Salesforce launches marketing personalization and automation features

Salesforce this week announced new Marketing Cloud features designed to help companies build deeper relationships with their customers. Following on the heels of Service Cloud updates, the capabilities focus on personalization, optimization, and improving the relevancy of customer recommendations for products.

Research reveals the benefits of tailoring sales outreach to groups of — or even individual — customers. Thirty-eight percent of brands risk losing customers because of poor marketing personalization efforts, according to a study by Gartner. That’s perhaps why as far back as 2014, 57% of marketers reported that custom content was their top marketing priority, reports Altimeter.

Salesforce is ramping up Marketing Cloud’s targeting capabilities by combining AI with cross-cloud data to hone in on subscribers — and suppress users who go inactive. One of the new features, Einstein Engagement Scoring in Salesforce CDP, aims to boost engagement and conversion rates as well as satisfaction across customer experiences.

In part because of the pandemic, which drove more business online, customers have higher expectations for customer service today. The trend underlines the usefulness of Einstein Engagement Scoring and like tools, which can support rather than supplant initiatives driven by marketing and sales teams.

Arriving alongside Einstein Engagement Scoring are Interaction Studio templates, which extend personalization to customers via ATMs, point-of-sale, and call centers. New Interaction Studio integrations with Experience Cloud and customer service deliver personalized web, mobile, and portal experiences based on a customer’s real-time engagement, as well as providing sales and service teams with greater visibility into customer behavior, segmentation, and next-best actions.

Also among the Marketing Cloud upgrades is Einstein Content Designer, an AI-powered feature that automatically creates marketing content and optimizes it for segments of customers. A new Datorama connector and app for Salesforce CDP helps reveal the business impact of first-party marketing and advertising, while a Datorama integration and app for Interaction Studio optimizes return on investment across customer experiences.

Einstein Automate

Salesforce also unveiled enhancements to Einstein Automate, its workflow automation product for enterprises, including new capabilities in robotic process automation and machine learning.

MuleSoft RPA, which arrives today, seeks to automate high-volume, repetitive back-office tasks. Born out of MuleSoft’s acquisition of Servicetrace, MuleSoft RPA enables users to kick off prerecorded actions like extracting specific information from PDF documents and emails.

Another feature announced this week, Digital Process Automation, offers drag-and-drop tools to simplify the building and deployment of branded, automated customer experiences. As for Einstein Document Reader,  it taps Einstein’s AI capabilities to scan, identify, and ingest specific data from physical documents into Salesforce.

Salesforce says that its customers have continued to ramp up their use of automation over the last year. A recent MuleSoft survey found that 77% of IT and business decision makers have already implemented or are in the process of implementing automation solutions to increase productivity. As of July 2021, there’s been a 41% increase in the number of low-code automated workflows executed across Salesforce products, and Salesforce customers automate an average of 38.2 billion processes and complete 116 billion Einstein AI predictions each day.