Builder together with other Marketing Cloud platforms to further improve your marketing campaigns. Content Builder for instance, manages all content and assets in one location. You can use Analytics Builder to track the performance of content campaigns, measure their success and use Personalization Builder to extract valuable insights from the data to adjust a campaign accordingly.
How to Set Up the Personalization Builder in Marketing Cloud
The process below describes several technical steps that can help you set up the Personalization Builder in Marketing Cloud.
Step 1—content or product
Decide if you want to use content or product or both, and set up your catalog with field attributes, and activity tracking for category view, purchases, shopping cart. A catalog stores all your content or product data with as many details as possible. This includes price, URL’s, stock, description, keywords, and categories.
Step 2—import your catalog
The catalog importing task in Personalization Builder is time consuming. There are two possible options:
- Flat-file upload—the uploaded file is added to a publicly available web URL or an FTP account and imported into the Builder twice a day.
- Streaming updates—updates and adds content and products through another snippet of JavaScript.
You have the option to map your catalog fields with the default fields of Marketing Cloud, and select which fields to tag. Tagging determines the fields that are used to build your affinity per profile. For example, tag the fields for category and brand, where brand is Toshiba and category is TV.
Step 3—data collection
Once the catalog is in place, you can start collecting user data. You might need help from your developer to implement all the necessary Collect Codes for behaviour tracking. These Collect Tracking Codes are JavaScript snippets that are used to gather data about known contacts and unknown visitor behaviour.
First, collect the available JavaScript snippets of Marketing Cloud. Start with the Base Collect Code that needs to be implemented on every page of your web site. Find the code in the official documentation.
Next, you need to capture user attributes and information. This script identifies your unknown visitors:
<script type=”text/javascrip
_etmc.push([“setOrgId”, “MID”]);
_etmc.push([“setUserInfo”, {“email”: “INSERT_EMAIL_OR_UNIQUE_ID”}]);
_etmc.push([“trackPageView”]);
</script>
Step 4—enable the Personalization Builder
Turn on the data extensions of Einstein. Follow the next steps to enable the Personalization Builder populate these data extensions in Contact Builder.
- Navigate to the Personalization Builder Status tab.
- Reveal the drop-down menu by choosing the grey Settings cog
- Click on Data Extension Settings
- Click on Enable Einstein Data Extensions
- Click Save.
Conclusion
The most common challenge that brands encounter when using SalesForce Marketing Cloud is not knowing how to use its different tools. Marketers need to know which tools to use at the right time, and for what purpose. Salesforce Personalization Builder helps you better understand how your customers behave and why. It enables you to see your customers’ behavioural history, real-time interactions, and buying preferences. You can set it up with only a few technical steps.