Understanding your customers is like a puzzle. And a hard puzzle at that.
It requires connecting thousands of disparate pieces of information to put together a complete picture. Doing this for one customer would be challenging, but doing it at scale for tens of thousands of customers can seem impossible.
That’s where Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) comes into play.
Salesforce CDP makes it possible to piece together the data puzzle to create a clear picture of your customers. Not only that, it allows you to then take meaningful action based on that data – which helps you create a better customer experience and, in doing so, drive more revenue.
The Crown Jewel in Salesforce CDP: Calculated Insights
One of the best features within Salesforce CDP is Calculated Insights, which lets you define and calculate multi-dimensional metrics from your entire digital state stored in Salesforce CDP.
Quite simply, with Calculated Insights, you can create insights for unique customer profiles. In turn, these insights should allow you to measure areas of interest like a specific customer’s interest in and engagement with your brand, as well as their intent to keep engaging or buying.
And these are just a few examples of the data that Calculated Insights can track. Plus, recent updates from Salesforce made this feature even stronger by improving the ability to enable or disable different insights and by allowing your team to create user-friendly names for those insights.
Top 3 Ways to Use Calculated Insights
The potential to use Calculated Insights to better understand your customers and create winning experiences for them as a result is limitless. So what’s the best way to dig in and start reaping the rewards? Here are three of the best ways to use the Calculated Insights feature of Salesforce CDP:
1) Drive Loyalty: Repeat purchases, upsells, and cross-sells
First, you can use Calculated Insights to identify, engage, and reward loyal customers. Calculated Insights supports these goals by helping you understand what actions and behaviors commonly lead to desired outcomes (like buying more and buying more often).
Specifically, it looks at what your existing customers are telling you, whether implicitly or explicitly, that leads to them being more loyal. Then, you can use that data to create and reinforce journeys that drive toward desired outcomes – like repeat purchases, upsells, or cross-sells. Calculated Insights can even help you make recommendations about which products pair well together to serve the best content to customers to drive those desired behaviors.
It can also help you reward customers at key points in time, whether that’s for a birthday, an anniversary, or reaching a certain milestone. This capability helps you better understand your customers and make them feel valued – which can lead to them buying more from your brand and sharing more information.
2) Nurture relationships: Time on site and conversion rates
Next, you can use Calculated Insights to better nurture relationships with new customers who haven’t bought yet by sharing valuable recommendations that help them get to know your brand better and ultimately make a purchase.
For example, Calculated Insights can look at what separates these new customers who haven’t bought yet from loyal customers to help you bridge that gap. It can easily identify which customers haven’t bought yet and help make sense of what they do (or don’t) have in common with your longtime customers. This is particularly valuable, as the less activity people have taken on your site, the less data you have to make recommendations to them – so the more you can understand what they have in common with existing customers, the better off you’ll be. Armed with this information, you can create more specific messages or share more targeted recommendations based on what resonates with similar-looking loyal customers.
On the flip side, Calculated Insights can also help you quickly identify which customers from this newer group might not have any potential long term, because the reality is that not everyone who comes through will become a loyal customer. In this sense, it’s helpful to know sooner rather than later who to deprioritize, that way you can focus your energy on converting the customers who have the most potential. Taking this approach with the data from Calculated Insights can help manage expectations for your team and provide the necessary details to reallocate time and money toward customers that have higher long term potential.
3) Convert often: Online/offline sales, click to purchase, and acquisition costs
Finally, Calculated Insights can help combine customer data points from a variety of places so you can quickly and easily determine which scenarios are most likely to drive conversions. This data should then help you improve conversion rates.
Conversions are a key milestone in the customer journey, whether that’s new customers making their first purchase, existing customers signing up for a loyalty program, or anything in between. Understanding what actions help drive these conversion events and how much time and money you need to invest to get customers to those points is powerful information.
Whether you have a short or a long sales cycle, knowing all of the steps that ultimately drive a conversion can help you work more intelligently to increase those activities. For instance, you might use that information to put more customers into a flow that drives them to sign up for your loyalty program. But the only way you can do that is if you know what the common conversion points are, all of the actions and decisions that lead up to that point, and the behaviors of the people who are most likely to convert. Once you know that, you can put all of those details together to single out those customers and create the right journey that leads them down the path to conversion.
Better Understand Your Customers and Drive Meaningful Engagement with Calculated Insights
Calculated Insights is a powerful feature of Salesforce CDP that can help you deeply understand your customers at scale and drive them toward meaningful engagement as a result. It allows you to create journeys that nurture customers based on their interests – which creates a more positive and relevant customer experience. As a result of all that, Calculated Insights can help you increase revenue by driving more conversions on activities like making purchases and becoming loyal customers. And that combination of better customer experience and increased revenue is the ultimate win-win.