Connections 2022: What the New Marketing and Commerce Cloud Launches Mean for You

Connections is Salesforce’s premier conference for digital, marketing, and commerce professionals. In June, we brought together experts across industries to discuss how to use technology to build relationships and revenue at scale with data-first moments.

Navigating the new marketing and commerce world

We’re in a new world where companies face mounting pressure to do more with less. They have to do this while navigating a challenging labor market and meeting rising consumer expectations.

Changes in data privacy make it difficult to meet those expectations and deliver personalized experiences. Plus, a cookieless future is fast-approaching, pushing brands to overhaul the way they engage customers and measure performance.

The good news is our Trailblazers are already building stronger relationships with zero- and first-party data that customers provide with their consent–say, from marketing, commerce, service, and loyalty interactions where data is shared directly with the brand to enable real-time personalization, recommendations, and faster service.

These are the wow moments that everyone wants.

During Connections 2022, we introduced Customer 360 innovations for Marketing and Commerce Clouds that do just that. Here’s a look at the new features and how they’ll help you.

New Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform features

• Google Ads
  Our expanded strategic partnership with Google with new integration automates first-party data interoperability between Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Google Ads.
  
  You can now connect a unified customer profile in CDP to Google Ads to activate privacy-focused advertising campaigns and gain new segment-level insights into audience affinities for smarter segmentation and planning. This updated Google integration is expected to be generally available (GA) in the months to come.
• AppExchange
  The Salesforce CDP ecosystem is expanding further with new privacy-safe apps for customer profile enrichment and advertising activation through partnerships with Annalect, Acxiom, Criteo, LiveRamp, MediaMath, MetaRouter, Neustar, Nine Digital, Streamlytics, The Trade Desk, Yahoo, and WPP Resolve.

New Marketing Cloud Personalization and Engagement features

• Triggered Campaign Messages
  This new integration between Marketing Cloud Personalization and Journey Builder means you can now run real-time personalized journeys based on new product catalog and behavioral triggers.
  
  For example, you can automatically engage interested customers across channels about a product they like when it comes back in stock, goes on sale, is expiring soon, or is launching as part of a category they like.
• Conditional Completion Actions
  In Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, you can now set rules that filter prospects into segments and automate marketing and sales journeys.
  
  For example, as visitors fill out a landing page form, it can route them through personalized experiences based on whether they’re a new prospect or a VIP customer, or whether they attended an event or webinar. Sales are aligned into the process with automatic alerts, emails, and Slack notifications to trigger the right action at the right time, such as following up on VIP customer welcome kits.

New Marketing Cloud Intelligence features

• Intelligence Ecommerce Marketing Insights App
  Work smarter with your budget by connecting and visualizing commerce and marketing data across platforms in ready-to-use interactive dashboards.
  
  The app uses the Intelligence Connectors for B2C Commerce Cloud and other commerce platforms like Amazon to connect orders and product-level data to campaign data. This helps teams allocate and shift spend confidently for greater return on investment (ROI). Expected to be GA in October 2022.

Marketing Cloud Summer ’22 Release

• The new Marketing Cloud has more capabilities to power your brand’s hyper-personalization, which is one-to-one relationships at scale. Check out 6 New Marketing Cloud Features to Help You Power Personalization for a rundown of the new Summer ’22 Release features and how they’ll help you.

New Slack features

• Digital Command Center for Slack
  Stay ahead of mission-critical alerts by tracking the activity and performance of automations, integrations, and processes across Marketing and Commerce Cloud from one digital command center in Slack.
  
  This helps avoid adverse business impact when there’s a technology issue (such as lost revenue or increased opt-outs) by identifying inconsistencies before they critically impact your campaign. Expected to be GA in September 2022.

Next-gen Commerce Cloud

Turn every touchpoint into a revenue opportunity with:

• Commerce Marketplace. You can now quickly create, manage, and scale a marketplace solution on Commerce Cloud. Drive revenue growth by increasing cart sizes, earning commissions, and receiving membership subscription revenue from vendors. Expected to be GA in September 2022.
• Commerce for Customer Service. This new capability, available now, gives service agents a 360-degree view of order history across channels and the tools they need to issue returns, exchanges, and promotions. Agents also have visibility into inventory across every store and fulfillment center and can order on behalf of customers from a single screen.
• Seamless Commerce. Available now, this will help companies start seeing a return on investment (ROI) faster by saving time and money with an all-in-one commerce, order management, and payments solution supported by partner services.
• Better Social Discoverability. Piloting now, Commerce Cloud will have TikTok integration enabling you to build your presence on the platform. This includes automated smart product feeds and a diverse array of catalog-focused advertising solutions with simple one-click setup. It also has improved ad performance analysis with TikTok Pixel and dynamic video and collection ads to inspire new audiences.

What these changes mean for you

These new capabilities help next-gen marketing and commerce Trailblazers create wow moments that build into trusted relationships and revenue across industries. Here’s a look at a few examples:

• A manufacturer’s service agent can deliver a personalized experience by capturing shopper data signals in real time during a service interaction, offering the right third-party products and services that accompany the appliances they own.
• A healthcare insurance provider can drive productivity and revenue by delivering timely and relevant product recommendations in response to a customer’s survey answers.
• A bank’s client manager can surface a client’s credit history, accounts, and previous customer service interactions from a single, unified profile. Then, they can make recommendations for a new credit card based on applicable promotions and the client’s financial needs.
• A retailer can better connect with shoppers by identifying the products most appealing to each customer demographic and automatically syncing product catalogs with targeted social media ad campaigns that link to the retailer’s ecommerce site.

From creating personalized experiences to keeping up with evolving trends to developing marketing strategies, we’re here to help all #MomentMarketers succeed. Thank you for joining us on this continued journey to bring wow moments into your customer relationships.

To see all of the new innovations come to life, watch the Opening, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud Connections ’22 Keynotes on-demand on Salesforce+. Plus, discover what the Next-Gen Marketing Cloud (and Naming) Means for You and how you can Grow Your Career With the Marketer Career Path on Trailhead.