salesforce.com (CRM) Debuts Next-Gen Marketing Cloud

salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) unveiled the next generation of the Marketing Cloud, making any journey possible. With new enhancements to Journey Builder, companies now have one place to map and optimize journeys that span sales, service, marketing, custom apps and more. In addition, the next generation of Active Audiences allows marketers to seamlessly orchestrate ad targeting alongside digital marketing and across the digital advertising ecosystem with partners Facebook, LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Neustar, Twitter and Viant.

The ubiquity of smartphones, connected products, apps, wearable devices and digital communications creates trillions of customer interactions every day. The customer’s journey and every customer interaction, whether it’s engaging with a marketing campaign, speaking with a salesperson or getting a customer support case resolved, is an opportunity to build a relationship and define the brand. Because of this, companies are now competing on customer experience.

However, delivering an exceptional customer experience across all channels is not easy. While marketers have ample access to customer data, activating that data and engaging customers with relevant content across every channel is a significant challenge. To address this challenge, marketers are moving from manually executed batch and blast campaigns to event-triggered automation and real-time personalization.

“Marketers now have an unprecedented opportunity to engage customers at every step of their journey,” said Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce. “The next generation of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud uniquely helps companies take action on data from any customer interaction to deliver the right content at the right time across every channel.”

The Next Generation of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Now Any Journey is PossibleThe Marketing Cloud is the world’s #1 digital marketing platform. It enables marketers to build a single view of the customer, map and optimize every journey, deliver personalized content on every channel — email, advertising, social, web, mobile, apps — and measure the impact on their business. The next generation of the Marketing Cloud delivers breakthrough innovations that empower marketers to create any kind of journey and activate CRM data to run ads across more than 100 digital advertising networks and technologies including web/display, social, mobile, apps and video.

• Next Generation Journey Builder: The next generation of Journey Builder empowers companies to guide customers on 1-to-1 journeys across channels and devices to ensure they always deliver the right message, at the right time, via the right channel. Now companies can make any journey possible and connect every interaction across every department, from post-service customer satisfaction to product adoption programs, and loyalty programs to employee onboarding. Marketers can empower all teams within the organization to unleash the power of the world’s #1 CRM and connect all interactions along the customer journey to deliver customer success.
  
  • New Native Journeys With Sales Cloud and Service Cloud: New pre-built Sales Cloud and Service Cloud events and activities in Journey Builder make it easier than ever to manage customer journeys that span marketing, sales, service and other kinds of interactions.
  
  
  • New Pre-Built Journey Triggers: Now, for the first time, Salesforce objects like contacts, leads, accounts and cases, as well as custom objects are available as pre-built triggers in Journey Builder. Marketers can automate inbound event-driven triggers, such as a customer joining a loyalty program or downloading an app, which then send the customer a message on any channel to begin their journey. Triggers can also automatically modify data in the customer contact record or set up wait times and decision splits to adjust the journey in real-time based on customer interactions across sales, marketing and service.
  
  


• Next Generation Active Audiences: Today, Salesforce announces the next generation of its ad platform Active Audiences, which syncs ad targeting with CRM, empowering marketers to run more relevant ads across all of the places they execute campaigns. New partnerships will extend its scope to reach audiences across the broad display advertising ecosystem. Active Audiences can now help marketers:
  
  • Connect with customers and prospects across the display advertising ecosystem: New Marketing Cloud partners announced today — LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Neustar and Viant — will empower Salesforce users to activate CRM data and run ads across more than 100 digital advertising networks and technologies.
  
  
  • Coordinate targeted, relevant advertising to drive sales, service, and marketing journeys: Full integration with Journey Builder empowers marketers to bring targeted, relevant advertising in line with sales, service and marketing journeys. Active Audiences orchestrates digital advertising based on the customer’s entire experience with a brand – the emails and mobile messages they open, their purchase history, their engagement with the customer service team and where they are in a sales cycle.
  
  
  • Target people across social networks: Salesforce is a Facebook Marketing Partner for ad technology, content marketing, community management, and audience onboarding; a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Partner across sponsored updates and company pages; and a Twitter Official Partner. Through Active Audiences, marketers can reach their customers and lookalikes on Facebook and Twitter. With Salesforce Social.com, they can create and optimize media at scale across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
  
  

Comments on the News

• “Having the rich breadth and depth of data from our online and offline customer engagement in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to deliver more relevant content to our customers,” said Kimberly Ruthenbeck, director of Web Customer Experience, Room & Board. “Making the right offer to an engaged customer at the optimal time is every retailer’s sweet spot. The direct conversion from customers who engage with predictive content powered by the Marketing Cloud and then click to buy is 150 percent higher than the site average.”


• “With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, FleetCor is bridging the gap between marketing, sales, and service,” said Pamela Coan, director of customer marketing, FleetCor. “By integrating all of our customer data, we can now act on it in real-time across customer facing departments, which is leading to increased customer engagement and satisfaction.”


• “Leading organizations that successfully exploit business moments are able to accurately create distinct brand, customer service or sales values based on a nuanced understanding of their customers’ journeys,” wrote Brian Prentice, research VP, Tiffani Bova, distinguished analyst VP, and Olive Huang, research director of Gartner, in the May 2015 report entitled, “Connect Business Moments, Personas and Journey Maps to Boost Customer Experience Outcomes.” “To optimize brand, sales and customer service actions, each part of the enterprise must be working off a common view of their customers’ journeys. This way, organizations are able to assess the impact of their actions relative to the overall customer experience and avoid confirmation biases.”

Global Leaders Deliver 1:1 Customer Journeys at Scale with the Salesforce Marketing CloudLeading global brands like FleetCor, Room & Board and the Michael J. Fox Foundation harness the Marketing Cloud to connect with customers in a whole new way. Companies that have deployed Marketing Cloud have seen an average of 43 percent increase in marketing campaign ROI, 44 percent increase in lead volume and 46 percent faster campaign deployment, according to a recent third-party research report sponsored by Salesforce1. The Marketing Cloud’s customer journey capabilities are seeing increased traction, as Salesforce gained the most market share in the worldwide CRM marketing software category based on 2014 total market share revenue, according to Gartner.

Source: Gartner Inc., Market Share: All Software Markets, Worldwide, 2014, Bianca Francesca, et al, March 31, 2015.

Pricing and Availability

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Journey Builder are generally available today for customers. Journey Builder pricing starts at $3,750 per month.


• New Journey Builder activities, triggers and events with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud will be available in Q4 2015.


• Active Audiences is generally available today for customers. New Active Audiences display features are expected to be generally available in Q3 2015. Active Audiences pricing starts at $4,200 per month.

salesforce.com (CRM) Debuts Next-Gen Marketing Cloud