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Improve Marketing with Commerce Data

Learning Objectives

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

  • Explain how a unified Marketing and Commerce Cloud improves customer reach and engagement.
  • List ways to put these improvements into action.

Explore What Each Cloud Reveals About Your Customers

Meet Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), the trusted outfit for outdoor and recreational gear based in the heart of Indianapolis. The company uses tailored marketing to help each customer find the perfect gear. Its marketing team has an ambitious goal: Personalize every customer journey using the combined power of Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud.

Right now, NTO uses Marketing Cloud to reach its customers. Through its history of marketing efforts, it’s developed rich customer profiles. NTO engages with customers across many channels, such as targeted emails and social media advertising. It has a deep understanding of what its customers want, backed up by detailed metrics. Marketing Cloud helps NTO attract and retain customers by planning, personalizing, and deploying messages about its offerings.

NTO also uses Salesforce Commerce to run its online stores. Commerce Cloud has its own treasure trove of customer data—order data, shopper activity tracking, product data, and store transactions. Commerce Cloud helps customers find and buy products, from acquisition to conversion to fulfillment. It unites all things commerce—direct-to-customer (D2C), business-to-business (B2B), order management, and payments—with sales, service, and marketing on one powerful platform.

Thinking about how to align marketing and commerce efforts more closely, NTO looks at the numbers provided by the Salesforce 2023 Customer Success Metrics. The numbers show that commerce amplifies marketing: Unified customer profiles and features create value. Customers who unify marketing and commerce see these kinds of cost improvements.

  • A decrease in customer acquisition cost by an average of 22%
  • An increase in customer lifetime value by 31%
  • An increase in online revenue by 29%

Unifying commerce and marketing provides a complete, 360° view of each customer’s journey with a shared catalog and user profile. With commerce data surfaced in marketing, marketers can engage shoppers and buyers at key moments—from the online store to social media to email campaigns and beyond. Knowing its customers better will help NTO in its goal to create personalized offers for each customer in real time and increase sales conversions.

Here’s a video showing Commerce Cloud in action. It describes how to set up a store; recapture customers who browsed but didn’t buy; use transactional emails; and communicate before and after the sale.

Achieve Next-Level Success with Marketing and Commerce

The marketing and commerce teams get together to brainstorm ideas to boost customer engagement, increase sales, and create personalized journeys that wow each customer.

NTO Goals

Audience

Examples

Connect every step of the customer journey, from product discovery to delivery and unboxing.

Customer who spends time on a product’s landing page but doesn’t buy the product.

The marketing team sends the customer an enticing email about the product they were viewing and adds a promo code for the item.

Build rich segments using purchase intent data that reveal what your customers want.

Customers who browse new specialized gear, such as high-end tents and climbing products.

Family campers who browse family-size tents and kid-size sleeping bags.

To keep this adventurous segment happy, the marketing team tailors their content by serving them exclusive deals on the latest top-notch specialized gear.

To keep the family segment happy, the marketing team offers them discounts on product bundles that include everything needed for perfect family getaways.

Tailor engagement based on past purchases and interactions to make every customer feel special.

Customers buy fancy camping cookware and browse freeze-dried food.

In response, the marketing team shows them images of people cooking around a campfire in promotional emails or messages.

Connect with customers via SMS conversations.

Customers enrolled in a loyalty program.

Using conversational SMS, the marketing team sends reminders offering exclusive deals based on customer purchase history. Customers can respond to the message and connect with an agent or a service rep to ask questions and place orders.

Recapture revenue from customers who browse a website but leave without making a purchase or who search for a product but don’t buy it.

Customers who browse multiple product categories—like tents and sleeping bags, or search for a product online but don’t make any purchases.

The marketing team sends them an email based on their browsing and search, including a curated and personalized selection of similar products, bundle discounts, and expert tips.

Automate customer journeys and create individualized promotions across channels.

Ice-climbing adventurer customers.

Using a customer’s past purchases and interactions, it creates a plan to engage this segment with:

  • A curated home page with the highest-rated climbing gear based around the winter season.
  • A text highlighting local ice-climbing spots with a link to a checklist full of necessary ice-climbing gear. The text is sent when the weather stays below freezing in the customer’s ZIP code for a week.

Engage customers to turn “maybe later” into “yes, please!”

Customers who consider products but don’t buy them before they go out of stock. For example, a customer who moved a popular sleeping bag to their cart, but then it went out of stock.

When the sleeping bag comes back in stock, that customer receives a targeted SMS message or email with a subject line like, “Great news! Your favorite sleeping bag is back.” And it includes a direct link to the product page along with free shipping to encourage a purchase.

Market to B2B customers looking to order seasonal items for a company retreat.

A B2B sporting goods store that orders seasonal items in bulk every September.

Marketing looks at the products they’ve ordered in the past and sends them an email promoting new related products that are in stock in bulk.

Streamline your message and email sending with a single solution for maximum efficiency and detailed reporting.

NTO marketers and business analysts.

With so many personalized messages and emails, NTO finds using a single solution to be extremely helpful. NTO now syncs purchase data and marketing data in real time resulting in sending timely, targeted messages and reviewing metrics in one dashboard. It can use up-to-date contact lists and see open rates, click-throughs, and conversions in customized reports.

Looking at this list of value-driven possibilities, ‌teams are ready to go. They see how integrating Marketing Cloud’s rich customer marketing data with Commerce Cloud’s rich consumer data creates the perfect starting point for their customer personalization adventure and can increase sales.

Resources

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