Salesforce updates Commerce Cloud, rolls out Einstein AI dashboard, Order Management platform

January 13, 2020 • Salesforce, Updates

Salesforce has updated its commerce APIs and added a Mulesoft Accelerator to its Commerce Cloud for faster integrations. It also announced a new dashboard to track performance for its Einstein AI-powered recommendation system and released a Salesforce Order Management solution for e-commerce teams on Monday.

The announcements came during the kick-off for NRF 2020, the National Retail Foundation’s annual conference.

New Einstein AI dashboard. The new dashboard within Cloud Commerce reporting shows how Einstein AI-powered product recommendations are performing within a company’s storefront platform.

“Einstein AI dashboard provides near real-time metrics so merchandisers have actionable information the need across sites, storefront pages and custom date-ranges,” Salesforce said.

Improvements to commerce APIs and Commerce Cloud. Salesforce’s updates to its commerce APIs and Commerce Cloud solution are designed to help shorten the production process for custom commerce apps built on Salesforce’s platform and aim to help marketers and e-commerce teams, “Reach shoppers at any touch point.”

Salesforce added the Mulesoft Accelerator to Commerce Cloud to “jump-start” commerce solution integrations. The Mulesoft Accelerator comes with pre-built templates for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and product information management (PIM).

A Salesforce Order Management platform. Salesforce said the new solution “bridges the gap” between physical and digital channels, connecting and automating fulfillment and customer service processes.

The platform works with Salesforce’s mobile POS partners Mad Mobile, NewStore and PredictSpring.

A community-driven initiative for developers. Salesforce has also launched a Commerce Cloud Developer Center to create a “community” for those building e-commerce APIs. The center will provide resources, best practices and a way for API developers to engage with others in the field. It will also include developer toolkits and sample apps.

Why we care. Salesforce’s latest updates are aimed at providing more holistic commerce martech solutions, from the Order Management platform that offers a unified view of the commerce experience to enhanced commerce APIs to faster app development and easier integrations with Commerce Cloud and finally to the additional layer of e-commerce analytics with the Einstein AI dashboard.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

Salesforce reports 33% YoY growth in third-quarter results

December 6, 2019 • Reports, Salesforce

Global CRM provider Salesforce announced its third-quarter fiscal results this week, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) reported another record-breaking quarter. The company’s total third-quarter revenue reached $4.5 billion, representing an increase of 33% year-over-year.

Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff pointed to Customer 360 Truth, expanded strategic partnerships with their competitors and the company’s streak of acquisitions as drivers of growth. Benioff also cited the company’s commitment to helping its customers undergo digital transformations.

“On the heels of Dreamforce, Salesforce’s plan to continue expanding its strong product portfolio and increasing cloud adoption within its customer base creates an attractive rationale for growth, said Dustin Grosse, chief marketing and strategy officer at Nintex. “But, with competition from cloud companies like Microsoft and Amazon reporting higher than expected earnings, Salesforce must close out this year with compelling results to meet investors’ rising expectations.”

Why we should care

Organizations typically rely on dozens — if not hundreds — of martech applications and vendors to execute their sales, marketing, and other operational functions.

“We’re working with them [customers] on all three pillars of digital transformation, technology business model and culture,” added Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block during an investor relations call. “These three pillars are absolutely essential to achieving a 360-degree view of each customer, and that is the holy grail of digital transformation.”

By maintaining an open ecosystem and honoring its commitment to collaborate with partners including IBM, Amazon and Microsoft, Salesforce is able to deliver a more connected customer view to its users than platforms that strictly limit their integrations.

“We know this data is not just in Salesforce, we know our customers have many platforms. That’s why we’re open and why we work with all of our strategic partners; IBM, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple, HP, Dell, and many others,” said Benioff. “Because it’s critical for us to work with these strategic partners to deliver a working, incredible solution for our customers. That’s what our customers want. These partnerships continue to deliver incredible innovation and success.”

More on the news

Benioff also included statements regarding Salesforce’s Cyber Week performance noting that Commerce Cloud processed more than 30 million orders and powered over 614 million retail site visits. Digital sales on Commerce Cloud increased by 13% during this year’s Cyber Week
Salesforce Marketing Cloud reportedly deployed over 24 billion emails on Cyber Monday, while Service Cloud processed over 428 million agent interactions.
“We’re now on track to double our revenue in five years,” said Benioff. “WIth Customer 360, only Salesforce is providing companies with a single source of truth, bringing them even closer to their customers across every touchpoint.”

About The Author

Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media’s Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Salesforce names Microsoft Azure as public cloud provider for Marketing Cloud

November 15, 2019 • names, Salesforce

Microsoft and Salesforce have announced plans to expand their strategic partnership through the migration of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud to Microsoft Azure. The move is anticipated to allow Salesforce to optimize Marketing Cloud performance to meet increasing customer demands.

In order to support
their joint customers using Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Teams, Salesforce will
also build new integrations for its Sales and Service clouds with Teams. The
integrations will allow sales and service users to access Salesforce records directly
in Teams, and is expected to go live in late 2020.

Why we should care

Moving Salesforce
Marketing Cloud to Azure will allow the company’s customers to benefit from
Azure’s infrastructure which will help brands manage data security, privacy and
compliance requirements on a global scale.

The integration between the widely-used Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Teams can be expected to drive further collaboration across sales and service teams by increasing accessibility to data directly within the Teams app. Salesforce and Microsoft customers – like Marriott International – will be able to take advantage of improved collaboration and greater efficiency through the strategic partnership.

“Marriott has more than 7,200 properties spanning 134 countries and territories, so driving efficiency and collaboration is critical,” said Brian King, global officer, digital, distribution, revenue strategy and global sales, Marriott International. “The combination of Salesforce and Microsoft enables our teams to work better together to enhance the guest experience at every touchpoint.”

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By bringing its Marketing Cloud to Azure, Salesforce joins over 95% of Fortune 500 companies using the Azure infrastructure, which covers the most global regions of any cloud provider.
“In a world where every company is becoming a digital company, we want to enable every customer and partner to build experiences on our leading platform,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. “By bringing together the power of Azure and Microsoft Teams with Salesforce, our aim is to help businesses harness the power of Microsoft Cloud to better serve customers.”

About The Author

Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media’s Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Salesforce launches hybrid Content Management System built to integrate with other platforms

November 8, 2019 • launches, Salesforce

Salesforce launched a new content management platform on Thursday, the Salesforce Content Management System. By entering the CMS space, Salesforce aims to give content marketing teams a tool anyone can use — “from novices to experts” reads the announcement — and capable of creating personalized content powered by Salesforce CRM data.

Salesforce calls it a “hybrid” CMS, meaning users can create, manage and deliver content on the platform, and then distribute to other digital platforms not powered by Salesforce by using the company’s Experience Builder or Commerce Page designer tools.

“If you want to deliver content onto a third-party site, experience, or mobile app, you can use our headless APIs to deliver content smoothly,” writes Salesforce Community Cloud and SVP Adi Kuruganti.

Why we should care

Marketing teams already plugged into Salesforce’s CRM will now be able to create more personalized content at scale via the company’s new content management system. And, if the CMS is as user-friendly as it is being billed to be — and actually does integrate with other platforms — teams won’t be limited based on their design resources, nor will the content be restricted to the Salesforce ecosystem.

Andy Jones, a creator for NOW TV, who had early access to the CMS, said the advantages of connecting Salesforce’s CRM and CMS were immediately clear. Jones also said the platform allowed content creators to go from exposure to mastery quickly, with no need to rely on IT or design resources.

More on the news

The Salesforce Content Management System includes multi-language and translation support to localize content.
Marketing teams and creators can build “content collections” on the platform — playlists of content that can be distributed to external digital platforms.
Salesforce recently announced it had promoted Adam Blitzer as the new CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Blitzer has been with Salesforce since 2013 when it purchased his company Pardot.

About The Author

Amy Gesenhues is a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Marketing Land, Search Engine Land and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy’s articles.

Salesforce adds AI, interactive components to its email platform

October 25, 2019 • interactive, Salesforce

Salesforce has announced updates to its Marketing Cloud email solution to support new inbox functionalities provided by several major Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The new features include Salesforce’s AI solution, Einstein and interactive email capabilities that could serve as an alternative solution to AMP for Email. The interactive capabilities will be integrated from the company’s acquisition of Rebel beginning early next year.

Why we should care

Email consistently outperforms other digital channels as an ROI driver for marketers, but consumer expectations keep climbing. Studies show that personalization is a key driver of engagement and sales. Salesforce’s combination of AI-driven personalization and interactive email components could help marketers improve engagement with their campaigns.

“At
the start, marketers approached email like digital mass-mailer postcards,” said
Salesforce senior director of product management Joe Teplow. “New things
are happening. We’re seeing more and more of this functionality being supported
by email clients, where they’re jumping on the bandwagon and proposing their
own ideas for future uses. Those who aren’t forward-thinking about email can
get left behind.”

Gmail and Outlook, for example, support functions such as in-email payments, survey responses and more. Subscribers and customers can take action without ever leaving the email.

These capabilities could also add significant automation to email operations processes. Salesforce’s AI aims to improve email campaign deployment by recommending images and identifying optimal send-times, the company said. It also uses natural language processing (NLP) to automate copywriting tasks such as personalized subject lines based on customer preference data.

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Starting in early 2020, Salesforce Marketing Cloud will pilot Rebel’s integrated interactive capabilities, called Interactive Email, in Email Studio and Journey Builder.
Einstein features include Einstein Content Selection which makes automatic recommendations for visual assets for emails based on customer preferences and behaviors.
Einstein Copy Insights uses NLP to identify the optimal words for email subject lines, as well as text messages and social media copy,
Einstein Messaging Insights notifies marketers of under or overperforming messages and makes recommendations for improvements.

More about the Managed Inbox

About The Author

Jennifer Videtta Cannon serves as Third Door Media’s Senior Editor, covering topics from email marketing and analytics to CRM and project management. With over a decade of organizational digital marketing experience, she has overseen digital marketing operations for NHL franchises and held roles at tech companies including Salesforce, advising enterprise marketers on maximizing their martech capabilities. Jennifer formerly organized the Inbound Marketing Summit and holds a certificate in Digital Marketing Analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management.

Salesforce’s Datorama brings no-code approach to data

September 25, 2019 • Datorama, Salesforce

Salesforce has announced two new Datorama analytics features that are expected to help marketers bring their data preparation, analysis and visualization to new levels with a no-code approach to data. The new tools, Harmonization Center and Data Canvas, will help marketers cleanse, classify and enrich data for improved analytics and provides a platform for creating interactive dashboards for better insights. Both features are now generally available. Datorama is a part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Why we should care

The Harmonization Center is a no-code feature that will allow marketers to create consistent brand taxonomies across their siloed data sources. The no-code approach will make data harmonization more achievable for marketers without having to rely on additional technical resources. The Harmonization Center will also allow marketers to validate their data before importing it to Data Canvas to visualize it.

Data Canvas allows marketers to create dashboards to analyze, visualize and present data without needing technical or design skills.

“In order to support our diverse customer base across multiple product lines, we leverage numerous marketing platforms, all of which generate data in various forms, said Brenna Comacchio, marketing science and insights at Autodesk. “Datorama helps us democratize data across this robust marketing ecosystem and compare the success of our efforts across a multitude of marketing channels. We can centralize data across siloed environments, visualize it to uncover actionable insights, and easily share it across the organization.”

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Salesforce Datorama’s Harmonization Center includes:

Data classification: Marketers can standardize their data with preferred taxonomy. Additionally, marketers enrich their data by assigning a new list of classifications to a data set. Marketers can upload a list of attributes such as country, offer and audience and map each attribute to their campaign data.
Naming convention patterns: Enables marketers to standardize their data by detecting patterns within data to ensure consistent and accurate naming conventions.
Data hygiene score: Provides marketers with a score of how consistent and cleansed their data is.

Data Canvas allows marketers are able to access a full suite of design editing tools, a library of visualizations, unique themes. Other features include:

Datorama Marketplace integration: The Datorama Marketplace allows developers to create apps for marketers. This gives marketers access to different integrated apps for presenting and visualizing data.
AI-Powered Visualization Recommendations: Marketers will receive AI-powered visualization recommendations based on the data they are using. Datorama will suggest dashboards that will best visualize a marketer’s data set, showcasing the right levels of granularity, segmentation and exploration, such as specific date and time ranges, geos and products.

About The Author

Salesforce asserts its position in CDP space, reports another record quarter

August 23, 2019 • asserts, Salesforce