3 Ways Marketing Cloud and Customer Data Platform Innovations Can Help You Succeed Now

It still feels like yesterday when we all came together to experience the magic of Dreamforce ’22. We saw so many Trailblazers in person and experienced all the valuable sessions (which are still available on demand!).

We also launched Data Cloud that week. Here, we dig deeper into what our latest (and biggest) product innovations mean for our Trailblazer Community.

This year, we introduced new capabilities for Marketing Cloud to deliver real-time personalized moments, new channel automations, and expanded marketing intelligence across the enterprise. These innovations are all powered by Data Cloud, our new, hyperscale real-time data platform across the Salesforce Customer 360.

Data Cloud turns data into highly personalized experiences across not just marketing but also the customer journey to sales, commerce, and service.

We know making every moment count is more challenging than ever, with economic headwinds driving tighter margins and budgets. And, with new data privacy changes and the fast-approaching cookieless future, our goal is to help you reimagine your data strategy now to deliver the real-time magical moments your customers crave while optimizing performance and spending to efficiently drive growth.

Let’s take a look at the three ways these innovations will help you drive more personalization, automation, and intelligence across your marketing at every moment.

1. Personalize marketing moments in real time

With billions of data points harmonized every millisecond, Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform powered by Data Cloud helps brands and companies create personalized moments in real time. This leads to more loyal customers and more productive marketers.

Here’s what’s new in real-time personalized moments and why it matters.

• Customer Data Platform powered by Data Cloud
  Connect real-time data across Salesforce and external data through MuleSoft, native connectors, and Salesforce AppExchange to create a fully unified customer profile. Building precision segments requires a full set of information to work with, such as back-end data (Is the person a homeowner?), commerce and sales data (Have they bought anything?), service data (Have they experienced product issues?), and, of course, marketing data (Have they engaged with the brand recently?). Data Cloud brings all of this data together in real time for segmentation and activation in Customer Data Platform.
• Customer Data Platform with Snowflake integration
  Customer data can reside in many different places in an organization. Now we’re making it simple to access customer data stored in Snowflake directly, and vice-versa. This will help to deliver a real-time Customer 360 view across the two platforms without moving or duplicating data using zero-copy data sharing to reduce complexity and costs.
• Customer Data Platform and first-party advertising
  Discover new ways to engage across Meta and Amazon Ads. After announcing our strategic partnership with Google at Connections, we’re using new privacy-safe integrations for ad activation and aggregated insights that deliver more personalized and efficient marketing. Plus, we announced 18 new partners on AppExchange, including theTradeDesk, LiveRamp, and Neustar, to help you build your first-party data foundation in the cookieless future.
• Customer Data Platform and personalization real-time integration
  Use a much broader range of first-party data in Marketing Cloud Personalization to deliver relevant and timely messaging that’s key to educating customers, building consideration, and increasing conversions.
• Customer Data Platform automated data prep
  Automatically standardize incoming customer data into a consistent format or harmonize it with other data sources to prep your data for action. This will save countless hours of manual data preparation.
• Customer Data Platform for every brand and team in your business
  Centralizing all of your data in one place shouldn’t feel complex or crowded. With Data Spaces, admins will be able to organize their data into secure spaces so different teams or brands within an organization can use the same Customer Data Platform instance–but only access the data, segments, customer graphs, and insights they need to do their work.

2. Automate engagement across every channel

These innovations will help you save time and money with automated engagement across email, web, mobile, and more.

Here’s what’s new in automation and why it matters.

• Real-time journey orchestration
  Respond immediately to user activities to increase conversion and cost-efficiency. For example, send a follow-up email when a new loyalty tier is reached or trigger a personalized mobile and advertising journey when a new hotel guest checks in. How is it done? By automating real-time customer engagement across channels with Customer Data Platform and Marketing Cloud Engagement. Trigger relevant journeys with real-time data and expanded personalization attributes, such as location, loyalty status, interests, and previous purchases..
• WhatsApp-first business messaging
  Tap into the powerful integration where the #1 messaging platform meets the world’s #1 CRM. Combine the global reach of the WhatsApp messaging platform with the scale and ease of Salesforce. Move to conversational engagement that blends marketing, commerce, and service interactions into a single thread. And, you can use data from Customer Data Platform to personalize those moments at every stage.
• Account engagement API enhancements and external actions
  Empower B2B marketing and sales teams to work together to grow the pipeline, drive efficiency, and reduce costs. Our new, more flexible, and scalable API enables new integrations with Customer Data Platform and external segmentation tools. This will help you create and share segments with Customer Data Platform, use a richer set of account attributes for personalization, and activate engagement across channels with Salesforce and third-party platforms. For example, share a segment of premium individual service users to Account Engagement for an enterprise upsell campaign.

3. Optimize marketing performance with more intelligent insights

Here’s what’s new in intelligence and why it matters.

• Intelligence database exports
  Automate complex marketing and advertising data integration with Marketing Cloud Intelligence, and export it into your data warehouse and data consumption tools such as Snowflake (for data storage) and Tableau (for visualization). Boost your analytics with marketing insights, customer journey analytics, and advanced media mix modeling to make smart adjustments about where to spend and where to double-down as fast as possible.
• Your own AI in Customer Data Platform
  For marketers, data science can open up new opportunities to predict propensities, reduce churn, and increase customer lifetime value. That’s why we’re ensuring organizations can train and deploy models from SageMaker, Amazon’s cloud machine learning platform, directly with Einstein, our AI technology. Unlock the value of your data science models within your personalized marketing strategy.

We’re excited to see the moments you’ll make with these tools at your fingertips. Stay tuned for more. In the meantime, feel free to reach out with any questions.