Marketing Cloud: at the heart of the Salesforce ecosystem

Marketing Cloud has come a long way in the last two years and is now one of Salesforce’s flagship products. “The solution has been integrated into the Salesforce ecosystem and many of its features have been redesigned to provide a consistent user experience when moving from one cloud to another, especially with the arrival of Customer 360,” says Natasha Maalouf. Marketing Cloud allows companies to manage their digital marketing activities while using pre-existing information. In practice, the tool is proving to be a compendium of benefits for Salesforce customers: “Marketing Cloud proposes the ability to capitalise on the customer information already collected through the sales relationship. This not only makes it possible to personalise communications with the customer, but also to optimise the customer base segmentation,” explains the Senior Manager. Therefore, there is no need to build a complex technical infrastructure to improve the customer experience and save time for company employees. With its recent acquisition of Slack, Salesforce has laid another cornerstone in its ecosystem: “All the information available through the platform can now be shared with everyone, employees, customers, and partners, as needed and in compliance with data privacy rules of course, henceforth part of a truly digital company.

Optimisations at all levels

The last Dreamforce conference organised by Salesforce in December 2020 brought as usual a number of revelations about upcoming innovations. Marketing Cloud is no exception. “Thanks to the optimisation of Customer 360 Audiences, it will now be easier to define segments and calculate aggregates, regardless of the source of the information. These enhanced segments will then be used by Marketing Cloud to create enhanced customer journeys, campaigns, and communications.

Datorama, a reporting tool, will provide access to highly detailed analysis of data from the customer journey through “out of the box” reports and dashboards for Marketing Cloud, allowing for more personalised communications. Another enhancement is the integration of Chat Messaging for WhatsApp:  Salesforce has added another missing piece to its multi-channel approach. Content Builder and Journey Builder, which are integrated into Marketing Cloud, will make it possible to create and send WhatsApp messages respectively. AMP e-mails completes the panorama of Salesforce’s marketing innovations by allowing a customer to interact directly with a service provider via an e-mail sent from Marketing Cloud.

Marketing Cloud, a popular solution

With the current pandemic, customers have fully realised the importance of maintaining a strong customer relationship and the need for its management, and these have even become priority issues.  “Digital marketing projects have been prioritised at the expense of other types of projects, and budgets have been made available in a hurry to implement digital marketing automation tools like Marketing Cloud. Thanks to the flexibility of our teams and our ability to adapt to the requirements of our customers, we were able to respond quickly to activate this tool, or to reactivate it in companies that had deactivated it.

Marketing Cloud, the future playground of artificial intelligence

How can we succeed in optimising the use of data in order to personalise the customer relationship even more? This is the question that Salesforce has obviously already started to answer. “Thanks to Customer 360, which strengthens the link between the various clouds, and to AI in particular, with Einstein, it will be possible to contact a customer in the most appropriate way in order to offer her or him the best product or service. The ongoing optimisation of the customer journey will also involve the use of AI, particularly within Datorama and Tableau CRM, providing a better understanding of diverse customer feedbacks. What can we expect from Marketing Cloud, a solution that is already at the cutting edge of innovation? “We can assume that Marketing Cloud will perhaps one day become part of the Salesforce user interface, making it easier for users to work without having to connect through two different interfaces, thus optimising the relationship between the various departments of the company,” concludes Natasha Maalouf.