The past few years have shown us just how critical personalization is for a brand’s digital strategy. According to the latest State of the Connected Customer Report, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
That demand is crystal clear, but marketers face three main challenges in addressing it:
1. Personalizing at scale across channels
2. Effectively using owned data to power personalization
3. Aligning organizations for consistent personalization
The stakes are much higher and the competition more intense, but there is good news. There’s more data and better technology available to marketers now, which means more opportunities to create better customer experiences.
On that note, here’s a look at six new features in the latest Marketing Cloud release that will help you use data and artificial intelligence (AI) to personalize your marketing.
1. Einstein: Einstein Engagement Frequency “What-If” analyzer
Are you concerned about your customers feeling email fatigue from too many messages? The new “What-If” analyzer tile on the Einstein Engagement Frequency dashboard predicts how your next email send will impact engagement. This will help you:
- Avoid email fatigue that comes from oversaturating your subscribers
- Visually test multiple message frequency scenarios to understand how additional messages will affect engagement over time
- Determine how many emails to send for your upcoming campaigns
2. Engagement: Data Extensions Query Support for Intelligence Reports Advanced
As a marketer, you need to ensure you’re delivering the right message to the right audience. With Data Extension Query Support, you can analyze the performance of your messaging by unique audience attributes stored in Marketing Cloud’s Data Extensions to drive higher engagement and brand loyalty. With this new feature, you can:
- Enrich your query analyses by connecting up to 30 data extensions to your subscriber-level and aggregate Marketing Cloud engagement data
- Perform codeless queries with audience attributes from Data Extensions to uncover new optimization opportunities
- Understand the structure and rows of your Data Extensions with standalone querying
3. Customer Data Platform
Use richer customer information and reach people on their preferred channels with Marketing Cloud’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) updates. New features in the CDP can help you achieve better personalization by:
- Augmenting the volume and variety of data types that can be shared with Marketing Cloud engagement systems
- Connecting data across the enterprise from both marketing and non-marketing systems
- Activating data from Customer Data Platform to Mobile Push contact points in Marketing Cloud engagement to drive personalized mobile messages
4. Personalization: Triggered Campaign Messages
Triggered Campaign Messages combines the best of Marketing Cloud Personalization with the powerful outbound communication engine of Journey Builder, which can help you reengage customers on their preferred channel. Deliver personalized, relevant messages based on deep, contextual customer behavior, all in real time to:
- Trigger an email, mobile app message, push notification, next best action/offer, or an in-store experience based on an individual’s behavior
- Measure the amount of time an individual spends on your site, and understand the business context
- Use powerful real-time segmentation and sophisticated artificial intelligence to determine and deliver contextually relevant experiences that inspire customers to take action
5. Account Engagement: Conditional Completion Actions
When it came to prospects interacting with marketing assets, marketers previously needed to run multiple automations to segment effectively and at scale. The new Conditional Completion Actions allow marketers to run these automations in one place. Get even more granular with personalization on your emails, forms, and other assets by only triggering follow-up actions if a prospect meets a certain set of criteria. You can now:
- Suppress certain groups from getting added to lists, engagement campaigns, or receiving auto-responder emails
- Easily assign prospects to the correct user
- Route leads to more personalized journeys by further segmenting prospects at the point they interact with content
6. Intelligence: Database Exports
Customers are investing increasingly in enterprise database software. These databases act as repositories of information from all teams across the entire organization. But, previously, getting data from the marketing team was a hassle. Marketing data is often complicated and relatively siloed, so teams are tasked with making marketing data more accessible enterprise-wide. We are meeting this trend of database investment with the new Database Exports feature. With Database Exports you can:
- Automate the export of cleansed and harmonized marketing data into your organization’s database
- Make marketing data available to other parts of your organization for deeper analysis and insights
- Back up the data you have in Intelligence in your preferred database, creating an audit-proof system of all enterprise data
