Spotlight on New Personalization Enhancements for Brands with Apps
With Salesforce’s Winter “22 release, notable enhancements were made to the way that a company’s app can work along with Marketing Cloud to create highly-contextual in-app experiences for customers. Best yet, once set up, these enhancements will enable marketers to tailor “moments that matter” in-app messaging to be delivered to customers in response the user’s actions in real-time. Specifically, marketers can define which in-app actions should be tracked by the MobilePush SDK (version 8.0.0 or higher), indicate that set of criteria within Journey Builder, and then have the close relationship between Journey Builder and the SDK power in-app personalization for users in new ways.
The first step in making this happen is to create a schema that details the “Events” (or user actions) that should be tracked. Click here to see an example CSV file and rules related to how best to define your event schema (for example, the highlight that there is a 250 character limit for Event Description).
Outside of knowing the rules and following a template, it also makes sense to have collaborative discussions about which details to include. It can be helpful to have the marketing team and the development team come together to discuss the mapping of the schema. Considerations of things like what sort of metadata should be captured along with an event (i.e. — specific attributes), what the common language used to describe these events should be (i.e. — labeling of events within the schema and MobilePush SDK), which screen views should be tracked, et cetera.
Once the schema is mapped, it will then need to be uploaded into Journey Builder (which can be done simply with a drag and drop of the schema CSV file). From there, the data related to the defined in- app actions will register as the events that can be used as part of Marketing Cloud journeys. For example, you can set an event to be that, when a user ends up on the purchase confirmation screen, they are prompted in real-time to opt-in for push notifications to receive the newest promotions relevant to them.
Or, if you have chosen to capture metadata related to purchase order value, you could instead display a real-time message in the app at checkout if the user has just bought something over a certain threshold amount. This means that even an action like the app install itself could be used to set a user onto a journey, simply by defining the app install as being a tracked event, and then using the Mobile App Event Entry Source within Journey Builder.
Those kinds of use cases are why the enhancements that come with this update are particularly exciting. Now the MobilePush SDK and Journey Builder are working together in a much more pronounced way. This enables you to trigger journeys, goals, and decision splits in ways that are notably more personalized and interact with your customers at exactly the moments that matter most. Why not try out the new Events area as part of a journey that you build in the near future?
