You’ve probably seen those ‘How It Started … How It’s Going’ memes posted on social media. Two pics are shown next to each other to imply the passage of time and what it took to get from Point A to Point B.

If you were to do one of those memes for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you’d see what started as a relatively minor acquisition for Salesforce around 2013 has exploded into a marketing powerhouse.  

So, the answer to ‘how it’s going’? It’s going really great.

There have been a bunch of acquisitions that have transformed Marketing Cloud from those early days to where it is today. Over the years, the platform has continually risen to meet the needs of financial services marketers at that moment. And right now, organizations are seeking a 1:1 level of personalization with their customers with relevance and at scale.

But this level of personalization isn’t always readily achievable. Banking, lending, and wealth management companies are sitting on a lot of customer data, but often that data is siloed in systems that aren’t speaking to one another. And this can lead to an unclear understanding of the customers you are trying to engage with. 

When marketers don’t know or can’t respond to individual customers, they often end up falling back on unengaging static experiences. These disjointed encounters lead to a struggle to guide people down the financial services funnel since you cannot provide value in those pivotal moments of the customer journey. 

Why personalization matters

Personalization allows financial services organizations to promote relevant products and services to their customers and prospects across channels like web, email, and mobile in real time, with offers specific and unique for them.

But to provide that personalization, you must have a strong understanding of the data behind each person engaging with your channels and brands. You want to get a sense of their engagement with your marketing content, interest based on browsing behavior, and context of where they are within your customer funnel. All that data is stitched together from across your systems to guide prospects down the conversion funnel by serving relevant messaging and personalized content in a one-on-one experience. 

Let’s look at an example with someone interested in a new home loan. An anonymous visitor arrives at your website through an online ad, and their first visit is personalized based on their referring source so that they receive a consistent experience between digital channels. As the anonymous visitor browses your website, the Marketing Cloud Personalization platform gathers key contextual information about interests and building affinities towards products or content. 

Once the anonymous visitor completes an application or saves the results for later, the Marketing Cloud Personalization platform begins to resolve their identity. This identity matching and resolution then allows you to retarget them across new channels like social media and email. When that now known customer comes back to the site, their return experience is personalized and they are provided with relevant products or content. We can even go a step further and keep the customer up to date on each step of the process until their loan is funded. 

Without personalization of content, products, and messaging, your customers will feel that you don’t know them or what they are interested in and will abandon your site, email, or message. Understanding behavioral trends at an individual and a macro level provides insights into the offers and products that drive customers to your channels and ultimately convert them into sales.

Developing a 1:1 relationship with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization

Leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization, you can build a single comprehensive view of each customer and prospect by combining in-depth behavioral analytics, first-party data, and machine learning with your existing data. By bringing together data from wherever customers come into contact with your brand, you are able to deeply understand prospects and customers and converse with each individual with an intelligent voice across every touchpoint.

The platform uses configurable rules and AI-based decisioning to determine what to do or say to the customer at each moment. You can activate data across channels and on any device to shape the conversation with maximally relevant, individualized experiences. You can provide informed and consistent interactions throughout the customer lifecycle by using what you learn about a customer on one channel to inform the personalization delivered on any other channel.

Effective engagement at different stages of the customer lifecycle can improve KPIs across your organization. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization has helped financial services businesses improve in the following areas:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning
  • Decide what experiences to deliver through both human, rule-based segments and machine learning-driven decisions at the audience and individual levels.
• True real-time decisioning and experience delivery
  • Engage customers with consistent, personalized conversations and next best actions across channels, and optimize experiences based on contextual and behavioral data, business value, and your campaign goals.
• Decrease cost to serve with unified insights that unveil the customer’s intent and context so you can provide them with the next best action or conversation based on their personal preferences, historic and in-session behavior, affinity and engagement scores, and real-time business context. 
• Understand anonymous visitors, known customers, and accounts by unifying all relevant data into a single profile and resolving identities from different channels and devices
• Deep behavioral tracking with business context
  • Personalization provides capabilities that support web and mobile tracking via the SDK that goes beyond simple click and conversion tracking to monitor active time spent and true engagement per person and per campaign. The Personalization platform understands product and content metadata and scores engagement, affinity, and intent in real time.
• Move customers through the journey with your brand
  • Activate lifecycle-targeted campaigns based on machine learning and business rules or in response to customer engagement, such as offering a related product or service after a purchase
• Find new customers
  • Detect patterns in customer activity and encourage visitors to take action, such as creating an account or making a purchase

These capabilities enable you to execute cross-channel experiences at scale. With a unified solution to listen, understand, decide, and take action based on all the intelligence gathered about a customer, your teams can prioritize and target their outreach to ensure it is relevant and effective.

Take personalization to the next level with Silverline

Success with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Personalization hinges on understanding your organization’s capabilities and requirements. Silverline will work collaboratively with you as your trusted partner to determine your organization’s goals and vision for this platform and how it will work alongside your other marketing initiatives and technology stack. We’ll help you harness your data to gain insights into your customer’s behaviors to create valuable, dynamic, individualized experiences — enabling continuous value with the Salesforce platform. Find out how we can help your organization.