The definition of one-to-one personalization has dramatically changed with the revolution of AI. Consumers expect a type of experience that knows what you want before you even do. This kind of novelty requires another level of intelligence. The next generation of products is expected to withstand the demands of a population that expects the unexpected. A product built on a platform that flourishes in providing the “impossible”. This is where Salesforce Personalization comes in.
During the fall, I was thrilled to work on the first implementation of Personalization built natively on the Salesforce platform for one of our retail clients. Personalization is a real-time AI decision-making tool built on Data Cloud that helps you use customer data to drive personalized experiences.
Personalization on the Salesforce platform takes the foundation for enriched customer experiences existing on Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP) and uses the full capabilities of Data Cloud to bring the power of Agentforce to companies.
After the successful build and launch of the product and use cases, I found myself drawn to a few distinct product features that impressed me with their use case potential. After the hands-on experience, I’d like to walk you through the new features that helped our client to thrive and release their first-ever product recommendations.
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Target with precision using real-time profile data
Personalization helps companies make better and smarter decisions about customer experience. Through identity resolution, data is integrated into a Unified Customer Profile created by various complex data sources. Real-time profiles based on Unified Profile cache important data, like cart and product browse interactions and allow for experiences and recommendations to reflect users’ recent actions.
How we used it in Salesforce Personalization:
One of the major examples of success for this client was having first-party identity information, like email and hashedId, pair together profiles using identity resolution. The client was able to take source profiles from other streams such as email engagement and have them fluently resolve with engagement from the website.
From these unified profiles, dynamic recommendations were constructed using connected data. After setting up relationships between products and their related items like material and categories, we used real-time customer engagement data to make recommendations to include related items. For example, it shows other items in the category of the product that were currently being viewed or that were in the cart.
Putting AI in the hands of marketers
The State of Marketing report found that only 16% of marketers consider themselves advanced with AI tools, even though many state that AI is a prevalent and integral part of improving consumer experiences. In just a few clicks, Personalization makes AI work for you by optimizing your business objectives and harnessing the power in real-time.
In minutes, you can create an Objective-Based Recommender that focuses on the personal goals of your business and drives an optimal customer experience and enhanced outcomes. Additionally, Recommenders allow you to filter based on attributes like price or exclude products a user already owns.
How we used it in Salesforce Personalization:
Our client’s main goal was to improve overall sales and revenue on the site through different product recommendations and experiences. They decided to target the cart page, with the first use case to show products that will increase revenue overall. With a few clicks, our team was able to build an Object-Based Recommender to Maximize Revenue easily. The result was an increase in the span of products displayed, and AI-based decisions on the production site to champion the ultimate goal of revenue increase.
Controlling content with clicks
Many marketers feel it is critical to edit and tailor the experiences on the site to meet customer needs. Web Personalization Manager (WPM) is a sophisticated marketing tool within Personalization that bridges the gap between development and deployment. The user-friendly interface blends ease of use with sophisticated tools, allowing marketers to pick and click page content for customization.
This visual tool helps marketers to configure and add personalized experiences to their websites with a business user-friendly and intuitive UI. WMP puts the power to personalize back into the marketer’s hands.
WMP is designed to work on a vast range of web applications, allowing marketers to easily select, visualize, and replace content on the website without the need for a developer. Using the Out of the Box Templates, include a “picked-for-you” product recommendations on a cart page, or replace a single content block with customized image variations.
My experience during this project showed me that empowering customers and driving loyalty had become seamless on a single data platform. We were building use cases that used real-time engagements from customers and found that we effortlessly could pair it with other data sources using Data Cloud’s resolution abilities. The result of our efforts led to a 33% increase in order conversion for our client, and 40% increase in product views across key categories.
The best part? We are just getting started.
Salesforce Personalization in action
See how you can scale 1:1 personalization with agents that autonomously adjust experiences to deliver the right outcome for your customer and business.
