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Salesforce Unveils New Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud Innovations (Digital 360)

By Lucy Mazalon

Salesforce have announced their latest technologies for two products – Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud – with the aim to help companies go digital faster and deliver the next generation of marketing, commerce and digital experiences.

This has now come to be known as ‘Digital 360’, not a Salesforce product itself but instead “a re-imagining of the capabilities we have around three things: Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Experience Cloud” (ie. Community Cloud, rebranded) – source. While Digital 360 isn’t anything new, aside from its name, it’s an offering to target CMOs and CDOs (chief data officers).

What’s new? Marketing Cloud expands customer data platform to deliver real-time engagement, audience segmentation and loyalty management.

Commerce Cloud introduces new data integrations; enhances order management and headless commerce capabilities for companies to innovate fast with clicks, not code.

The overarching message of Digital 360 is about combining data, thanks to Salesforce CDP, which aggregates every data point about an individual customer across multiple platforms, a single source of truth/creating a unified customer profile across all touchpoints.

Digital 360: Pushing the Limits

As consumers continue to push the limits of what it means to be digital-first, Salesforce is helping companies stay ahead of these shifts.

Salesforce powers an average of 100 billion+ Einstein predictions, sends 682 billion emails and delivered 3 million commerce transactions on average each day in 2020.

Marketing Cloud

“Marketers can get to know their customers through a single source of truth to engage with relevancy, humanize every moment at scale with AI-powered personalization to inspire action and loyalty, and optimize overall marketing impact with unified analytics.”

Salesforce CDP for Marketing

Already mentioned at the keystone of Salesforce Digital 360, use Salesforce CDP to deliver powerful marketing, advertising and personalization.

Above: build targeted audiences from these unified profiles with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface.

Salesforce CDP is integrating two technologies:

  • Interaction Studio analyzes cross-channel brand interactions and applies Einstein to instantly determine and send a message, product offer or content recommendation.

Above: activate or send audiences to any advertising, messaging, or engagement platform to create tailored experiences

  • Loyalty Management gives companies a real-time audience segments of their best customers, including membership status, loyalty tier and points balance.

Above: Loyalty Management

Google and Salesforce Partnership

The strategic partnership between Google and Salesforce helps marketers better understand their customers, in a way that respects privacy and maintains trust, by using first-party data to achieve smarter measurement and activation, including Customer Match, across marketing and advertising.

The companies will continue to invest in solutions that make it easier to use customer insights from Salesforce products, including the Salesforce CDP, for activation across advertising on Google.

Snapchat Audience Match

Targeted, personalized advertising audiences for Snapchat.

Use what you already know about your customers (first-party data stored in Salesforce) to engage customers, and grow customer lists leveraging lookalikes that identify new targets with similar characteristics to existing customers.

WhatsApp Integration for Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud’s WhatsApp Business Solution can increase customer engagement with keyword detection, transactional messages and more. Communicate with customers on WhatsApp directly, easily setting up an account, channels and message templates.

Commerce Cloud

“New technologies will help companies identify business trends, personalize customer experiences, and simply connect the end-to-end commerce journey, from the online storefront to order management and beyond.”

Salesforce CDP for Commerce

Salesforce CDP, again, is the keystone of Salesforce Digital 360. Commerce Cloud data is integrated into Salesforce CDP out-of-the-box, so companies get a complete view of first-party customer data across every touchpoint and use commerce data in cross-channel marketing.

 

B2B2C Commerce (New!)

The new B2B2C Commerce app enables B2B companies to get a connected, direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce sites up and running with clicks, not code.

B2B2C Commerce was prompted by the trends witnessed in 2020, where B2B companies wanted to diversify business (new revenue streams), and/or forge a relationship with the ultimate consumers of their products. Lidiane Jones, EVP & GM, Commerce Cloud, said that they have a number of customers already in pilot, calling out Consumer Goods (merchandising) as a key – but not exclusive – target vertical.

Salesforce Order Management

Here we have three technologies that “powers companies beyond the buy button — through fulfillment, delivery and loyalty”:

  • Omnichannel Inventory,
  • Distributed Order Management
  • Order Management for B2B

Omnichannel Inventory + Distributed Order Management: see real-time inventory across an entire network of stores and fulfillment centers, allowing them to turn their stores into distribution centers and provide customers with a choice in how they receive their items — same-day delivery, buy online pickup in store and more.

Add in Order Management capabilities…
And B2B buyers will have more transparency and control over their orders with self-service fulfillment tracking, cancellations, order modifications and more.

Headless PWA Kit and Managed Runtime

Headless commerce is a term you may have heard about. Developer teams can quickly and cost-efficiently decouple front-end and back-end technologies to create highly customized consumer-facing experiences (headless commerce).

  • Progressive Web Application (PWA) Kit
  • Managed Runtime

Developers spend less time maintaining infrastructure and more time creating interactive customer experiences.

What’s next? When is this available?

  • Learn more about the next generation of Marketing Cloud 360 at 10:00am PT at Connections here
  • Learn more about the next generation of Commerce Cloud 360 at 10:30am PT at Connections here

Available today:

Available June 2021:

Available August 2021:

  • Salesforce Headless PWA Kit
  • Managed Runtime

Available October 2021:

  • Order Management for B2B
  • Salesforce CDP for Commerce Cloud

Final thought

All the innovation is great to see.

In the back of my mind, I can’t help thinking about how a sizeable number of customer organizations are far off from being able to tap into the ‘Digital 360’ vision. There are companies of all sizes nowhere near ready to adopt these digital innovations or SMBs who would be priced out – so I’m curious when, and if, the gap between these organizations and Digital 360 will be closed. Which lead me to consider what practical steps could accelerate adoption of these advanced technologies that are part of Digital 360. So far, I’m not sure but I will be observing to find out.

The Author

Lucy Mazalon

Lucy is the Operations Director at Salesforce Ben. She is a 10x certified Marketing Champion and founder of The DRIP.

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