Decoding Einstein Content Selection in Marketing Cloud – Part 1

Salesforce defines Einstein as ‘The first comprehensive Artificial Intelligence for CRM. It’s an integrated set of Artificial Intelligence technologies that makes Salesforce Customer 360 degree smarter and brings Artificial Intelligence to trailblazers everywhere’. When you apply Einstein to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it helps marketers understand customer behavior through artificial intelligence and reach out to them with targeted content.

Simply put, Einstein Content Selection is a feature in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that dynamically chooses the best and optimal content for the emails from a pool of content in Content Builder based on configured business rules. So, every subscriber receives the same email but with different content chosen by Einstein Content Selection, enhancing the probability of subscriber engagement. 

We have run you through the different types of Einstein products in Salesforce Marketing Cloud in our previous blog titled ‘Salesforce Marketing Cloud Einstein – An Overview’ and covered, in brief,  Einstein Content selection in the blog titled ‘4 Powerful Ways To Boost Email Marketing With Salesforce Marketing Cloud And Einstein AI’. 

This blog is a part of a two-part series dedicated to Einstein Content Selection. This first article will cover the basic understanding of Einstein Content Selection and the benefits of using Einstein Content Selection.   

The Einstein menu was recently reconfigured. You can now access all the Einstein products, including Einstein Content Selection, via the Einstein menu option on the top of the landing page. Einstein Content Selection  has been made available for the following Marketing Cloud editions:

• Professional Edition 
• Corporate Edition 
• Enterprise Edition

Another important consideration is the usage of Super Messages while using Einstein Content Selection. An email with an Einstein Content Selection block will consume 2 Super Messages. Super Messages are consumed only if the customer opens the email.

Benefits of using Einstein Content Selection 

Einstein Content Selection has various benefits that can be harnessed by marketers or SFMC specialists to provide personalization to their customers and enhance the customer experience.  

• Einstein Content Selection uses the power of Artificial Intelligence to boost the click-to-open rate [CTOR] by choosing the most appropriate content at the email open time. The higher the click-to-open rate, the better the customer’s engagement, as it denotes the email content, message, and design effectiveness.
• Marketers can deploy emails quickly and reach the market faster. This is achieved by creating a single email template and letting Artificial Intelligence automatically select unique content for each subscriber. It is claimed that you can save as much as one-sixth of the time by using Einstein Content Selection instead of using programmatic content.
• Analytics is provided as a part of the Einstein Content Selection, which helps the marketers find out the better performing content as compared to others. It also helps in creating future marketing strategies. The tracking is done at the asset level, and it helps provide granular data for all the assets. 
• One of the biggest challenges that marketers face in today’s competitive world is the ease of using the marketing automation platform. Einstein Content Selection provides a no-code solution to this problem. Einstein Content Selection is a configuration based product, and any marketer can quickly adopt it. 
• Einstein Content Selection performs split testing like A/B/n testing internally in  real-time on the content, which helps provide optimal results and better customer experience.
• Einstein Content Selection provides awesome metrics or analytics as proof of its usefulness. As per one of the case studies, Einstein Content Selection with a combination of Send Time Optimization [STO] has increased the Return on Investment [ROI] by a margin of 18% and has uplifted the welcome journey by a margin of 22%.     
• Einstein Content Selection gives the power of choice in the marketers’ hands by allowing them to configure the business rules. This helps in increasing the lifespan of the content and complying with the business rules.

Factors affecting the Einstein Content Selection 

There are three broad categories of inputs provided by marketers in the Marketing Cloud. These are used by the Einstein Content Selection to display the relevant content to subscribers.

• Content pool with relevant details

Marketers upload a list of all the content on the platform from which Einstein Content Selection will choose the best possible match for its email content. Marketers can decide the metadata required for uploading along with the Content pool, e.g., language, region, season, discount type etc.

• Consumer profile data

This is the subscriber data, and in most cases, it is already present in Salesforce Marketing Cloud in the form of data extensions, etc. This data is used to match the content pool attributes to arrive at the relevant match.

• Business rules 

The business rules are applied to the Einstein Content Selection to ensure that the content match follows the required use case or requirement. There are three types of business rules in the Einstein Content Selection. They are:

Fatigue business rule: This business rule defines how often the content is reused in the Einstein Content Selection. This rule helps by keeping the content fresh, and you can reuse the content by displaying it to the subscribers who haven’t seen it yet.

Exclusion rule: This business rule requires Einstein Content Selection not to consider certain use cases or skip them. A good example of this type of exclusion rule is not displaying the schemes to the subscribers of a particular language. For example, don’t display the product schemes to the European subscribers. 

Must Match business rules: This business rule ensures an absolute match between the subscriber attribute and the content attribute. An excellent example of this is a language match. This business rule defines that there should be a match between the language of the content attributes and the language of the subscriber attributes. This will ensure that the correct language content is displayed to the correct subscriber.  

Einstein Content Selection flow

Einstein will evaluate all the business rules and fallback content in the flow mentioned below to display relevant content to each subscriber.

• The first match is the business rules match. Einstein engine will evaluate all the configured business rules as a part of the first evaluation and display the matched asset in the email to the subscriber.
• If the above business rule doesn’t match, then the Einstein engine will look for the next step, which is a fallback image for that specific asset class, if it exists. It will display the fallback image in the email.
• The next step is to match an asset class but ignoring all the Fatigue rules set in the system.
• Finally, if all the above steps fail to match, Einstein will display a contingency image configured in the setup as the last resort. This will be displayed in the event of all the above steps failing. 

Wrap up

Einstein Content Selection is one of the crucial pillars of the Einstein umbrella within Salesforce Marketing Cloud. While we have covered the Einstein Content Selection use cases and its benefits in this first-in-the-series blog, we hope it will now be easy for marketers to make the most of Einstein Content Selection and provide their customers an enhanced experience. For a detailed understanding of Einstein Content Selection, please visit the below link:
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_pb_einstein_content_selection.htm&type=5