Today, we experience personalization in many areas of our lives, from customizing furniture fabrics to adding heated seats to a new car. So why shouldn’t your marketing messages also be tailored to customer preferences?
Personalization makes us feel acknowledged and understood by treating each customer as a unique individual. It strengthens the customer-company relationship, as highlighted in the Salesforce Top Trends in Personalization report. A remarkable 86% of marketers have observed that personalization significantly impacts customer relationships in a positive way. The benefits include enhanced customer experience, increased conversion rates, greater visitor engagement, and improved lead generation and customer acquisition.
However, many companies struggle to initiate these personalized relationships that customers crave. In this article, we’ll explore what personalization entails and how Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization can automate personalization across customer journeys.
How Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization works
Marketing Cloud Personalization is more than just a platform; it’s a real-time personalization and decisioning powerhouse that facilitates one-to-one engagement across various channels. This robust platform is designed to create a holistic view of each customer and prospect. By combining comprehensive behavioral analytics, first-party data, and machine learning with your existing data, it forms a cohesive understanding of prospects and customers. This comprehensive view allows personalized interactions across every touchpoint where customers engage with your brand.
The system operates through configurable rules and AI-driven decisioning, intelligently determining the appropriate actions or messaging for every customer interaction. The power of this platform extends beyond individual channels; it allows data activation across multiple channels and devices, ensuring maximally relevant, personalized experiences. The insights garnered from one channel are utilized to inform and shape personalization strategies across all other channels.
Addressing personalization challenges
Organizations often grapple with challenges when striving for real-time personalization:
- Dispersed data: Customer data sprawls across multiple systems, hindering a comprehensive view of each customer.
- Legacy system limitations: Older systems lack the capacity for web-scale data, real-time engagement, one-to-one orchestration, and machine-learning activation.
- Channel disparity: Customer data often isn’t accessible across all engagement channels, leading to fragmented experiences.
Marketing Cloud Personalization serves as the ultimate solution to these challenges. It empowers organizations to grasp and engage with each prospect and customer as a distinct individual across various digital channels. This is achieved through centralizing data, analyzing audiences at macro and micro levels, targeting experiences across all touchpoints, and evaluating success against key performance indicators. Importantly, this unified system of insight and activation enables real-time functionality, aligning with the pace of modern customer engagement.
Capabilities of Marketing Cloud Personalization
The platform empowers you to establish better relationships with prospects and customers through several key capabilities:
- Seamless data integration: Effortlessly integrate data sources and channels, encompassing both online and offline touchpoints.
- Holistic customer understanding: Unify disparate data into a single customer profile, comprehending both anonymous visitors and known customers, while reconciling identities from various channels and devices.
- Decision-making flexibility: Make decisions on the type of experiences to deliver, utilizing both human-driven segments and machine-learning decisions, both at the audience and individual levels.
- Consistent engagement: Engage customers consistently across channels, fostering personalized conversations and actions based on contextual and behavioral data, aligning with business value and campaign goals.
- Monitoring and optimization: Continuously monitor and optimize personalization efforts through ongoing testing, real-time reports, dashboards, and access to a comprehensive data warehouse.
Why an organization needs Marketing Cloud Personalization
In our work with Silverline clients, we often encounter siloed customer data across multiple legacy systems. These systems aren’t designed to meet the real-time engagement and machine-learning needs of modern marketing teams.
Marketing Cloud Personalization unifies this data in one central location, enabling marketing teams to engage with each customer individually across channels at scale. This functionality empowers you to:
- Collect, stitch, aggregate, and interpret behavioral and attribute data about every customer
- Understand anonymous visitors, known customers, and accounts by resolving identities from different channels and devices
- Optimize customer experiences based on contextual and behavioral data, as well as business value objectives and campaign goals
Marketing Cloud Personalization impact across industries
In our collaborations with clients in financial services, healthcare, and other sectors, we’ve seen the critical importance of personalized experiences in building trust, driving loyalty, and enhancing satisfaction.
For instance, in the healthcare industry, personalized communication and content address patients’ specific needs, offering targeted recommendations and fostering a more connected and empathetic experience. Mobile apps play a vital role in engaging healthcare patients, allowing organizations to customize app experiences based on preferences, behaviors, and location. These apps can display personalized health recommendations, appointment scheduling options, and targeted health education content, leading to increased engagement and user retention.
Similarly, in financial services, a common objective is to encourage customers to adopt saving habits aligned with their life stages. Marketing Cloud Personalization helps design targeted savings-focused campaigns by analyzing customer data to identify individuals who may benefit from saving for specific goals. Personalized messages then assist them in taking action, such as planning for retirement or a home purchase.
By optimizing your personalization efforts with Marketing Cloud Personalization, you can provide consistent, personalized experiences across channels. This personalized journey ensures ongoing engagement with tailored content, products, promotions, or offers — a demand echoed by 94% of marketers who believe customers expect personalized brand experiences.
