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In this video I talk about the current state of personalization in marketing, the definition of hyperpersonalization and how it helps bring your customer experience to an entire new level.

Based on a real world scenario you’ll learn how a great customer experience for click and collect could look like and how this can be achieved in Salesforce Marketing Cloud interfacing with other Salesforce Clouds and data sources using Salesforce Interaction Studio. Learn which metrics can be improved when using hyperpersonalization extensively and what sets Interaction Studio apart from the competition.

Watch the video and/or read the transcript below. If you like what you’ve learned, please like the video and subscribe to my channel!

Transcript

In this episode I’m going to talk about hyperpersonalization in marketing using Salesforce Interaction Studio.

How is personalization done right now and where is marketing headed? You might notice these types of personalization from two perspectives - from sending marketing communication on behalf of your company and also as a customer receiving communication from companies. If you receive communication that doesn’t seem to be tailored to your specific needs (like batch and blast newsletters) where you get a lot of information that seems to be sent to everyone who subscribed to the newsletter of the company, that’s not very intelligent. At most, the personalization present might be a personalized salutation.

Bringing this to another level is using intelligent segments. A lot of companies right now do segmentations within their customer base - they select based on demographics, maybe your favorite store or where you live. If you receive communication that is a little bit more tailored to your specific needs or to your specific situation, then you might be segmented by that marketing department. But you might also see some parts of the newsletter that don’t fit your individual situation - like a product being advertised that you just recently bought. So that’s the state most companies are at right now, so either they are sending emails to the entire customer base or using segments to narrow down the recipients a bit.

But where we are going now and what I’m going to talk about today is real-time personalization that focuses on an individual. So in our use case we send individualized communication to Sandra and we don’t just segment based on her living in San Francisco. We know where she is in the customer journey, what she recently bought from us and if there’s service cases going on at the moment.

That’s where marketing is going towards and what most larger companies are looking at right now - the so called hyperpersonalization.

What are the goals of personalization and why even bother doing so? Usually you have two main goals. One is optimizing the customer experience and the other one is providing a consistent customer journey across departments. When setting goals most companies just have their own goals in mind, but they often don’t fit the customer. Luckily Salesforce Research did some digging and found out that more than 80% of customers think that the customer experience is as important as the products and services a company provides - and most of them are even likely to pay more if the experience is great. Something also a large share of customers expect is that they have a consistent customer journey across all the departments they are interacting with. Just like they have a single person responsible for everything they do with your company, no matter if it’s marketing communications, if it’s a service representative or if they are buying something in your store. So keeping everything consistent is definitely something you should invest in and make possible for your customers.

So how is this possible and how can you do that on a scale where you don’t need to invest that much manual effort and have that many employees. Using Interaction Studio you can do that and everything that gets done is split in three phases. First of all you need to listen to your customers, sense the behavior of them, track the data so that you can understand what they really want to do - which is the second phase. The third one is acting on that knowledge that you’ve gained. In the listen phase you can incorporate different channels, the easiest is tracking web behavior. What’s special about Interaction Studio here is that it’s not only tracking sites and categories visited, but also the time spent looking at these different pages. What’s also being tracked is conversion behavior, behavior within your company’s apps as well as sales and service behavior that is handled by your sales and service reps. But with Interaction Studio you have the flexibility to incorporate different channels. So also the in-store behavior can be tracked and can be used to personalize the experience. Data that is already commonly used for personalization but only within the channel is email engagement for example.

With the understand-phase where we really dig into that data and understand the situation of a customer, that’s where we need a little bit of help to automate that process. Because collecting data largely is already automated. But using and understanding that data isn’t. As you can see in the middle of the slide, we have a little bit of help here from Einstein - the artificial intelligence used by Salesforce. So that’s where the numbers are crunched and we get insights in real time. But not only the insights are present in real-time, also the actions we can take on them. So in real-time we can also personalize all the channels that we are collecting data from so we can deliver an individualized experience on the web channel, within apps. Also you can present information to your sales and service reps that are specific to your customers needs. What’s also possible is personalizing marketing communication with next best promotions, next best campaigns. And to also get that to the offline channel, you can present that data to your sales reps at the Point of Sales systems so you can show them the next best campaigns, the next best offers they can present and the best conversations they can have with your customer. As this is a little bit theoretical, I’m going to dig into an example together with you.

If we want to let’s say enhance the experience that customers have with a click and collect process, we have two important persons in our example - one is Christian our shop assistant and his goal is to understand his customers better and to utilize the sales opportunities that come with knowing your customers. And Sandra is our customer in this example and she loves to select everything in your online store and then to pick it up in the store during her lunch break. So she doesn’t spend much time in the store, nonetheless she likes to have a great customer experience and a great service by Christian in store.

So which channels are we looking at? We track the data on the online store where Sandra is selecting the products and looking at what you can buy and what’s of interest for her and we analyze the data, utilize it in our marketing communication as well as presenting it to Christian so he’s able to deliver the best experience possible to Sandra in the store.

In our customer journey we have lots of touch points and most of these touchpoints interact with or collect data that’s also fed to Interaction Studio. When Sandra interacts with our website with our store we can already use the data that we have of her. In that example we show her a hero image and a campaign specifically tailored to women who are interested in active sports and outdoor sports. But Sandra just now wants to buy new running shoes so she goes through the catalog, through the product categories and has a look at one specific shoe that she’s interested in. She then looks at the pictures, selects the size, then also has a look at the product details and description. We can also see that there are some recommendations based on everything that we already know about her.

But Sandra is already sure that she wants to have that shoe so she selects to buy it at the store using click and collect. So now that we know a little bit more about Sandra and have everything ready, we send her a notification that everything can be picked up at the store.

When Sandra then goes to the store to pick it up, Christian sees the reservation number and knows that the product is here. But he wants to deliver a better experience for Sandra! So what he can do is directly look into her profile in Interaction Studio so he can see everything that she looked at, what she’s seen on the website, every interaction and what personalized experience has already been delivered. So he sees that she saw some recommendations, that there was a personalized experience on the website with the hero image specifically tailored to her segment. But what he can also do is dig into data to see what categories are of interest for her, what specific product details are relevant. And he can also narrow it down by looking at the views, the time spent viewing specific articles, as well as what’s most important to Sandra when it comes to purchases.

But that would take up a lot of time and Christian can’t investigate all that on his own because Sandra doesn’t want to wait that long. So what we can do is display preselected information to Christian. It’s not selected by us in fact, it’s rather done by artificial intelligence - so by Salesforce Einstein. So in our example we use the Sales and Service Cloud as an interface that’s shown to Christian. He then sees all the information about Sandra and has the possibility to go to the Interaction Studio tab, where he can see product recommendations as well as campaign recommendations for Sandra.

Now he knows that she also looked at hiking gear in the past and can talk to her about those products and give more information about them. Hopefully he can deliver the experience that Sandra desires in the store. But Sandra doesn’t have a lot of time, so she doesn’t decide to buy those articles Christian recommended now.

However, there’s also a recommended campaign for her, so Christian decides to send her further information with just the click of a button. Sandra then gets information based on her purchase and also based on everything Christian talked to her. The next email she receives feels specifically tailored to her by Christian. But it wasn’t Christian, it was Interaction Studio and everything that Einstein does for us. You can see the same promotion Christian talked to her about, as well as the products that he recommended.

As you can see, using Interaction Studio we automatically or near automatically delivered a great and personal user experience to Sandra! And Christian also had the possibility to do his job in a great and easy way.

If you aren’t already keen to try out Interaction Studio and hyperpersonalization, those metrics might be something that can further motivate you to use hyperpersonalization. These metrics were provided by Salesforce so they are based on a lot of Interaction Studio projects and there is a really good data pool behind them.

It’s possible to increase conversions and customer retention by about 20%, while also having a higher offer redemption. So why are these offers redeemed a lot more often? That’s because they are tailored to the specific needs of a customer which is a great thing to achieve, because customers love offers. And if the redemption is even higher with personalized ones that’s great for your customer experience. Even though you’re increasing a lot of these metrics, the cost to serve a customer can be reduced at the same time.

Why use Salesforce Interaction Studio as your hyperpersonalization toolbox? First of all, if you’re already using tools within the Salesforce platform it’s easy to integrate. You have a seamless integration to different tools that are used by your employees - Sales, Service and Marketing Cloud for example. It enables you to have personalized offers, personalized information in real time and everything based on artificial intelligence (Salesforce Einstein). And that isn’t just something I think is great, but also something reflected by Gartner’s magic quadrant for personalization engines. Salesforce Interaction Studio has been named a leader for the third time in a row!

It really is a great product on the market, that you can use to deliver personalized experiences!

I hope I could give you a good overview about the types of personalization - what it is and how it can be done using Interaction Studio.

If you like to know more about the topic, please also check out my article “Interaction Studio - Your Hyperpersonalization Toolbox”. Feel free to also connect with me on LinkedIn and Twitter.

If you liked that presentation, please also like the video on Youtube and if you want to stay up-to-date and get more information about Salesforce Marketing Cloud, please subscribe to my brand-new YouTube channel!