Your customers are everywhere: They visit your website and your store, they follow you on social media, they open your emails, and the list goes on.
For most consumer goods companies, customer experience focused teams know this reality all too well, but there’s not much they can do about it. Instead, they’re left with disparate data from each of these channels that they can’t unify for a complete view of each customer.
And without this comprehensive understanding of customer behaviors across channels, creating personalized marketing campaigns is nearly impossible. It’s time to change that.
The Promise of Personalization
Imagine a world where your marketing team could easily speak to customers as individuals and meet their needs proactively.
You could take into account interactions on one channel when communicating with customers in another channel – for example by promoting that shirt they were browsing on your website in an ad on Facebook. You could even choose when to send communications or which channels to target them on based on their propensity to buy.
The truth is, this isn’t just something marketing teams are dreaming about; it’s a necessity for any consumer goods company that wants to stay competitive. Just look at the data: According to McKinsey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when they don’t. What’s more, fast-growing companies attribute 40% more of their revenue to personalization than slower-growing peers.
Finally, a Solution to Unify Customer Data
Fortunately, unifying customer data from multiple sources in real-time is possible. And it can empower marketers to deliver better experiences that improve customer engagement and satisfaction.
The answer? A Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Salesforce Data Cloud.
Salesforce Data Cloud allows marketers to connect, act on, and enrich data:
Connect
First, Data Cloud integrates data from any system to build a complete picture of customer behavior. It can organize this data in a variety of ways (think brand or region) and even create a single profile for each customer that captures their interactions across channels.
These unified customer profiles can include data like recent behavior, lifetime value, and even AI-powered predictions like propensity to buy in the future. With this view, your team no longer has to worry about disjointed experiences from sending conflicting messages in different channels. Instead, they can focus on truly understanding your customers, which is the first step to seamless, personalized experiences.
Act
Of course all of that data is only as good as your team’s ability to put it to use. Data Cloud makes that possible with AI-powered insights, real-time segmentation, and data-driven automation.
For instance, with Data Cloud, your marketing team can develop customized journeys for different groups of buyers, such as those with a high propensity to buy vs. those who need more nurturing first or loyalty club members vs. non-loyalty members. And they can use automation to adjust messages as needed, such as moving customers into the loyalty club journey as soon as they sign up or triggering a new email after a customer takes certain actions onsite.
Data Cloud’s detailed analytics and insights also keep marketers informed about the results of their efforts at every step of the way, making it easy to adjust course as needed.
Enrich
Finally, because Data Cloud is an open and extensible platform, your team can easily enrich data with pre-built apps from certified experts and even extend audiences to trusted first-party advertising partners for deeper, privacy-safe insights.
This type of ongoing enrichment can help further improve targeting on key channels and promote new product discovery, ultimately creating best-in-class experiences that surface highly relevant products and offers for each customer to drive deeper relationships. It can also help your team make more informed decisions as they plan personalized, cross-channel journeys.
Making the Promise of Personalization a Reality – Today
The power of a solution like Salesforce Data Cloud to deliver truly personalized experiences at scale is clear. But getting started and setting up your Salesforce environment properly takes attention to detail.
That’s where experts like AllCloud come into play. Our team of consumer goods and Salesforce experts can deliver a seamless Data Cloud implementation based on industry best practices and your company’s current and future needs.
Interested in learning more? Get started with our Complimentary Data Cloud Assessment, specifically designed for businesses that are assessing their data strategy. Our team will review your current state and goals to identify requirements and best practices for moving forward.