Last week, marketers from around the globe gathered at Salesforce Connections in New York to shape the future of digital marketing. Companies in various markets and industries are finding new ways to leverage technology to get closer to their customers.
We’ve distilled three of the top conversations from the event, and broken down what they mean for your marketing initiatives.
- It’s all about personalized, data-driven customer journeys.
Marketers are leveraging their data and insights to identify their customers’ key journeys to deliver the right messages at the right time. Children’s furniture retailer, Land of Nod, shared how they examined their customer data to get a greater understanding of the buyer journey. They uncovered an interesting buying pattern: their customers shop on a project basis and tend to purchase related items over a period of time, rather than in one session. This observation revealed the importance of delivering relevant content at the right time in each customer’s buying journey. As their CRM and Analytics Manager aptly put it, “Imperfect relevant content is better than perfect irrelevant content.” - The lines between marketing, sales, and customer service are blurring.
When your customers engage with your organization they expect to be treated the same, whether they speak to sales, call customer service, or receive marketing communications. Organizations are beginning to deliberately blur the lines to drive business outcomes. For example, KLM is driving sales through their service channel. Other organizations are using Marketing Cloud to monitor social media for any negative feedback and automatically creating cases in Service Cloud to ensure follow-up engagement. Pharmaceutical giant Merck shared how they are leveraging Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds to build a one-to-one relationship with each customer. They realised that they could not rely solely on indirect selling — instead, they must reestablish the one-to-one relationship patients used to have with their pharmacist in order to be competitive. Using the aforementioned Clouds in conjunction with Communities, they have built an engagement loop that enables one-to-one relationships between the patient and physician, the physician and Merck, and Merck and the patient. - Create connected customer experiences.
Marketers are driving a deeper customer relationship by seamlessly connecting digital and nondigital interactions to reach customers wherever they are. By employing omni-channel marketing that combines social, mobile, email, online, and in-store touchpoints, marketers can better communicate with customers and create smarter buying opportunities. For example, furniture retailer Room & Board understands that their customers don’t buy new furniture every day, but they still wanted to build long-term relationships with them, whether they are shopping in-store or browsing online. Room & Board mined data to ensure that they understood their customers’ needs and buying patterns, and used Predictive Intelligence to deliver the right digital recommendations at the right time. In doing so, they were able to mirror the one-to-one service they provide in the store. This approach increased average order value, boosted conversions by 600%, and ROI by 2800%.
This year’s Salesforce Connections brimmed with conversations around getting closer than ever to customers. To translate these marketing trends into actionable strategies for your team, connect with our experts.
