3 Ways Marketers Can Use Salesforce Flow to Reach Customers at the Right Time

One workflow and one dataset: it’s an ideal state for marketers. Imagine a scenario in which marketing, sales, commerce and service teams are connected, providing a unified and consistent customer experience. All the data is in one place, so there’s no need to waste time with multiple sources. Now bring in an agentic AI layer to automate building reports and scheduling data refreshes. Salesforce Flow’s new functionality can help make this goal a reality. 

What is Salesforce Flow for Marketers?

Flow is Salesforce’s on-platform automation tool. It’s been used by Salesforce Admins for years to automate business processes, manage data, and assign tasks. Flow enables:

• Multi-channel journeys: Build native journeys across email, SMS, and WhatsApp
• Connected experiences: Connect marketing, sales, commerce, and service interactions
• Data-driven personalization: Use Data Cloud and other sources to personalize journeys
• Ease of use: Designed for marketers with varying technical expertise
• Admin control: They oversee marketer permissions within Flow so marketers don’t overstep on admin use cases.

In Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Edition, we are opening up Flow to marketers to build customer journeys. You can connect customers with sales, service, and commerce; build native multi-channel journeys; and use Data Cloud to personalize paths based on things like marketing engagement and product purchased.

Let’s take a look at how you can use this functionality.

Three ways to use Salesforce Flow for timely customer engagement

1. Respond to customers across channels, fast

Customers need immediate responses from businesses, especially on mobile channels. According to Salesforce’s State of Connected Customer, 81% of customers expect faster service. Flow helps with real-time engagement by:

• Triggering journeys based on customer interactions like email opens, link clicks, and abandoned carts 
• Using keyword-based two-way SMS/WhatsApp functionality to automate responses and decision splits based on customer replies 
• Using Unified Conversations to seamlessly hand off conversations to service agents (bots or human) within the WhatsApp/SMS thread

2. Facilitate cross-department interactions

Salesforce Flow is one workflow across marketing, sales, service, and commerce. This makes it easier to create and automate cross departmental interactions. Customers need consistent experiences across departments – otherwise it’s a frustrating experience to restart at every new interaction. Unified Conversations for SMS and WhatsApp connects marketing and service teams so correspondence is unbroken in the messaging thread.

A marketer can set this up in Flow using a decision split and the Keyword-Based Two-Way SMS/WhatsApp feature. If the customer responds with keywords, they’ll be sent down those paths. But if they want to talk to an agent or ask a question, Agentforce can send them to the service team, either an AI agent or a human. 

The customer does everything in WhatsApp or SMS – they aren’t switching channels or being forwarded to a website. The service team also does everything on the Salesforce platform, so they see all the interactions the customer has in the messaging thread and can better help them. 

Flow can also access and activate data from multiple sources. Flow can integrate with Commerce Cloud to trigger personalized journeys based on events like abandoned carts. 

3. Scale personalization with AI

Predictive AI is the best tool you can use for spotting patterns. It can sort through data, identify patterns, and pull insights. Predictive AI removes manual data analysis so that as a marketer, so you have what you need need to act fast.  

When creating journeys for your leads, this can help you optimize send times and slow down/speed up journeys for customers depending on how they are interact with messaging. The Einstein Engagement Frequency tool in Flow helps avoid oversaturation and reduces unsubscribes. Einstein Send Time Optimization personalizes send times based on individual customer behavior.

These features can be accessed directly within Flow, so they’re easy to set up and execute, and give you more flexibility with journey design and content.

Salesforce Flow helps you interact with customers across channels fast, brings cross-department interactions together, and scales personalization with AI. It brings us one step closer to the marketer’s dream of engaging across the entire customer lifecycle to deliver customer-driven relationships.