Get to Know Salesforce Personalization

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain how the Personalization app relies on Data Cloud to create tailored experiences.
  
• List the different ways that Personalization can benefit your business.
  

Create Preferred Experiences

In today’s competitive market, personalization is key to standing out and building strong customer relationships. Salesforce Personalization combines predictive analytics, recommendation systems, and audience targeting to deliver tailored content to the right people at the right time.

Using Data Cloud along with advanced AI and machine learning algorithms, Personalization helps you understand and connect with your customers better than ever.

How Does It Work?

Personalization is a collection of Salesforce objects that connect your data with machine learning models to generate tailored experiences for your customers. Its tools help you promote and recommend products, content, and offers to the right people at the right time.

These personalization features rely on Data Cloud. Data Cloud allows you to unify data from multiple sources for a comprehensive view of your customer’s interests and behaviors. To ensure that every decision is contextual and relevant, Personalization uses Data Cloud's real-time profile.

These features learn continuously, fine-tuning recommendations and predictions to improve your outcomes in multiple places without a lot of legwork.

What Can It Do?

Getting just-in-time notifications, finding the perfect product, and other tailored interactions give customers warm fuzzy feelings. When you deliver relevant content, offers, and proactive experiences, people are more likely to engage with your brand and stay loyal over time.

Plus, you learn important details about your customers and get access to Data Cloud reports. These enhanced insights can help you improve your marketing and sales cycles time after time.

At its core, Personalization can help you:

• Respond appropriately and promptly.
  
• Increase customer engagement.
  
• Boost conversion rates.
  
• Grow customer loyalty.
  

Personalization works across the Salesforce ecosystem–from financial services to auto service, and more. Check out a few of the countless ways that it can work for you.

How Do You Create Personalized Experiences?

Using advanced AI, machine learning, and guardrails that you configure, Personalization creates and serves highly individualized experiences for people that you identify. Let’s see how you can make this happen.

First, you define where in the customer lifecycle a personalized moment will appear. Then, you select a personalization type and configure which data to use when choosing the most relevant content.

Working with a data analyst, you set up the rules that target the right audience for each personalization point, and you configure each decision. A decision determines who’s eligible to receive a certain personalization response and the content that’s returned. You can apply filters to limit what appears in the returned content.

During and after you run a campaign that uses Personalization, you can review your successes with pipeline and attribution analytics. Attribution data helps you understand the effectiveness of certain marketing strategies and personalization points. You can set up the Tableau-Data Cloud connector to view and manipulate this data in Tableau, or use any other business intelligence app with a Data Cloud connector.

To view operational statistics, such as the number of personalization points and decision requests, an admin must add the Pipeline Analytics dashboard to your org.

Use Case: A Tailored Web Experience

Rachel is a marketer at an outdoor apparel company, and she just started using Personalization. One of her KPIs is to increase repeat purchases, which she can achieve with content variations that connect with different people. Here’s what she does.

Rachel creates personalized web content for customers that appears after an in-store purchase. Each content variation promotes certain products, based on their previous purchase category.

• For people whose recent purchase came from a hiking product category, the content block recommends other best selling hiking products, such as boots and packs.
  
• For people whose recent purchase came from a water sports product category, the content block recommends products like paddles and wet bags.
  

Through this approach, Rachel makes it easier for customers to buy again–a win for everyone.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: How Personalization Works