09/19/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/19/2024 10:24
What a Dreamforce week it's been - it feels so good to catch up with Trailblazers, hear so many wonderful ideas, and unveil innovations we've been working on at Salesforce. Customer-driven relationships have been a big theme this year, namely how we can use data and AI to bring our internal teams together and deliver what consumers need no matter where they are in their journey.
Seamless handoffs between departments are crucial to making this happen. Marketing, Commerce, Sales, and Service all need to be in lockstep. This requires both a cohesive strategy and a strong tech foundation. Oftentimes, poorly integrated technology and processes leave customers feeling like they engage with separate departments rather than with one unified company. But that will soon be a thing of the past.
With access to unified data that's actionable across the entire organization, as well as advanced AI and automation capabilities, departments can work together to deliver hyper-personalized, connected, frictionless experiences across the entire customer lifecycle. Today's most successful marketing and commerce pros engage on the customer's terms and provide value across the entire customer experience.
On that note, this week we announced Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud innovations that will help businesses use data from across their company to deliver customer-driven relationships, while also improving internal team efficiency and productivity. Let's take a look at the details.
What Salesforce Marketing Cloud Dreamforce innovations mean for you
What Salesforce Commerce Cloud Dreamforce innovations mean for you
First, a little background. These four Marketing Cloud innovations are built on the Salesforce Platform and are grounded in customer data and metadata through Data Cloud. This gives marketers easy access to customer records from across their entire businesses to enable seamless handoffs, great customer experiences, and ways to measure success.
Agentforce for Marketing brings generative and predictive AI together into an end-to-end campaign experience that's initiated by the marketer and actioned on by the agent. Agentforce for Marketing helps marketers:
Let's look at an example of how this works. A marketer uses Agentforce Campaigns to launch a campaign to re-engage potential churn customers. It can identify the target audience, bring together data from various departments (such as device usage and upcoming renewal status). Agentforce Campaigns agent can even generate a personalized multi-channel campaign including building the journey and the first draft of an email to entice customers to renew or upgrade.
The new Marketing Cloud Advanced Editionexpands on Marketing Cloud Growth Edition with more advanced AI and automation capabilities to build better relationships, scale personalization and improve productivity. This helps marketers:
Learn how Marketing Cloud Growth Edition can help your business connect with customers in new - and powerful - ways.
Einstein Marketing Intelligence (EMI) uses AI and Data Cloud to connect, harmonize and enrich your marketing data in three clicks. It gives marketers one place to optimize spend and cross-channel campaign performance in real time. This helps marketers:
Einstein Personalization is our new AI-based decision engine that enables businesses to create real-time 1:1 customer experiences. Einstein Personalization will help you:
Learn how Marketing Cloud helps you action all your data faster, deploy smarter campaigns, and personalize across every touchpoint.
Commerce is complex. Especially now, as companies collect vast amounts of data, expand into new channels, and navigate the new era of AI. Disparate, disconnected systems make it even more difficult to manage all the complexity. To meet this challenge, Salesforce is extending Commerce Cloud capabilities and making it easier than ever for businesses to deliver truly unified commerce.
Unveiled at Dreamforce, new out-of-the-box features will further extend commerce into all areas of the business. Here's how:
What if you could predict which promotions and marketing campaigns would turn casual shoppers into paying customers? Or discover what motivates shoppers on a more granular level? With unified data from across your business, you can. Unified commerce is making every part of the business better together.
Easily build campaigns using detailed engagement and purchase data. Create precise marketing segments to reach customers with highly personalized offers. Abandoned cart? Re-engage shoppers with perfectly timed notifications.
Increase visibility for service agents by connecting point of sale, checkout, and the contact center. Now reps can check on orders, process returns or exchanges, and place orders on behalf of customers from within the service console - and manage every order with ease.
Create product bundles, offer and manage digital subscriptions, and streamline revenue options with recurring billing invoices.
Grounded in trusted, secure customer data and metadata from Data Cloud, new AI-powered commerce agents help simplify and speed up key processes for merchants, businesses buyers, and consumers alike. Here's how they work:
As a business leader,it can be difficult to know where to focus your efforts to increase revenue. With Merchant Agent, you can use the power of unified data to set and achieve business goals faster. Not sure which levers to pull to increase average order value? Want to create a product bundle to help sell unpopular inventory? Get suggestions from Merchant Agent by simply typing a prompt.
Business buyers want - and deserve - the same commerce experiences as consumers. Powered by generative AI and natural language processing, Buyer Agent allows business buyers to use chat and photos to find, buy, and reorder products.
What if you could turn any customer touchpoint into a transaction? With Commerce Cloud Checkout, you can. New express payment options like Link by Stripe and Amazon Pay help merchants improve conversion by an average of 14% and enable shoppers to checkout 3 times faster.
Commerce Cloud now also offers an integration with Amazon's "Buy with Prime". Here's what that means for the customer experience on your site: Shoppers can conveniently pay using their Amazon Prime account and choose to have their items delivered with Prime in a matter of days.
With this integration, you and your customers receive all the benefits of Prime, including fast and free delivery, a trusted checkout experience, and hassle-free returns. You can even embed reviews from Amazon directly into your product listing pages.
Unlike isolated, incomplete point solutions or outdated systems, Commerce Cloud natively connects all facets of commerce onto a single platform with sales, service, and marketing. This enables a truly 360-degree view of the entire customer journey. And that's good news, because commerce should be connected with the rest of your business - not a secluded island.
Unified commerce means you can bring B2B and B2C experiences together. Easily deliver B2B and D2C from one platform. And it all runs on the same catalog and pricing engine. With everything in one place, you can focus on what matters most: your customers, your teams, and your goals.
By bringing together enterprise-wide data and trusted AI with cross-department workflow automations Salesforce helps you easily scale personalized, intelligent experiences across sales, service, and marketing. This approach turns every customer interaction into an opportunity for growth, setting a new standard for what it means to succeed in customer-driven relationships today.
Stephen Hammond is the EVP and GM of Marketing Cloud at Salesforce, leading teams to drive innovation for current and future marketing technologies and solutions. He has more than 25 years experience in marketing technology with 20 years in multibillion dollar enterprise software development for... Read More real-time digital experience and marketing technologies.
More by StephenMichael is a seasoned Senior Product Executive, Advisor, Investor, and Board Member with more than 19 years of success building and leading high-performing organizations across the entire product life cycle.