How the New Digital 360 Drives Faster, Easier Digital Transformation

Over the past six months, as the Coronavirus pandemic has persisted, consumers have embraced digital experiences at such a fast rate that organizations are racing to keep up.

In response, this week Salesforce announced Digital 360, which combines Salesforce’s industry-leading Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Experience Cloud with expert services, a broad partner ecosystem and Trailhead on-demand learning to put customers at the center of every interaction online.

This is a video of the Digital 360 experience — Customer 360 Audiences is one part of Digital 360, which combines industry-leading technology with new services and learning through Trailhead to help digital leaders create connected, personalized experiences

Adam Blitzer, Salesforce’s EVP and GM of Digital, delivered a virtual keynote at DMEXCO, a major European digital marketing conference and trade fair this morning, to discuss how COVID-19 is impacting businesses and consumer expectations, and why the Salesforce is launching Digital 360 in response.

What follows are highlights from that keynote, and further details on the new Digital 360.

Successful companies are those that are accelerating digital transformation

A recent study showed that up to 75% of the Fortune 500 is accelerating digital transformation right now, but according to Blitzer, “75% sounds light. Almost every brand that is thriving is accelerating digital transformation right now.”

“They’re adapting to new consumer behavior, they’re taking advantage of new technologies that may be more effective in this shelter-in-place situation we find ourselves in, and they are not slowing down.”

While many other channels are being disrupted in light of the pandemic, digital is thriving. Customer behavior is changing profoundly, and that change is squarely centered on digital experiences. Blitzer shared some of Salesforce’s Q2 Shopping Index research, that showed:

Global digital revenue grew by an unprecedented 71% year over year
Sites that advertised buy online or curbside pickup options saw digital revenues grow by 127% year over year
Purchases from a social channel referral grew 104% across the entire industry

As Blitzer put it at DMEXCO, “Many leaders believe that up to three years of digital acceleration and digital transformation is being condensed into a three month period, right now.”

These profound, and accelerated, changes call for new technologies tailored for marketers, digital leaders and everyone involved with commerce online, and Digital 360 is tuned for the needs of these leaders. “How do you stay ahead of this changing world? The important thing is to be customer first, customer obsessed. And if you put your customer at the center, you’ll be ready to react to whatever comes your way.

“The technology that we’ve built to help our customers focus on their customers is what we call the Salesforce Customer 360…and today, I’m excited to announce that we’ve taken the Customer 360 and tailored it for Chief Digital Officers, Chief Marketing Officers, and all our digital trailblazers, with the new Digital 360.”

Alongside a broad ecosystem of partners, Trailhead on-demand learning and new advisory services, Salesforce is announcing several new product innovations in Digital 360, including Customer 360 Audiences, Experience Cloud and Commerce Cloud Payments.

A CRM designed for digital leaders: Customer 360 Audiences

Customer 360 Audiences is Salesforce’s customer data platform, which enables marketers to capture, unify, segment and activate all their customer data.

Customer 360 Audiences enables marketers to capture, unify, segment and activate all their customer data
Customer 360 Audiences enables marketers to capture, unify, segment and activate all their customer data
Customer 360 Audiences enables marketers to capture, unify, segment and activate all their customer data
Customer 360 Audiences enables marketers to capture, unify, segment and activate all their customer data

“Digital leaders now more than ever need their own version of CRM – a CDP, or customer data platform,” said Bobby Jania, Salesforce Vice President of Marketing in the keynote, noting that there is projected 75 percent growth in data sources used by marketers from last year to this year. “We’ve never had this much data about our customers before. Data unlocks new aspects of our relationship with them.”

“We’ve never had this much data about our customers before. Data unlocks new aspects of our relationship with them.”
Bobby Jania, Vice-President of Marketing, Salesforce

Jania also pointed to a pronounced need for connecting increasing amounts of data coming in from disparate sources. These sources include commerce systems, experience builders, CMS platforms, portals, mobile apps, and more. “We have to be able to connect this data to get the insights we need to be successful,” Jania said.

Customer 360 Audiences accounts for these disparate sources, as a fully robust customer data platform. Indeed, an intelligent customer data platform is today’s natural evolution of what CRM is all about.

Build experiences at the pace of the customer with Experience Cloud

Salesforce Experience Cloud, formerly known as Community Cloud, is a digital experience platform that enables companies to quickly build connected CRM-powered digital experiences for their customers, partners and employees.

This is a screenshot of the experience cloud product being used by Xcel — *Salesforce Experience Cloud enables companies to quickly build connected CRM-powered digital experiences*

Experience Cloud makes it easy to create effective digital experiences, and new Experience Builder technology provides intuitive guidance for doing so. Experience Builder is low-code technology and leverages drag-and-drop modular technology so that anyone–not just developers or designers–can put customers at the center of every kind of digital interaction.

The technology lets customers build experiences quickly, easily set how they digitize their processes, and accelerate business growth at the pace of their customer for any industry in any vertical. In conjunction with Experience Builder, Salesforce CMS and Mobile Publisher allow users to build a limitless variety of digital experiences in record time.

Move quickly and scale your business with Commerce Cloud Payments

*Commerce Cloud Payments gives companies the ability to launch commerce sites with an out-of-the-box payment solution*

Commerce Cloud Payments enables brands to embed payments into their sites with clicks. Powered by Stripe, companies can launch commerce sites with an out-of-the-box payment solution.

With Commerce Cloud Payments brands will be able to launch new sites, geographies, channels and payment methods including credit cards, mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, and non-card payments methods such as SEPA, iDEAL and Bancontact fast – with simple click and go implementation

Brands can deliver better and more secure checkout experiences by reducing fraud false positives’ and expensive manual reviews. All of this on a trusted commerce platform to help you grow and scale globally.

The digital imperative

“Now is the time to go digital, or disappear” said Blitzer at DMEXCO. He noted that Salesforce data on shopping patterns reflects holiday-level digital traffic surges almost every day. “This is leading to a more than doubling of digital revenue that our customers are seeing. How are companies keeping up? The key is to put the customer at the center, and be customer-obsessed.”

Now is the time to go digital, or disappear
Adam Blitzer, EVP and GM Digital, Salesforce

“Every company has gone digital overnight because of the pandemic,” said Blitzer. “With Digital 360, we’re delivering the full power of Salesforce for digital leaders—enabling them to move with the speed, agility and scale they need to operate at Black Friday levels every single day.”