What Our Dreamforce Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud Innovations Mean for You

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 organisation, as well as advanced AI and automation capabilities, departments can work together to deliver hyper-personalised, 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 you’ll learn in this blog…

What Salesforce Marketing Cloud Dreamforce innovations mean for you

What Salesforce Commerce Cloud Dreamforce innovations mean for you

What Salesforce Marketing 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.

1. Agentforce embedded in the flow of work 

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:

• Plan, launch, and optimise campaigns. Agentforce Campaigns will use predefined campaign goals and brand guidelines set by the marketer to create an entire campaign. It will create a brief, identify and create target audience segments, generate the first draft of an email and landing page, and build a customer journey. It will then continuously analyse campaign performance and recommend how  to optimise the target audience, content, and channels based on target KPIs.
• Personalise 1:1 engagement at scale. Using real-time interactions, conversations, and customer profile data, Agentforce Personalisation predicts which content fits each individual customer, what the best time and channel is to send it, and then actions on this.

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 personalised multi-channel campaign including building the journey and the first draft of an email to entice customers to renew or upgrade.

2. More capabilities for small and medium-sized businesses 

The new Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition expands on Marketing Cloud Growth Edition with more advanced AI and automation capabilities to build better relationships, scale personalisation and improve productivity. This helps marketers: 

• Make SMS messaging more fruitful. With Conversational SMS in Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, brands can bring together SMS conversations across Marketing and Service, so customers can have two-way interactions within a single phone number.

• Test your journeys in real-time. The Path Experiment feature helps you understand how your customers can interact with different, personalised paths in Salesforce Flow – allowing you to measure or optimise your customer journeys.

• Use predictive AI to send fewer, better messages. One of the cardinal rules of marketing is to never inundate your customers with too many messages. However, this can be challenging when you are running multiple automated journeys at the same time. With Advanced Edition, marketers in small businesses can use Einstein Engagement Frequency to automatically remove customers who are getting too many messages – and add customers to journeys if they need more outreach.
• Use predictive AI to find your most interested customers. Scoring is key to understanding how engaged your customers are with your marketing. However, maintaining scoring rubrics can be a highly manual process. With Einstein Engagement Scoring, small businesses can use predictive AI to understand which customers are ready to buy and which customers need additional nurturing. This takes manual analysis out of the equation so marketers can just act. 
  
  For more on Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition and updates on Growth Edition too, check out this blog by our colleague Eric Zenz.

3. Automate marketing data preparation and analytics 

Einstein Marketing Intelligence (EMI) uses AI and Data Cloud to connect, harmonise and enrich your marketing data in three clicks. It gives marketers one place to optimise spend and cross-channel campaign performance in real time. This helps marketers:

• Make faster and better decisions. EMI automates the complexities of data ingestion, transformation, and mapping across first- and third-party data using out-of-the-box connectors and prebuilt marketing data models. Einstein classifies new dimensions and identifies patterns, generating additional data for analysis.

• Gain transparency into marketing spend. Marketers can use unified data and attribution models to forecast and track cross-channel campaign performance and ROI against goals, from anonymous visit to closed revenue. 

• Optimise campaign performance in real time. Marketers can evaluate the health of their marketing programs and adjust spend in the moment to optimise performance with AI generated campaign summaries, ready-to-use insights, and out-of-the-box, marketing-specific, Tableau analytics dashboards. 

4. Automatically recommend products or content based on individual preferences

Einstein Personalisation is our new AI-based decision engine that enables businesses to create real-time 1:1 customer experiences. Einstein Personalisation will help you:

• Optimise for customer intent and business goals. Use rules or AI-based recommendations to surface the most relevant products, content, and articles for each individual. 

• Test and learn with dynamic content experiments. Use Salesforce Flow’s A/B split testing to select and send dynamic email content by audience – and then track performance and adjust content to optimise impact.

• Empower cross-department personalisation. Einstein Personalisation automatically surfaces recommendations in the Data Cloud customer profile based on the person’s engagement and affinities. A service agent or sales rep can use that to personalise their interaction without the customer having to repeat what they said or did before.
  
  For example, a service agent can offer a discount for a product the customer was recently browsing, and a sales rep can recommend relevant content and have a more personalised interaction with the customer.

What Salesforce Commerce Cloud Dreamforce innovations mean for you

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:

1. Simplify complex, cross-functional tasks

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.

• Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud: Easily build campaigns using detailed engagement and purchase data. Create precise marketing segments to reach customers with highly personalised offers. Abandoned cart? Re-engage shoppers with perfectly timed notifications. 
• Service Cloud and Commerce Cloud: Increase visibility for service agents by connecting point of sale, checkout, and the contact centre. 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.
• Revenue Cloud and Commerce Cloud: Create product bundles, offer and manage digital subscriptions, and streamline revenue options with recurring billing invoices.

2. Scale assistance with Agentforce commerce agents 

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:

• Merchant Agent: 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.  
• Buyer Agent: 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.
• Personal Shopper Agent: Give customers a digital concierge that mimics a helpful, personable in-store associate. Bring conversational search and product recommendations to any digital experience.

3. Streamline checkout — for you and your customers

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. 

Introducing the next generation of unified commerce

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 personalised, 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.