Personalization — Viewed Through a Salesforce Len

Mahogany Beckford
3 min readAug 30, 2021

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Photo Credit: cottonbro

Let’s say you had been scouring the internet for a little while, searching for the perfect cast iron frying pan. Then finally, you found it! You bought it… it arrived. You’ve been impressing your family for a few weeks now. However still, ads for the pan you already bought keep popping up for you.

If you have ever been shown an offer that doesn’t at all relate to your needs, then you have experienced the impacts of bad personalization. It helps to show that personalization matters — a lot — and plays a big role in modern marketing.

Personalization as an Expectation

Customers appreciate receiving communication that is tailored to their unique needs. Research released in mid-2021 shows that 44% of customers are likely to sever ties if a brand does not personalize experiences towards them.

This makes sense, because online experiences matter a great deal to customers. Just like with offline interactions, these experiences are directly tied to the impression that is formed of a brand. That is why, when a brand can personalize experiences with a customer, it is both felt and appreciated.

So how can a company personalize the experiences that customers (and potential customers) have with them? With Salesforce tools, of course! Considering that Salesforce offers technologies that are best friends to marketing teams, this is one area that they have covered. Here’s how.

Marketing Cloud to the Rescue

Marketing Cloud is a Salesforce platform that is made up of various “Studios” and “Builders”. For example, there is a Content Builder that, as the name suggests, helps a team simplify aspects of crafting content for their brand. Things like templates and dynamic content blocks make it very easy to send out emails that are responsive across device types and are personalized to recipients.

Another example is Advertising Studio, which lets a team leverage the data that is in their CRM to maximize their ad spend as they create personalized ads across channels. This helps a brand avoid being the company showing ads for a certain cast iron frying pan to customers who have already bought the pan from them.

When it comes to personalization, Interaction Studio is a shiny tool in the Marketing Cloud toolbox. Not only does it help marketers personalize experiences with their brand online but also, it can help to create great experiences offline too (in cases like with call center interactions, for example). This deeper cross-channel enablement is a major reason why Interaction Studio can be thought of as a tool for “hyper-personalization”.

Interaction Studio in Action

You see where she stopped at the ATM midway through the video above? With Interaction Studio, a brand could personalize that offline experience with her as well. Maybe personalization is why she received an SMS soon after. Maybe. Didn’t bother to watch the video? Go watch it!

A Market-Leading Approach

For years now, Salesforce has consistently ranked highly as a leader in personalization engines in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant.

A highlight noted in Gartner’s ranking is how it helps marketers “deliver more granular personalized experiences.” That is a great way to describe what can be done with this tool - granular personalized experiences, at scale.

If you are looking for a leading technology that will help your team execute on hyper-personalization both online and off, you should definitely consider getting on board with Marketing Cloud’s Interaction Studio. You’ll be glad you did.

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Mahogany Beckford

‘20-'23 Salesforce Marketing Champion. I like sharing marketing perspectives to help folks trying to get into the space and teams who are already using martech.