5 New Ways Marketing Cloud Can Bring You Closer to Your Customers

Perhaps the biggest challenge marketers face is meeting rising customer expectations for content tailored to them. In fact, we found that 56% of customers expect offers to always be personalized. That’s up from 52% in 2020. With the newest features in our Summer ‘23 Marketing Cloud release, you can better understand your customers — and connect with them in ways that resonate.

We know that first-party customer data is the key to giving customers content that’s relevant to them. This helps you create perfect segments and send the right message at the right time. 

However, simply collecting first-party data is not enough. You need to understand and make sense of the first-party customer data, and then use that information to build successful customer journeys. 

Take a look at 5 ways the features in the Summer ‘23 Marketing Cloud release can help you not only make better sense of your first-party data, but use it to better personalize your content for your customers. 

Create smarter segments using AI

Personalizing your content for your customers starts with defining your audience through segmentation. But with customer data in different apps and across different channels, it can be almost impossible to do. And even with your customer data in one place, it’s hard to build the most effective segment for your outreach.

With Data Cloud for Marketing’s Einstein Studio: BYOM for Amazon SageMaker, you can build smarter customer segments using your own AI models. Marketers and data science teams can now access Customer 360 data in their data science tools, build and train AI models there, and then deploy them within Data Cloud for Marketing for use in segmentation and personalization. 

Einstein Studio BYOM makes it easier for marketing and data science teams to work together. It also makes personalization simpler by unlocking your customer data – without dealing with manual analysis or processes. 

Understand marketing performance on a segment level

One of the things we continuously hear from our customers is that marketers want to understand how particular types of people are responding to their marketing, and whether they are getting better results from one group over another. Understanding this data is important because it helps you better determine where you should focus your time and money.

To help you understand performance at the segment level, we have made enhancements to Marketing Cloud Intelligence’s Connector for Data Cloud. Before these enhancements, the Connector was limited to only certain data sets (Calculated Insights and Predefined Insights) in Data Cloud. This made it difficult for marketers to get that complete picture of segment performance. 

Now Intelligence users can use a free SQL query to ingest all their Data Cloud data, including data model objects, data lake objects, and calculated insights into Intelligence via TotalConnect and/or Granular Data Center.

This helps you identify where your marketing strategies work best for customer engagement and which channels and tactics can continue to grow your audience size. 

B2B marketers: unify and use your data for better customer journeys

We know that B2B marketers have more data sources and third-party applications than ever before. Managing them can be a headache, to say the least. If customer data is distilled across your webinar app, and your text marketing app and your account-based marketing app – and not easily connected to anything – it’s very difficult to use this data to improve your customer journeys. 

Account Engagement: Data Cloud Integration solves this issue by helping you keep all your customer data in one place – including data stored outside of the Salesforce ecosystem. You can then activate it for use in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. This allows B2B marketers to create better segments and drive better dynamic content so the journeys they build are truly personalized for their customers. 

Get started — and get ready to scale personalized messaging

Once you understand your customers and are able to build intelligent segments, the next step is to take this information and use it to create journeys that really connect with customers. But we know that building these journeys from scratch can be hard when faced with tighter budgets, reductions in headcount, and fewer resources.

With Package Manager Industry Solutions for Marketing Cloud Engagement, you can take some of the guesswork out of getting started. We’ve included templated campaigns for retail and automotive use cases, with additional industries to follow over the next year. 

Each template contains pre-configured, ready-to-use journeys, content, assets, automations, and landing pages. This makes it easy to tweak and deliver personalized messaging quickly. The result is more consistent management of assets across business units and a way to help newer marketers get started, with content and plans crafted from industry best practices. 

Tailor your customer journeys to keep up with changing customer behavior

We know that more than half of customers expect communications from companies to be personalized to them. But how can marketers ensure journeys are truly personalized when customer behavior is changing in real time? 

With Marketing Cloud Personalization’s Dynamic Journey Remapping, you can now update automated journeys for customers mid-flight. For example, if a customer interacts with a company’s website or with another marketing asset, you can use automation to update the journey immediately and send customers on a slightly different trajectory depending on those interactions. 

This is available to customers who have both Personalization and Marketing Cloud Engagement’s Journey Builder.

Explore the Marketing Cloud Summer ‘23 release

The key to creating personalized customer journeys starts with understanding your first-party customer data and being able to use it in your customer journeys. The Marketing Cloud Summer ’23 release helps you do just that.