Salesforce Updates Marketing Cloud With New Email Features, Customer Mapping Tools

Salesforce has unveiled enhancements to its Marketing Cloud, including updated email, metrics and social media applications, along with integrated advertising tools to enable trigger ads based on CRM data.

Debuted at the Salesforce Connections event in New York, the new email features include upgrades to increase performance, ease of use and adoption rates.

The enhancements to Journey Builder, a customer journey mapping tool, are designed to help users map customer journeys across marketing, sales and customer service applications.

Updates to the Active Audience tool intend to help marketers synchronize ad targeting with CRM to run more relevant ads across all campaign channels. The new tools also provide access to digital advertising partners such as Krux, Facebook, LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Neustar, Twitter and Viant.

The pairing of Journey Builder and Active Audiences positions Salesforce Marketing Cloud users to deliver personalized content through multiple channels and measure overall effectiveness, according to company officials.

"The always-connected customer doesn't care if they receive marketing/sales/services interaction. All they care about is having a consistent conversation where and when they need it," said Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce, in his keynote presentation. "As marketers we need to know our customers and prospects and where they are in the journey with us."

Other enhancements include:

• Pre-Built Journey Triggers: Salesforce objects such as contacts, leads, accounts and cases, as well as custom objects are available as pre-built triggers in Journey Builder, designed to automate inbound event-driven triggers, such as a customer joining a loyalty program or downloading an app;
• Social Network Targeting: Salesforce is a Facebook Marketing Partner for ad technology, content marketing, community management, and audience onboarding; a LinkedIn Certified Marketing Partner across sponsored updates and company pages; and a Twitter Official Partner; and
• Automatic Customer Record Updates: The ability to automatically modify data in the customer contact record or set up wait times and decision splits to adjust the journey in real-time based on customer interactions across sales, marketing and customer service.