Marketing Cloud personalization guide

Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), Marketing Cloud personalization gives you the ability to serve up content, offers and experiences that address the unique needs of each of your customers, whenever, wherever and however they’re interacting with your business.

With Salesforce Personalization, data gets pulled from all your connected sources, without duplication. It can make instant, 1:1 customer decisions, 24/7. It can even update a customer’s browsing experiences in real time, based on their interests and buying intent, and your business goals. Plus, when that customer interacts with your site, their engagement data goes back to their customer profile in real-time, ensuring that stakeholders across the customer journey have the latest and most accurate view of that customer.

By improving customer experiences, Marketing Cloud personalization can help your business see increased conversion rates, lower acquisition costs and drive measurable lift in your bottom line.

While 1:1 personalization occurs in real time, implementing it in your business doesn’t have to happen overnight. In fact, it’s best to take a step-by-step approach.

1. Establish your goals

Before implementing your Marketing Cloud personalization plan, you’ll want to determine the business goals you want to achieve. Is it increasing conversions or repeat purchases? Maybe you want to drive higher engagement through content downloads, email signups or offer redemptions. Or perhaps you want to cut acquisition costs or lower your cart abandonment rates. As you decide the goals for your business, you’ll want to ensure they’re measurable with key milestones that enable you to clearly track progress.

2. Identify your personalization channels and data sources

Next, you’ll want to decide which customer channel, or channels, you’ll want to personalize. Whether it’s your website, an email campaign, your mobile app, at the point-of-sale or social media, any channel that your business uses to communicate with customers should be personalized. However, it may be impossible to personalize all your customer channels at once, so it’s important to prioritize. Consider personalizing customer channels in stages.

Data is the fuel that powers your personalization strategy, so make sure it’s up-to-date, accurate and complete. Key zero and first-party data sources to consider include:

• Behavioral data, which covers opens, clicks and page views, as well as active time spent and transactions.
• Attribute data, such as an individual’s geolocation, referring source, company, browser and device type; attribute data can also be pulled from connected databases.
• Zero-party and first-party data, including survey and form responses.
• Third-party data that’s bought from outside sources.

Remember, it’s important to keep your customers informed of your data collection policies.

Companies often choose to personalize their website first. It serves as the digital “storefront” for both current and prospective customers.

3. Choose your personalization approach

There are two basic approaches to personalization — rules based and machine learning. With rules-based personalization, businesses deliver personalized experiences based on preset market segments. Those segments can be as broad or as narrow as you choose. For example, a broad segment could be all customers from a certain geographic region, while a narrow segment could be a target group who left a specific item in their cart.

Rules-based personalization requires more manual maintenance. In addition, the more targeted the experience is, the more rules a business needs to create and maintain.

Machine-learning personalization is a form of AI. It uses algorithms and predictive analytics to create experiences in real time, such as displaying relevant content, offers or an end-to-end experience. Machine-learning algorithms can process data and detect patterns at a speed and scale that humans can’t. With machine-learning personalization, marketers set algorithmic parameters to deliver highly relevant, 1:1 experiences to individuals in real time.

With some machine learning algorithms, the more data they receive, the smarter they get. Some are even able to automatically detect and respond to changes in individuals’ buying patterns and behaviors.

Many companies use a combination of rules-based and machine-learning personalization.

4. Personalize across your channels

When implementing Marketing Cloud personalization for your business, you’ll want to think big, but it’s probably best to start small. Otherwise, personalizing every customer interaction at every purchasing stage and touchpoint can be overwhelming. As mentioned previously, many businesses begin by personalizing their website experience to ensure what a customer sees is tied to their last experience or recent purchase, or that product recommendations follow their in-session browsing.

After you’ve established a 1:1 personalized website experience, the next step is to personalize your customers’ email experiences. Just think: After a customer makes a purchase or visits your site, your business can send a follow-up email that’s tied to that customer’s unique interactions. Without a large investment in incremental marketing spend, the impact can be considerable. Businesses that use Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Personalization can make emails more impactful, which is important because only 21% of consumers reported that they had recently received a memorable promotional email.

Once you’ve set up 1:1 personalization in a couple of your channels, you’ll want to extend it across every customer channel. It’s like giving your customers the VIP treatment every time they interact with your business, at every point in their customer journey — from browsing on your site, to buying online or in-person, to inquiries and even product returns.

In order to achieve a seamless 1:1 personalized experience across every channel, you’ll need to build a unified customer profile (UCP) for every customer, prospect and account. Creating a UCP on this scale requires that you break down any data siloes that exist in your business to bring disparate pieces of customer data together. Your data solution will need to cross-check and bring together data from unknown uses with known ones, as well as allow data to flow back and forth between complementary systems like CRMs, POS systems and marketing automation platforms.

It’s no small task, but once your business can deliver a 1:1 personalized omni-channel experience to each customer, the impact on your business’s bottom line can be powerful.

Add meaning and value with every customer interaction

With Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Personalization, the opportunities to delight your customers are practically endless — and can be as unique as your customers themselves. To get thinking about the possibilities for your business, take a look at the examples below:

B2C:

• Tailor your homepage and any landing page in real time
• Tailor email capture campaigns and other signups with in-the-moment messaging
• Send personalized notifications by email, push or SMS. Maybe it’s an upcoming sale, or an offer based on geolocation or items that they left in their cart — or maybe their favorite item is back in stock
• Update emails with personalized content at open time
• Provide 1:1 recommendations and next-best offers in real time — in your website, app, email or other touchpoints
• Personalize in-app experiences
• Provide personalized messaging at the point of sale
• Notify call center agents of next-best actions and offers, or ideas on how to resolve an issue

B2B

• As soon as they arrive, let site visitors know you “get them” with relevant, helpful information based on their source, location, behavior, history and other behavior
• Recognize high-value visitors with tailored messaging
• Trigger alerts to sales reps in your CRM when a target account shows high activity and engagement
• Leverage 1:1 content recommendations to make browsing simpler and more rewarding for your site visitors
• Highlight relevant webinars and events to drive registrations
• Sync up email and website experiences
• Create personalized web and mobile surveys to gather zero-party data

Put your customers at the heart of every interaction with Marketing Cloud Salesforce Personalization.

‍To learn more about Salesforce Personalization, reach out to one of our experts today.