Salesforce Lightning strikes marketers

by Abhinav Mohapatra

Post launching Sales Cloud Lightning and Service Cloud Lightning earlier this year, CRM company Salesforce, has recently launched Marketing Cloud Lightning. The Marketing Cloud Lightning offers a new user experience, platform and ecosystem for marketers to create personalized consumer journeys that span sales, service and marketing. With Sales, Service and Marketing, enterprises can now deliver smarter journeys across the entire Customer Success Platform. Salesforce’s vision is to bring the power of Lightning to digital marketers so they can create more intelligent and personalized customer experiences.

According to Salesforce’s 2016 State of Marketing report, 58 per cent of high-performing marketing teams are driving customer experience initiatives across the business, compared to 8 per cent of underperformers. To accomplish this, marketers need a new platform that enables them to deliver a consistent brand experience across every touch point, regardless of channel or device. As the lines between sales, service and marketing continue to blur, marketers are taking a leadership role in delivering a unified customer experience.

Enabling digital marketers

The new Marketing Cloud Lightning will offer a modern and intelligent user experience across any device, enabling marketers to work faster and smarter, and deliver better results. It will have a common Salesforce identity and navigation for streamlining processes that span marketing, sales, service or other departments and enabling more comprehensive, integrated customer journeys.

It includes new Lightning Components such as reusable building blocks for assembling apps with drag-and-drop ease. This will enable companies to develop and customize new business apps, leveraging the combined capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, custom apps and now Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce will deliver Lightning Components ranging from core email functionality, like previewing emails and tracking email open rates, to journey capabilities, like automatically adding a lead or contact to a journey and reviewing the journey history of a specific lead or contact. In addition, customers will be able to use third-party components built by Salesforce partners and available from the Salesforce AppExchange.

Analytics and experience

It will help leverage data science to analyze information from the web and data throughout Salesforce to predict customer behavior. With new Predictive Journeys technology, marketers will be able to use data science to analyze information from the web. It will enable browsing activity and purchase history, along with all of their Salesforce data, like service hold times, customer satisfaction scores and email marketing campaign performance, to anticipate customer behavior and ultimately drive business results.

With Marketing Cloud Lightning, any activity in Salesforce can trigger a customer journey. For example, if a customer clicks on a Facebook Lead Ad, which automatically populates the lead with the information the customer has shared with Facebook, that lead can then be routed to Salesforce where a more personalized journey can be triggered based on what is known about the customer. Similarly, if the customer indicates in a post purchase follow-up email survey that she’s not satisfied, a case could be automatically opened, triggering a new journey.

Scott McCorkle, CEO, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce, says, “In today’s connected world, marketers manage the entire customer experience. With Marketing Cloud Lightning, marketers will now have the tools they need to create smarter, faster 1-to-1 customer journeys that span sales, service, marketing and more—enabling them to deliver seamless, highly personalized experiences.”

Google for advertising

Salesforce has also announced Marketing Cloud for Google Customer Match, the latest innovation in its ongoing strategic partnership with Google, which marketers can use to deploy CRM-powered advertising across Google Search, YouTube and Gmail.

To give customers relevant and personalized experiences, marketers are adopting identity based advertising strategies. Taking this into consideration, Salesforce has delivered Advertising Studio, its new advertising solution, which allows users to leverage Salesforce CRM data to deploy smarter digital advertising across the world’s largest audience platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and now Google.

By integrating with Google’s Customer Match API, Salesforce clients can optimize ads for their highest-value customers those that are part of loyalty programs or have signed up for an email list across Google Search, YouTube, and Gmail.

Benefits of Google integration

With this integration, marketers can leverage a single view of the customer in Salesforce to easily create audience segments and target them on Google Search, Gmail and YouTube. They can club similar audience profiles to reach new customers on YouTube and Gmail who are likely to be interested in key products and services. And coordinate advertising on Google properties directly alongside other digital advertising and marketing campaigns across email, mobile, social, web and IoT.

The Marketing Cloud Lightning Experience and the first set of Marketing Cloud Lightning Components are expected to be in preview the latter half of 2016. Predictive Journeys, including Predictive Scoring and Audiences, is currently in beta and will be included for accounts with the Salesforce Marketing Enterprise edition. The Advertising Studio is expected to be generally available in July, which will include Marketing Cloud for Google Customer Match.