Salesforce’s innovations will champion faster digital transformations

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, has announced innovations across Digital 360, helping companies go digital faster and deliver the next generation of marketing, commerce and digital experiences.

As consumers continue to push the limits of what it means to be digital-first — from buying cars and groceries online to applying for mortgages on their phones — businesses’ marketing budget is following suit, with online sales reaching over US$4trn1 and digital expected to hit half of all global ad spend this year.2 Salesforce is helping companies stay ahead of these shifts, powering an average of more than 100 billion Einstein predictions, sending 682 billion emails and delivering a daily average of three million commerce transactions in 2020.

To get more from digital, companies need to create connected experiences and have a complete understanding of their customers’ preferences, passions and needs. New technologies from Salesforce combine data and digital to make this possible — bringing together marketing, commerce, sales and service so that companies can put customers at the centre of their digital strategy.

“Being digital first and customer centric has never been more important,” said David Schmaier, President and Chief Product Officer, Salesforce. “With Digital 360, companies have the full power of Salesforce to go digital faster, build a single view of their customers, and drive growth.”

Marketing Cloud 360: The next generation of marketing


With the next generation of Marketing Cloud, marketers can get to know their customers through a single source of truth to engage with relevancy, humanize every moment at scale with AI-powered personalization to inspire action and loyalty, and optimize overall marketing impact with unified analytics.

  • Salesforce CDPAn enterprise customer data platform, Salesforce CDP supercharges customer interactions everywhere. Companies can bring together data from the world’s #1 CRM — across sales, service, marketing, loyalty and commerce — and use it to deliver powerful marketing, advertising and personalization that grows relationships and revenue. Today, Salesforce CDP is integrating two technologies to help companies quickly deliver a more dynamic experience at any moment:
    • Interaction Studio analyzes cross-channel brand interactions and applies Einstein to instantly determine and send a message, product offer or content recommendation.
    • Loyalty Management gives companies real-time audience segments of their best customers, including membership status, loyalty tier and points balance to nurture relationships and create lasting loyalty.
  • Google and Salesforce: Customers today increasingly interact with brands digitally and have rising expectations for their online privacy. The strategic partnership between Google and Salesforce helps marketers better understand their customers, in a way that respects privacy and maintains trust, by using first-party data to achieve smarter measurement and activation, including Customer Match, across marketing and advertising. The companies will continue to invest in solutions that make it easier to use customer insights from Salesforce products, including the Salesforce CDP, for activation across advertising on Google.
  • Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud: Powered by Salesforce Datorama, Marketing Cloud’s analytics offering, marketers now have direct access to new email, mobile and journey reports to analyze and optimize performance — all within the Marketing Cloud interface.
  • Marketer Career Path on Trailhead: Now, there is a single destination in Trailhead — Salesforce’s free online learning platform — with resources for anyone looking to start or build their marketing career. With over two million marketing badges earned to date, Trailhead is providing anyone with access to job-specific learning, a community of expert marketers, and custom learning paths to upskill for marketing career paths in email, demand generation, marketing analytics, data science and CMO leadership.
  • Snapchat Audience Match: Marketers can now use their first-party data stored in Salesforce to create targeted, personalized advertising audiences for Snapchat. Companies can use what they already know about their customers to engage customers with tailored, 1-to-1 content on the platform, and grow customer lists by identifying new targets with similar characteristics to existing customers using lookalikes.
  • WhatsApp Integration: Companies can use Marketing Cloud’s WhatsApp Business Solution to increase customer engagement with keyword detection, transactional messages and more. Now, companies can communicate with customers on WhatsApp directly, easily set up an account, channels and message templates.

“We’re excited to partner with Salesforce to make it easier for marketers to activate and measure first-party data in a privacy-safe way,” said Tript Singh Lamba, Director of Product Management at Google.

“Marketing Cloud has empowered Align Technology to connect with consumers in a more meaningful and frictionless way to meet them where they are,” said Nate Minnich, Vice President – Americas Marketing, Align Technology. “Data from Marketing Cloud helps bring consumers together with our Invisalign-trained doctor customers — what we refer to as the intersection of care. This proprietary data-driven approach can help us reach the potential 500 million consumers globally who could transform their smiles with a trained doctor using the Invisalign system.”

Commerce Cloud 360: The next generation of customer-centric commerce
Commerce Cloud helps companies move beyond a single transaction and create lifelong relationships. New technologies will help companies identify business trends, personalise customer experiences, and connect the end-to-end commerce journey, from the online storefront to order management and beyond.

  • Salesforce CDP for Commerce: With Commerce Cloud data integrated into Salesforce CDP out-of-the-box, companies get a complete view of first-party customer data across every touchpoint, providing a true single source of truth and the ability to use commerce data in cross-channel marketing.
  • B2B2C Commerce: With the new B2B2C Commerce app, B2B companies can quickly launch a connected, direct-to-consumer (D2C) e-commerce storefront with clicks, not code. Now, companies that sell through distributors and retailers can capture that first-party data, enabling them to understand their full customer base better, connect directly with marketing, sales and service and in turn unlock a new revenue stream.
  • Salesforce Order Management: Salesforce Order Management powers companies beyond the buy button — through fulfilment, delivery and loyalty. With Omnichannel Inventory and Distributed Order Management, companies can see real-time inventory across an entire network of stores and fulfilment centres, allowing them to turn their stores into distribution centres and provide customers with a choice in receiving their items — same-day delivery, buy online pickup in-store and more. With the addition of Order Management for B2B, business buyers will have more transparency and control over their orders with self-service fulfilment tracking, cancellations, order modifications and more.
  • Headless PWA Kit and Managed Runtime: With the new Progressive Web Application (PWA) Kit and Managed Runtime, developer teams can quickly and cost-efficiently decouple front-end and back-end technologies to create highly customized consumer-facing experiences — also known as headless commerce. Traditional commerce solutions take months to implement and are disconnected from the full customer journey. With Salesforce, developers can spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time creating interactive and innovative customer experiences.

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“Data is so critical in everything that we do — from driving efficiencies in the way we take care of our clients, to being more targeted and strategic about our marketing, to thinking about how we create a better experience for our team members,” said Jay Farner, CEO of Quicken Loans/Rocket Mortgage. “If you leverage data properly, you can make everyone’s life better and that’s really our mission.”

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Luke Conrad

Technology & Marketing Enthusiast

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