Delivering the right message at the right time has always been a fundamental goal for marketers, and real-time website personalization is a key strategy to achieve this. With the rise of AI, the ability to deliver highly personalized customer experiences is becoming more accessible and impactful.
Last year, Salesforce introduced a new offering: Einstein Personalization. This promises real-time personalized experiences, prompting questions about the future of Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP) in light of this development. In this post, we explain what Einstein Personalization is and how it will impact all current users of Marketing Cloud Personalization.
How Evergage Became Marketing Cloud Personalization
Let’s begin by looking at the current landscape. Marketing Cloud Personalization began with Salesforce’s acquisition of Evergage in 2020; a leading platform for web orchestration and personalization at the time.
Salesforce quickly integrated Evergage into its Marketing Cloud platform, initially rebranding it as Interaction Studio and later as Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP). This acquisition filled a gap in Salesforce’s suite, bringing robust personalization capabilities to Marketing Cloud.
However, despite significant progress in integrating MCP with the broader Salesforce ecosystem, some friction points remain.
While MCP is marketed primarily as a tool for marketers, its setup, maintenance, and updates are technically demanding, and often require specialized teams (for example, encryption for data transfer) to complete. This complexity can distance the platform from marketing users.
What Is Einstein Personalization?
Einstein Personalization is an AI-driven decision engine that uses real-time customer data to deliver highly personalized marketing campaigns. This new solution aims to centralize real-time, cross-channel personalization across the entire Salesforce Platform.
Built on Salesforce’s core platform, Einstein Personalization is designed to integrate seamlessly with Data Cloud, leveraging its data to power AI-driven personalized experiences. It functions as an extension of Data Cloud, enhancing its capabilities with AI-powered personalization.
Already generally available, you can use foundational Data Cloud elements like real-time data ingestion, identity resolution, calculated insights, and data graphs, for Einstein Personalization to deliver relevant, targeted, individualized content to customers at the right time.
Einstein Personalization also gathers and displays metrics to provide insights into the usage and effectiveness of personalized decisions. This news is part of the Winter ‘25 release.
Einstein Personalization vs. Marketing Cloud Personalization
Aside from being built on Salesforce’s core platform – and the benefits that come with Data Cloud – another key distinction between Einstein Personalization and MCP is the breadth of personalization it offers.
Einstein Personalization extends beyond website personalization to the AI add-ons for Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud. For example, Commerce Cloud promises advanced features such as personalized recommendations, search results, and category sorting.
Currently, Einstein Personalization only works with Experience Cloud sites for web personalization. However, its native integration with Data Cloud promises more streamlined data flow and easier platform connections.
This could significantly reduce the time and manual effort required to create personalized experiences and empower marketers to deliver campaigns without technical specialists.
What Should Marketing Cloud Personalization Users Think?
So the question is: should current MCP users be concerned? Not necessarily.
MCP remains a valuable tool, particularly if your website isn’t built on Experience Cloud or if you use platforms other than Data Cloud in your tech stack.
MCP’s versatility makes it a strong choice for personalizing customer experiences. However, for those seeking a more integrated, data-driven approach to personalization, Einstein Personalization offers compelling advantages.
While details on successful implementations of Einstein Personalization for websites are still emerging, it’s worth monitoring how this new solution evolves and how the two will be positioned next to each other in the future.
Why Should You Try It?
In the Salesforce Winter ‘25 release, we can learn that the Einstein Personalization capacity expands to other tooling like Marketing Cloud where using Einstein Personalization targeting rules and personalization decisions will be natively integrated with Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced editions.
For example, in Marketing Cloud Growth, you can use targeting rules and personalization decisions to provide individualized, dynamically varied content in Marketing email communications. In Marketing Cloud Advanced orgs, you can set up path experimentation for segment-triggered flows to determine which path had the best outcome.
The power of Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Einstein Personalization will help to build personalized experiences that are user-friendly for marketers as they can leverage the point-and-click approach. This makes the process faster and gives the power back into the marketers’ hands.
Summary
If you’re considering adding personalized experiences to your marketing strategy, Einstein Personalization is a compelling option, especially for those not already using Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP).
As highlighted in the Winter ‘25 release, Einstein Personalization integrates seamlessly with Salesforce’s Data Cloud to deliver AI-driven personalized experiences across multiple channels. However, leveraging its full potential requires Data Cloud as a foundational component.
For businesses already using MCP, the decision to transition or adopt Einstein Personalization depends on how customer data is managed and your tech stack’s compatibility with Data Cloud.
While MCP remains a strong choice for versatile website personalization, Einstein Personalization offers a more streamlined, integrated, and marketer-friendly approach. Evaluating your data infrastructure will help determine which solution best suits your needs as AI-powered personalization continues to evolve.