Salesforce Marketing Cloud Einstein – An Overview

Email marketing is all about sending the right email to the correct audience at the most opportune time. Mess up on any of the three factors, and you may make no impact or even worse, make a negative impact on the customer relationship. Since it is impossible to track the progress of each customer and their position in the sales cycle, modern marketers use a wide variety of tools that help them achieve it. Thankfully, for a Salesforce Marketing Cloud user, you have everything you ever need under a single umbrella.

In this article, we shall be giving you an overview of one of the most powerful Artificial Intelligence technologies that is built into Salesforce – Einstein. 

What is Einstein?

As we stated earlier, Einstein is an artificial intelligence technology that is integrated into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Its role in your marketing strategy is like a CRM assistant. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Einstein helps you process your data to discover patterns, predict customer behavior, suggest the next steps to be taken, and automate your marketing workflows.

Most modern technological advancements power this intelligent AI, such as Machine Learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing, voice recognition (Spring 2020), and visual pattern identification. So the self-learning AI processes your data, suggests the next steps to take (based on a similar situation or an action that influenced the outcome in the past), and makes appropriate adjustments as per the current case outcomes.

All you need in order to use Einstein to its maximum potential:

1. An extensive information data pool for Einstein to learn from
2. Using Salesforce for a while for it to ‘level-up’ based on your daily interactions with your customer 

Now let’s dive deeper into what features Einstein offers for a Salesforce Marketing Cloud user

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Einstein Features

When you utilize Einstein while sending email campaigns using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it creates customer journeys that can be predicted at every stage. From choosing the correct subject lines, predicting the optimum sending time, to suggesting better segmentation conditions, Einstein helps at every stage of email marketing. Factor in the other communication channels you have integrated, and Einstein can make sure the communication is consistent across all of them. Marketers can make use of premium AI features, such as:

Predictive Lead Scoring

Your most engaged leads are more likely to convert. Once you confirm the various stages that determine the criteria to define an engaging lead, Einstein can monitor the brand interactions of every lead in your list across the different channels to rate their conversion potential. This way, you focus more on leads with better scores to convert them faster and anticipate the customer needs as well as the next action they will take. Based on the lead score, you can create different audiences based on their tastes, create different segments, and map out different paths in the Journey builder. 

Predictive Audiences

You can engage people with common interests through a single email, but for certain niche interests, you need AI for accurate predictions. Einstein scours through individual customer profiles to find a collective user behavior that ties them together. It can be based on demographics, interests, past purchase history, or lead quality. This way, your email communication becomes more audience-oriented instead of being a one-size-fits-all approach. 

Automated Send Time Optimization

For geographically sparse audiences, it is vital to make sure your marketing efforts are presented at the opportune time when they are most engaged. Based on your past marketing results, Einstein observes the activity level of your customers at different periods to suggest the optimized send time when they are most likely to engage. This may not be accurate at the first try, but it’s better to act upon prediction than assumption. 

Social Media Post Tracking

Taking social listening to another level, Einstein can sort social media posts into predefined categories to separate the actual information from the noise. Any negative comment is tagged for brand image troubleshooting, and any specified team is allocated the task to investigate. Using image recognition and processing, Einstein can also browse through posts with photos or images for any brand mentions. Einstein can be trained for sentiment measuring for tailor-made social media post segregation. 

Einstein Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Working in the B2B market demands account-based marketing for a focussed approach to increase revenue for different accounts. You can train Einstein to identify the key accounts and bring data from multiple sources to a single point for quicker resolution of problems arising in those accounts. 

Einstein Product Recommendations

A custom solution for eCommerce marketing, Einstein Product Recommendations can process past purchase history and online behavior to suggest products that suit your customers’ needs. Effective up-sell and cross-selling opportunities pop out more commonly with the help of this module.

Einstein Content Selection & Copy Insights

Taking email personalization to the next level, Einstein Content Selection recommends the most relevant content, image, or any other asset by studying the subscriber’s preferences and behaviors. Copy Insights, on the other hand,  uses Einstein’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities to identify the most actionable and converting words that might be applicable in email subject lines or social media posts.

Journey Insights 

For every marketing channel, understanding and tracking a customer’s journey across the sales funnel is of utmost value. Einstein’s AI evaluates different data points to understand the customer’s decision process. Using journey insights, Einstein traces the various activities that eventually lead to a purchase and generates useful insights about the customer journey. 

This way, Einstein detects when specific email campaigns or any other marketing campaigns are facing sub-par performance and suggests recommended actions that can significantly improve communication effectiveness.

Wrap Up

With the implementation of Einstein AI, Salesforce is a curve ahead of its competition. Additionally, the ability to allow third-party developers to create custom applications that tap into the Salesforce Einstein network, makes every Salesforce user get tailor-made solutions to their marketing needs. With further innovations such as AI Cloud computing, Voice recognition, and IoT becoming future milestones for Salesforce to adopt, it is not late to learn the ins and outs of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.