Salesforce has announced Marketing Cloud Lightning—a new user experience, platform and ecosystem that the company says will give marketers the ability to create 1-to-1 customer journeys that span sales, service, marketing and more.
Salesforce Lightning propelled Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to the next level, and by extending it to Marketing Cloud, companies will be able to deliver smarter journeys across the entire Customer Success Platform, culminating in unmatched customer experiences. In addition, the company announced Marketing Cloud for Google Customer Match, the latest innovation in its ongoing strategic partnership with Google, which marketers can use to deploy CRM-powered advertising across Google Search, YouTube and Gmail.
Today’s connected customers expect personalized, seamless experiences whether they’re receiving a promotional offer via SMS or querying a service department via a tweet—they want brands to meet their needs, on their terms.
As the lines between sales, service and marketing continue to blur, marketers are taking a leadership role in delivering a unified customer experience. In fact, according to Salesforce’s recent 2016 State of Marketing report, the majority of high-performing marketing teams (58 percent) are driving customer experience initiatives across the business, compared to 8 percent of underperformers. To accomplish this, marketers need a new platform that enables them to deliver a consistent brand experience across every touch point, regardless of channel or device.
Next-Generation Customer Experiences
The new Marketing Cloud Lightning will offer a modern and intelligent user experience across any device, enabling marketers to work faster and smarter, and deliver better results. With common Salesforce identity and navigation, marketers will now be able to work seamlessly across the entire Customer Success Platform—streamlining processes that span marketing, sales, service or other departments and enabling more comprehensive, integrated customer journeys.
Marketing Cloud Lightning also includes new Lightning Components—the reusable building blocks for assembling apps with drag-and-drop ease—enabling companies to develop and customize new business apps that meet their unique needs, leveraging the combined capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, custom apps and now Marketing Cloud.
Salesforce will deliver Lightning Components ranging from core email functionality, like previewing emails and tracking email open rates, to journey capabilities, like automatically adding a lead or contact to a journey and reviewing the journey history of a specific lead or contact. In addition, customers will be able to use third-party components built by Salesforce partners and available from the Salesforce AppExchange.
With new Predictive Journeys technology, Salesforce says marketers will be able to use data science to analyze information from the web like browsing activity and purchase history, along with all of their Salesforce data, like service hold times, customer satisfaction scores and email marketing campaign performance, to anticipate customer behavior and ultimately drive business results.
The Marketing Cloud Lightning Experience and the first set of Marketing Cloud Lightning Components are expected to be in preview the latter half of 2016. The new experience will be included at no additional cost in every Marketing Cloud edition, which starts at $400 per month.
Predictive Journeys, including Predictive Scoring and Audiences, is currently in beta and will be included for accounts with the Salesforce Marketing Enterprise edition and available to Pro and Corporate editions with the Advanced Data & Analytics package at a $0.10 per contact rate.