Top 5 Personalization Features in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Power Your Brand’s Email Campaigns

Today’s customers are a demanding lot.

They want comfort and convenience during shopping. They also don’t want to be treated as an unrecognizable blob in a crowd of blobs. In other words, they demand personalization.

Here’s proof:

• 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs.
• 88% say the experience a company provides is as important as its offerings.
• 56% expect to always receive personalized offers.

(source: Salesforce State of the Connected Customer 2022)

Customers’ priorities and behaviors have shifted rapidly, so it’s harder for brands to earn their loyalty. Harder, but not impossible. The secret: personalization. Personalization is an effective way to engage with customers 1-on-1 and deliver memorable experiences – both of which are vital to earn their loyalty and long-term support.

So how can you achieve personalization at scale across every channel and for every customer?

Answer: Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

SFMC provides numerous features that will help you incorporate personalization into your digital strategy. Unleash this personalization to create better experiences that will keep customers coming – and coming back.

1. Engagement Frequency What-If Analyzer in Einstein AI

Effective personalization requires effective and detailed planning. Here’s where Einstein Engagement Frequency (EEF) can be your best friend. EEF is an effective, AI-powered way to determine the optimal number of emails to send to each subscriber in your send list. Frequency optimization is vital because email fatigue is a very real problem so you need to determine the right send frequency for each contact. Only then can you improve engagement and minimize unsubscribes.

What does this have to do with personalization?

Plenty!

The new What-If Analyzer feature in EEF will enable you to assess engagement data for each subscriber that will show whether you are sending too many emails that are not relevant to say, Subscriber A. You can thus determine if this subscriber is saturated with your emails and thus a single click away from unsubscribing or marking you as spam.

With the EEF What-If Analyzer, you can also:

• Understand the impact of sending frequency on your brand’s engagement with Subscriber A, Subscriber B….Subscriber N over time
• Analyze how your current sending frequency affects their saturation levels
• Test multiple frequency scenarios to predict their probability of engagement with your campaigns and make quick course corrections

All of this information will help you figure out the optimal number of emails to send for each campaign and subscriber. So, if you find that a particular subscriber is experiencing email fatigue (oversaturated), you can send them fewer emails. Similarly, you can pinpoint the subscribers who are not getting enough communications (undersaturated) to increase the sending frequency. In addition, finding the subscribers who are getting the exact right number of emails (on-target) will help you understand the best sending frequency and get a majority of subscribers into this ideal group.

Find Einstein Engagement Frequency and What-if Analyzer under: Marketing Cloud -> Einstein

2. Data Extensions Query Support for Intelligence Reports in SFMC Engagement

Intelligence Reports Advanced is a premium upgrade for SFMC Engagement. Use this analytics tool to analyze email messaging, create your own dashboards and measurements, and identify opportunities to optimize personalization. 

The tool includes a Codeless Query Builder to easily query high-volume and granular engagement data (opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, etc.) and extract cross-channel analytics for every campaign. These analytics will enable you to uncover new optimization opportunities for every email campaign. You also get a number of ready-to-use apps to connect email to the web and connect first-party audiences from SFMC Advertising Studio to performance data.

Intelligence Reports Advanced comes with support for Data Extensions Query to analyze campaign performance based on unique audience attributes. This attribute data is stored in SFMC’s data extensions (DE). Effortlessly connect up to 30 DEs to your subscriber-level and aggregate engagement data and then utilize this rich dataset to improve engagement and drive greater brand loyalty through enhanced personalization.

3. Database Exports in Marketing Cloud Intelligence

Marketing Cloud Intelligence is a great way to capture cross-channel intelligence and use it to inform your marketing performance. With this tool, you can automatically prepare and clean up marketing data, view it from one centralized view, and access always-on reports and AI insights to uncover performance optimization opportunities.

You can also export the data to external databases such as Snowflake and PostgreSQL and then use the combined power of all these tools to guide your personalization efforts. For this, SFMC supports a Database Exports feature that creates an audit-proof system of all data.

Use Database Exports to automatically export Intelligence marketing data to external databases to enable deeper analyses. Your valuable marketing data no longer resides in siloes so any department can derive insights from it to support their – and the company’s – personalization objectives.

It’s easy to set up a database export with SFMC Intelligence:

• Go to the Analyze & Act tab and select Database Exports.
• Click Create New.
• Define the data you want to export.
• Map the source data fields to the destination database fields.
• Configure the database export feed.
• Save and run the export.

4. Customer Data Platform (CDP) 

SFMC is one of the most data-focused ESPs available today. The data you get from SFMC is essential to drive your personalization efforts, regardless of campaign or subscriber type. One of the best ways to take advantage of this rich data is via SFMC’s powerful CDP feature.

The CDP will present real-time data and actionable insights so you can reach subscribers on their preferred channels. This data is unified, no matter where it comes from (marketing and non-marketing systems), so you can create a complete picture of each customer to improve:

• Segmentation
• Engagement
• Targeting

CDP can help you improve personalization in each campaign and message by augmenting data volumes and types that can be shared with other tools within the SFMC Engagement ecosystem. Augment data types for personalization and leverage activation contact points to reach subscribers with the right message on their preferred channels. You can also activate customer data to Mobile Push contact points to design and deliver personalized mobile messages.

5. Triggered Campaign Messages in SFMC Personalization

Combine the world-class capabilities of Marketing Cloud Personalization with the powerful outbound communication engine of SFMC Journey Builder to engage customers with hyper-personalized messages on their preferred channel. Here’s where triggered campaign messages come in.

For effective personalization, you must treat each customer as a unique individual. You must also listen to them, understand their intent, affinities, and goals, and leverage this understanding to attract and retain them with 1-to-1 moments in real-time. Only then can you deliver the right content, products, and offers that will:

• Boost their engagement with your brand
• Connect and optimize their journeys across each touchpoint
• Reduce customer churn

Create triggered campaign messages in SFMC Personalization to send personalized messages to each subscriber across their preferred channel using contextual, real-time data about their behaviors. This information is available in real-time so you can act quickly to personalize each email for each subscriber. You can also respond in real-time by triggering mobile app messages, push notifications, and in-store experiences based on each subscriber’s behavior.

Nine configurable product and behavioral triggers are available to create different kinds of SFMC journeys:

1. Cart abandonment
2. Browse abandonment
3. Segment join
4. Segment leave
5. Event action
6. New item in the high engagement category
7. Product price reduction
8. Product back-in-stock
9. Product expiring soon

Thus, you can start a journey when a particular customer joins or leaves a segment, abandons a cart, or takes a particular action, and accordingly design personalized email campaigns in each of these situations. Before sending the campaigns out, conduct A/B/n testing to optimize each journey on the fly and deliver personalized messages that inspire customers to take action.

Triggered campaign messages also support these advanced features for your personalization goals:

• Powerful segmentation and AI to deliver contextually-relevant experiences to every subscriber
• Dynamic content to personalize email and web experiences
• Design surveys and draw from response data to improve consistently customer experiences
• Connect online and offline journeys for more effective personalization

Wrap-up

Over the years, SFMC’s personalization features have improved by leaps and bounds. Take advantage of these features to advance your email marketing initiatives and deliver moments of magic to each customer. By treating every customer as a unique individual, you will earn their loyalty, reduce marketing costs, and increase customer lifetime value.

The best way to make the most of these features is to work with a trusted partner like Email Uplers. Contact us and we’ll show you how to best use SFMC to power your brand’s personalization goals – starting today!