Today every organization is operating in uncertain times. We will be living with the COVID-19 virus for some time. As the virus spreads and we face an economic crisis, brands have had to adapt. According to a survey by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) of 32 WFA membership companies:

• 81% of marketers who responded are deferring planned ads
• 57% of respondents had decreased ad spend
• 79% of respondents are changing their messaging to be sensitive to the times.

But within every crisis there is opportunity. Brands have been forced to accelerate the move to digital to maintain their customer relationships and keep their teams going while working from home. They are reconceptualizing their business models and the customer experience to meet the moment. This will position brands well for the post-pandemic future.

At Salesforce, we have identified three core principles to guide marketers through these times:

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Today, we’re excited to announce three new Marketing Cloud innovations relevant to these core principles and the shift to an all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.

Humanize digital interactions: Interaction Studio is now powered by Einstein

As customer expectations reach an all-time high and behaviors shift, how can companies treat everyone uniquely in a digital world where they are interacting with thousands or millions of people across a multitude of channels?

Interaction Studio analyzes how customers are interacting with your company across channels and applies AI and machine learning to make real-time decisions about what to show or say to a customer – in the moment – when they are on your website, opening an email, using your mobile app, talking to a call center agent, or talking to an associate in a store or branch.

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Three new Interaction Studio innovations leverage Einstein and technology integrated from our Evergage acquisition to optimize marketing results.

• Einstein Personalization Recipes: Build, manage, test and implement AI-powered recommendation strategies to recommend the most relevant content and products based on each person’s characteristics and affinities, in real time.
• Einstein Personalization Decisions: Take advantage of an advanced, continuous learning algorithm that factors in extensive information about each web visitor to decide and deliver the ideal next best action, offer, or experience across channels, rather than relying on guesswork with rules alone.
• A/B/n Testing: Maximize the benefits of personalization campaigns and customer engagement efforts by running A/B tests of different experiences across all channels and measuring results across revenue, click-throughs, conversions and average order value.

“At Carhartt, we’ve built a legacy of developing strong relationships with our consumers,” said Anna Cole, Director of D2C Global Digital Platforms at Carhartt. “Our collaboration with Salesforce has allowed us to better understand our consumer and deliver an exceptional experience. In light of COVID-19, the data we saw through Salesforce helped reinforce our decision to adjust our digital engagement strategy and focus on customer storytelling.”

Engage customers with empathy: New Pardot Premium enables B2B marketers to scale their teams globally

Successful ABM (Account-Based Marketing) strategies focus on being relevant to specific customers or accounts. To help companies anticipate their customers’ needs and coordinate engagement across all channels, Pardot brings together marketing, sales and service teams to truly understand the customer and market sentiment.

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The enterprise edition of Pardot includes four new features to support complex B2B marketing teams:

• B2B Marketing Analytics Plus: Uses AI to quickly sift through all data from first-party and third-party sources to understand what Pardot campaigns perform best, why they performed, and leverage predictive analytics to determine what will perform in the future.
• Einstein Attribution: Delivers AI-based marketing attribution analysis in reports and dashboards to accurately assign revenue credit to multiple marketing touch points throughout the customer journey.
• Pardot Business Units: Allows marketers to seamlessly manage corporate and regional campaign efforts across brands, geographies and segments, while also maintaining a global view.
• Developer Sandboxes for Pardot: Provides admins and developers with the ability to comply with IT processes for deploying new technology and capabilities by using sandboxes to test, audit and configure in an isolated training environment.

“Leveraging Pardot, we now have a much more complete view of ROI, and can dive deeper on conversations at a micro level,” said Jaime López, GM of Marketing Operations and Digital Acceleration at Wartsila. “Salesforce has taken our massive amounts of data across multiple systems and has made it all seamless and easy to use. As a result, we have eight times more influenced pipeline that we can clearly understand and analyze. This helps us massively in trimming the sails and adjusting our marketing.”

Optimize budgets & impact: New Datorama integration with Tableau connects marketing and enterprise data for enhanced analytics

With marketing budgets under increased scrutiny and in many cases reduced, analytics capabilities have become a crucial tool in the marketer’s arsenal to understand how to optimize spend and ROI. Traditionally, getting marketing data into an unified state for marketing and enterprise insights has been a huge challenge.

Marketers can leverage Datorama to centralize and unify all of their marketing performance data while utilizing the new integration with Tableau to scale analytics seamlessly across their organizations and explore their data in any way imaginable.

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Now, the Datorama Integration with Tableau helps marketers optimize their budget and data with:

• Automated Marketing Data Integration: Connect and unify all marketing data in Datorama with clicks not code by using 150+ marketing and media API connectors and dynamic marketing data modeling
• Real-Time Marketing Insights: Optimize budget efficiency at scale with always-on access to all spend, performance, and business outcome data in Datorama
• Integrated Enterprise Analytics: Supercharge Tableau enterprise data with unified marketing data from every marketing channel and platform
• Marketing Data Exploration: Leverage Tableau’s self-service data exploration and advanced visualization for deeper analysis into opportunities to optimize budget performance for efficiency and effectiveness

“At AKQA we need seamless access to data and insights to fully optimize media spend for our robust portfolio of clients. With Datorama, we’re able to connect and harmonize all of our client’s media and marketing data into a single system of record to maximize efficiency of analyst time and client budgets,” said Camila Bonfante, Analytics Lead at AKQA. “We also use Tableau across our agency to explore additional data sets and conduct advanced data modeling. The new Datorama Integration with Tableau will allow us to easily unify cleansed marketing data from Datorama with any other data source in Tableau. These two complementary products will allow us to further differentiate our service to clients, enabling us to provide deeper analysis to create true business impact for clients.”

More Information:

• Pardot Premium will be generally available in July 2020.
• Interaction Studio will be generally available in the third quarter of 2020.
• The Datorama Integration with Tableau is generally available today.
• Learn more about Salesforce for Marketing here
• Learn more about Salesforce Einstein here
• Follow Marketing Cloud on Twitter
• Like Marketing Cloud on Facebook

Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other press releases or public statements are not currently available and may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has headquarters in San Francisco, with offices in Europe and Asia, and trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “CRM.” For more information please visit https://www.salesforce.com, or call 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.