Have you been hearing about Salesforce’s new Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions? Are you curious about what’s unique to them compared to the Engagement and Account Engagement Editions? There are a ton of cool new features that enable a more connected experience through the Salesforce platform, too much to go through in a single article. So, let’s focus on a few recent personalization capabilities.
Specifically, we’ll cover use cases for cross-object merge fields and dynamic content, and discuss some considerations when setting up the Data Graphs that power them.
What Are Cross-Object Merge Fields and Dynamic Content?
Cross-object merge fields refer to features that enable you to insert string values into content for any attribute on any object that’s related to Data Cloud’s Unified Individual record. It’s what allows you to insert an individual’s name or the account name associated with that individual.
Dynamic Content, on the other hand, allows you to swap out entire sections of content based on conditional rules. What they share in common, though, is that they enable highly personalized content without any coding whatsoever. If you could use some visuals, check out our release videos for cross-object merge fields and dynamic content.
Personalization Use Cases
Let’s spark your imagination around what you can do with a few examples from different industries and areas of the business.
Cross-Object Merge Fields
Event Management Example:
Following a conference, you can thank your speakers with a follow-up message that includes some extra post-event insights. For example, the subject line can reference their session by title, “Thank you for hosting the {Personalization 101} session”.
Also using merge fields, the message could include the final attendee count and the session score. For example, “I’m glad to announce that {Personalization 101} had {490} attendees and received a session score of {4.91} out of 5. Congratulations!”
Operations Example:
To nurture your customers, you might want to include a monthly summary of their usage for a given product or across all their products. To retrieve these monthly summaries, consider using Calculated Insights that summarize usage on a 30-day rolling period. Heck, you could take it a bit further and add dynamic content that gives them encouragement or tips based on their usage increasing or decreasing over time, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Field Service Example:
After a field service visit from your company, say from a gutter expert to check out that storm overflow; the HVAC expert because of those falling hoses; or the structural engineer because of those growing cracks in the wall (not that I’m at all familiar with these visits or problems as a recent first-time homeowner), you’d like to request feedback about the service provided.
You could provide a generic request for feedback or you could ask for feedback for {Steven} in {replacing your main water shut-off valve}. Speaking for a friend, this extra touch is not common and would certainly stand out.
Dynamic Content
Offer Management Example:
It’s time to encourage some spending on an upcoming sale with some discounts, but the discount level differs based on customer spend, loyalty, or likelihood to churn. To do this, you could create multiple segments, emails, and Flows to target each audience, but that sounds like a lot of duplicated effort and extra time to get approvals for each content asset. Instead, create a segment for anyone eligible for an offer and then vary the offer content by creating rules for dynamic content against those dimensions.
If there are extra terms needed that vary by another dimension, such as local state laws, you can create separate rules to vary terms by locale.
Sales Nurturing Example:
To keep customers engaged, you may want to highlight upcoming webinars based on your customer’s affinity to a given topic area. Using Data Cloud, you can assign affinity scores based on a wealth of engagement signals from web, messaging, and in-person events, again using Calculated Insights. Once you know their affinity, create rules that highlight an upcoming webinar for their highest-scored topic, e.g., Marketing Personalization. Where the customer’s affinity scores are too low for an accurate signal, show a fallback webinar that you think will be a crowd-pleaser.
And, to bump your open rates, have the subject line change based on whether you know their affinity or not. For example, the subject line could read, “Don’t miss this webinar for your fav topic – {Personalization}” versus “Don’t miss our most anticipated webinar this month.”
Service Example:
After each case is closed, you want to thank the customer but also address them more cautiously when the customer’s sentiment is poor when resolving it. For example, if the customer is delighted, thank them for their continued service and show them content you think will continue to engage them. However, if the sentiment was poor, perhaps keep the message short and simple while reiterating your continued dedication to quality service.
Getting Setup and Best Practices
Keep in mind that these features use Data Graphs to ensure the lowest latency when sending highly personalized content. They also simplify data traversal since they only contain the data you want to leverage for personalization. Here are a few quick tips when working with Data Graphs for personalization:
- You’ll want to create a data graph that uses the Unified Individual as the root object and then configure the personalization data graph in Marketing Setup.
- When configuring your data graph, consider all the data you plan to create a rule against or include as a merge field. Consider leaving other data out to make use of personalization features easier.
- To make data graphs even more performant for large audiences, include this object structure in your data graph: Unified Individual → Unified Link Individual → Individual → Contact Point Email → Email Address.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce’s new Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions offer powerful personalization capabilities that can significantly enhance your marketing efforts. By leveraging cross-object merge fields and dynamic content, you can create highly tailored and engaging communications without the need for coding. Whether you’re in event management, operations, field service, offer management, sales nurturing, or customer service, these features can help you deliver more relevant and impactful messages to your audience.
Ready to get started? Dive into the setup guides and start exploring the possibilities of personalized marketing with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Lastly, stay tuned! We plan to improve these capabilities to make them easier to use and more powerful in upcoming releases.