Maybe you’re known among your friends as the one who loves Flamin’ Hot Cheetos or the one who is constantly on TikTok – or perhaps it’s only posting on TikTok about Cheetos! Whatever your friends identify with you, that thing tends to turn up in all their interactions with you, like getting a Cheetos hoodie for your birthday gift.

The point is that all those interactions are specially personalized to you. They resonate with you because they are based on your likes and interests. And it makes you think that your friends truly know you. 

This idea of personalization has been a priority among marketers. The concept has been around for years but has taken center stage because of the pandemic. Consumers relied heavily on online shopping during the pandemic, which heightened expectations of the companies they purchased from. 

According to McKinsey’s Next in Personalization Report, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. And those companies that do emphasize personalization see results in performance, customer outcomes, and the bottom line – the research shows that personalization most often drives 10 to 15% revenue lift.

But just like those Cheetos, we know that personalization is hot, hot, hot, yet many companies don’t know how to capitalize on this trend. It can be overwhelming to recognize where to begin their personalization journey. Here we dive into the steps to achieve personalization at scale by leveraging the benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio). 

What is Marketing Cloud Personalization?

Marketing Cloud Personalization is a solution that enables companies to deliver contextually relevant experiences in real-time across their channels. Marketing Cloud Personalization reacts to the real-time behavior of consumers as they interact with a brand’s owned channels, including online through email, social, and mobile, and offline via in-store or kiosks. 

With Marketing Cloud Personalization, marketers can:

• Automate AI-driven customer journeys: Create, automate, and manage intelligent, always-on customer journeys that learn as they go.
• Create personalized web experiences: Optimize a brand’s website with dynamic content to cater to each customer’s needs in real-time.
• Connect journeys across channels: Engage your customers across the web, email, call centers, and more. Send messages based on browsing history, purchase history, or when a product is back in stock.
• Make real-time offers that drive conversions: Use in-the-moment data to deliver engaging product and content offers across your marketing.

For example, if a consumer clicks on an offer for discounted tickets to a baseball game and then logs into the team’s mobile app or calls the ticket sales office, Marketing Cloud Personalization instantly updates the individual consumer engagement profile with those real-time actions. Marketing Cloud can then deliver the next best experience, such as a discount on team apparel, to continue to engage the baseball fan with the team brand.

Why should marketers leverage Marketing Cloud Personalization?

Step behind the scenes of a marketing team, and chances are you’ll see they are using multiple siloed, channel-specific marketing solutions to try and achieve personalization. These so-called solutions lack the real-time context marketers need from consumer interactions to deliver personalized consumer experiences and relevant offers. 

By using Marketing Cloud Personalization, marketers will gain a cloud-based engagement layer that works with and across their existing systems. The solution liberates data from functional silos to provide real-time analysis and actionable insight across individual consumer journeys. You gain a comprehensive view of each and every customer and prospect. You can use that data to deliver relevant, individualized experiences to ultimately improve a customer’s journey with your brand.

Marketing Cloud Personalization features can make an impact across your entire business, including:

• Increasing conversions with campaigns, personalized content, or next best action.
• Onboarding customers with lifecycle insights and optimization.
• Increasing first-call resolution and decreasing average call-handling time with self-service customer care.
• Retaining more customers with renewals, relevant and timely campaigns, and targeted next best offers.

How should a marketer get started with Marketing Cloud Personalization?

At Silverline, one of the most significant issues we see companies face when starting with Marketing Cloud Personalization is an inability to narrow down their use cases. They see this fabulous new tool and want it to work magic across every single campaign. Silverline’s approach is to help our clients zero in on the necessary use cases that will drive the most value and the quickest wins. 

We believe in a crawl, walk, run approach to getting the most out of Interaction Studio. These are the suggested steps for companies to take, and Silverline can help with all stages of the process. 

1. Discovery – Identify marketing goals and challenges.

• Capture and prioritize your marketing goals and challenges. 
• Identify the potential use cases for campaign planning, execution, and analytics by understanding the customer flow and the desired customer experiences and outcomes.
• Review the technologies and platforms you are currently using and pinpoint the type of data you want to input to those platforms and, on the activation side, the type of data you want to output.

2. Implementation – Configure Marketing Cloud Personalization to support your goals.

• Build out your target audience segments using the information produced in the discovery stage. 
• Create personalized promotions for those segments, such as coupon codes, pop-ups, or email open times.
• Examine the segmented audience data to generate next best offers, develop brand advocates for loyalty programs, or proactively cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

3. Future – Prepare for accomplishing upcoming marketing goals. 

• Evaluate potential future functional, operational, and tactical impacts and roadmap recommendations to resolve them.
• Provide Marketing Cloud Personalization training and enablement to ensure your marketing team is educated on using the platform.
• Silverline provides an action plan for marketers to self-implement recommendations to support future instances for Marketing Cloud Personalization.  

Achieve personalization at scale with Silverline

Silverline tailors digital transformation solutions to meet your current and future needs. Our team leverages insight acquired through 10+ years in the business and thousands of engagements, along with real-world expertise gained across the media and entertainment industry. 

Silverline helps you make the most out of your Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform so you can drive personalization at scale with Marketing Cloud Personalization and engage your audience at the right place and at the right time. From strategy and implementation to managed services, we guide you through every phase of your Salesforce Marketing Cloud journey to enable continuous value with the Salesforce platform. Learn more about how we can help your organization.