With digital innovation skyrocketing over the past two years, many companies have been playing catch up to meet their customers’ demands. But, companies that stand to see long-term success are the ones who have their sights set on the future. Last week, Salesforce hosted their annual Connections conference in Chicago and unveiled some exciting new features and trends in digital.
The Connected Customer: Customer 360
Today’s customers expect top-tier digital experiences. Through Customer 360, Salesforce is actively innovating end-to-end online experiences powered by their commerce, marketing, and service clouds. Cross-cloud technologies make marketing automation, personalization, and data collection for continuous improvement and evolution possible.
Digital channels provide unique data points for understanding customers and the customer journey better. But, disjointed or dysfunctional backend technologies mean glitchy experiences at best and lost revenue at worst. Salesforce has created various cloud technologies that integrate seamlessly so businesses can extract insights at any point in the customer journey.
Latest Trends and Innovations
Hyperpersonalization
The evidence is clear: today’s customers want a personalized shopping experience, but personalization starts with knowing your customer and their habits. Salesforce’s cross-cloud capabilities allow businesses to gain deeper customer insights to shape their customer journey and build custom experiences that cater to the individual. Salesforce products such as Tableau make data analysis easier and provide the analytics foundation for personalization.
Personalization can take on many forms: from custom discounts to product recommendations, to custom email marketing programs. So, how can your company deliver a personalized experience in milliseconds when a customer visits your website? Salesforce helps you build and deliver personalized experiences throughout every stage of the customer journey. In fact, the latest releases help businesses combine the efficacy of personalized marketing with the convenience of marketing automation so organizations can get the best of both worlds and do more with less.
Marketing Campaign Automation
48% of B2B customers said finding up-to-date product or service information was a top challenge when researching purchases. Salesforce has just released a new offering: triggered campaign messages.
Triggered campaign messages operate in the background automatically. They can be set to alert customers when a product they viewed has come back in stock, a new product is released that the customer would love (based on previous data collection), or a product they viewed or would like goes on sale. Customers benefit from getting updated information in real time and marketing teams benefit from personalized messaging running on auto-pilot.
Data Privacy
Consumers are now prioritizing brand trust and privacy over other factors in the shopping experience. One of the newest releases in Salesforce’s upgrades includes data consent and opting in to data-sharing between CDPs (customer data platforms) and Google Ads. This helps consumers feel more trust in the brands they’re interacting with and serves as a work around for the end of third party cookies coming in 2023.
Next Gen Commerce
The steep rise in eCommerce use has forced brands to reevaluate their commerce experiences – and think in terms of scalability and functionality. In fact, 90% of B2B buyers said they would turn to a competitor if their current supplier’s digital channels couldn’t keep up. That means brands who aren’t improving their eCommerce capabilities stand to lose market share in the future.
Companies who are new to Salesforce Commerce Cloud can now accelerate their time to launch by using or customizing out-of-the-box templates from Salesforce. Developing your brand’s commerce assets can happen faster than ever before.
Salesforce also introduced a brand new feature: Salesforce Marketplace. Marketplace allows companies to create, manage, and scale a marketplace within Commerce Cloud. For companies with shifting inventory or who are constantly evolving their product catalog, Marketplace makes eCommerce more convenient.
Ready to get started on your Salesforce implementation project? Our team of Certified Salesforce experts is here to help. Learn more about our commerce offerings on our website or schedule a consultation here.
