Salesforce Marketing Cloud Goes Live
With Google Analytics 360 Integrations
The new
integrations are designed to enable companies to better understand their
customers and make insight-based marketing decisions.
Salesforce
After
six months in partnership with Google in an effort to improve marketing
effectiveness via an alliance of their respective platforms and strengths,
Salesforce Marketing Cloud went live with its first Google Analytics 360
integrations today.
The
new integrations are designed to enable companies to better understand their
customers and make insight-based marketing decisions via Salesforces’ massive
marketing platform twinned with Google Analytics 360’s market-leading web analytics
product. They were announced along with new AI and commerce initiatives at the
inaugural Salesforce Connections conference in Chicago and in a keynote address
by Salesforce president and chief product officer Bret Taylor.
Marketers will be able to analyze cross-channel engagement data in one place—a
single customer journey analytics dashboard housed in the Marketing Cloud. From
the dashboard, marketers can better visualize how email, mobile and web
interactions are performing and how they’re impacting each other. Connections,
with a focus on the B-to-C marketing proposition, drew 10,000 attendees.
Under
the theme of the Fourth Industrial Revolution—first put forth by Salesforce
founder and CEO Marc Benioff at the company’s DreamForce conference last
November when the Google partnership was first announced—Taylor spoke of the
challenges and opportunities that technology-driven disruption presents.
“Competing for customers today goes beyond building the best product. It
requires creating connected digital experiences that transcend individual touch
points,” said Taylor in announcing new Google integrations. “It is the greatest
opportunity that we’ve had in generations to connect to consumers.”
According
to the recent Salesforce State of the Connected Customer report, 80 percent of customers say that the experience a
company provides is as important as its products or services, and 57 percent
have stopped buying from a company because a competitor provided a better
experience. Yet, companies struggle to keep pace with customers’ expectations
for smarter, faster and always-on experiences, which are driven by the role
disruptive new technologies play in their daily lives. “We are seeing this very
clear trend, with cross function and integration, of getting closer to
consumers and driving growth across marketing, commerce and service,”
said Jon
Suarez-Davis, svp, chief strategy officer, Salesforce Marketing
Cloud in an interview prior to the keynote announcement.
“This underscores the importance of companies reorganizing to
meet the pace and expectations of their customers,” continued Suarez-Davis,
adding that in this transforming ecosystem, “companies are often competing
against their own pasts that are not designed to keep up with the pace of
modern customers.” Also springing from the partnership is a beta trial starting
in the third quarter of this year, in which marketers will be able to create
audiences segments—like category buyers, loyalty members and abandoned
browsers—in Google’s Analytics 360 before connecting with those audiences
within Marketing Cloud.
According to Salesforce, marketers using the dashboard will be
able to pick up on signals about products that are getting seen but not
purchased. The marketer can then create a new audience based on that
information in Analytics 360 and publish it to Marketing Cloud. They can add
that audience to a “re-engagement journey” to offer additional information or
discounts via email or mobile notifications. “This a huge productivity gain
for marketers out there,” said Stepahnie
Buscemi, evp, product marketing, Salesforce. Buscemi, who
Taylor brought to the stage to discuss how the launch will help marketers
better serve customer needs, noted this type of function had been done via old
school cut-and-paste from platform to platform and that affinity-driven brands
like Ticketmaster can now create personalized experiences in one place.
“Ticketmaster
has an incredible gateway for peoples lives. We believe in that fancentric view
and have to deliver on how to we get the right message to the the right
audience at scale and this platform allows us to do that,” said Kathryn Kai-ling
(H0) Frederick, evp, growth and insights at Ticketmaster, who also
briefly spoke of the keynote stage along with Google’s Babak
Pahlavan, senior director, product management, ads cross-channel
management, global head of products. “We have to lean on Google and Salesforce
to be the bedrock of our marketing,” concluded Kai-ling (Ho) Frederick. “Essentially,
we are taking the complexity out of the equation completely,” added Pahlavan.Taylor’s
keynote also focused on new innovations for the Salesforce Einstein artificial
intelligence for CRM offerings that is built into the Salesforce platform as
new marketing, commerce and service innovations.
"We are seeing this very clear trend, with cross function
and integration, of getting closer to consumers and driving growth across
marketing, commerce and service."
-Jon
Suarez-Davis, svp, chief strategy officer, Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The latest Marketing Cloud Einstein innovations are Einstein
Segmentation and Einstein Splits. Leveraging machine learning and pattern
analysis, Einstein Segmentation will analyze billions of consumer signals,
uncover patterns in consumer behavior and discover new audiences to reach with
personalized messages. Einstein Splits enables marketers to create personalized
journey paths based on Einstein engagement likelihood scores. Those Einstein
Split stats then land in the Marketing Cloud Journey Builder to test customer
paths and messaging tactics.
Taylor also touched on new marketing, commerce and service
innovations: Commerce Cloud B2B Commerce is designed to deliver
consumer-like shopping experiences to business buyers with B2B-specific
functionality; Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio enables companies to
visualize, analyze and manage contextually relevant experiences to consumers,
including offers, promotions, discounts and more across a brand’s owned online
and offline channels (email, social, mobile and in-store); and Service Cloud
LiveMessage, which is expanding SMS support globally to 17 additional
countries in APAC, EMEA and Latin America, including Singapore, France and
Brazil, enables companies to communicate with customers through two-way mobile
messaging. Customers can message a brand to ask a question, initiate a return
or schedule a delivery time.
Finally, Salesforce announced new integration pilots between
Service Cloud and Commerce Cloud designed to increase customer satisfaction and
enable customer service to become more agile by accessing commerce data in
real-time within a single console, including up-to-date shopper data and
order-on-behalf-of capabilities. Commerce Journeys brings together Marketing
Cloud and Commerce Cloud to allow marketers and merchandisers to trigger
transactional and behavioral journeys based on customer actions, such as
abandoning a shopping cart, confirming an account or making a purchase.