Enabling Customer Experiences that Drive Brand Loyalty & Repeat Business with Salesforce

With the relatively recent launches of both Salesforce Data Cloud and Salesforce Loyalty Management – both of which are components of the larger Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) platform – there has been a lot of interest from clients and prospects alike in how each of these tools can help their business. This blog will explain the benefits of each tool and then outline use cases on how to leverage both solutions to deliver value to your customers while enhancing your business offerings and bottom line.

Salesforce Data Cloud

Even though the CDP space is not entirely homogenous, the basic function of any CDP is to connect disparate data sources to leverage the data from all business systems. A CDP accomplishes this through a combination of rules that primarily handle identity management. So, with a CDP, when you identify a person in one database, like your eCommerce order system, you can have a high degree of certainty that it is the same person in other databases, such as your digital or direct marketing databases. The net result is a system of truth that covers a broad amount of data that used to be a challenge to tie together. Once you have this source of truth, you can start delivering the experiences customers have come to expect. Those experiences will drive brand loyalty and repeat business, critical to the long-term success of any organization.

Salesforce Data Cloud, while creating this system of truth your organization needs, also delivers in other functional areas that marketers have identified as critical to retaining existing business and driving new business, including simplified customer segmentation and campaign activation. Combining these areas will further improve your personalization efforts while also increasing the relevancy of your message.

Simplified customer segmentation is just as it sounds – an easier way for marketers to identify customers in different categories and maintain their profile as they move from one category to another. For example, a user may start out only interested in a brand but with no experience. As they purchase more products from the brand and even become an advocate of the brand, they will move through different segments that the brand marketer has created. The purpose of this segmentation is to be able to deliver the right offers and messaging to the customers in that segment. But, as mentioned in this example, customers don’t always stay in the same bucket. Each type of persona that a customer evolves into requires different experiences to either keep them engaged or help them move to a grouping that yields more revenue.

Campaign activation is also fairly straightforward – once a customer has been placed into a segment, Salesforce Data Cloud can automatically activate them for any number of campaigns powered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud. As the consumer evolves into different personas, they can move into appropriate SFMC campaigns, as well. These are powerful and automatic tools for a marketer to leverage.

Salesforce Loyalty Management

The loyalty platform space is like most other niche areas — it features a lot of disparate systems that have been around for a long time. In the ecosystem, different platforms are available that cater to specific industries like lodging, restaurant and retail for example. Often, these systems were developed as an add-on to a reservation or point-of-sale system. The focus was not to develop one integrated system that includes all customer data and related systems that a business may have. This leads to disparity in data due to siloed systems and information.

Salesforce Loyalty Management is an exciting new option on the market that looks to address this gap. Built from the ground up by some of the leading experts in the customer loyalty space, Salesforce Loyalty Management can further several goals for your organization, including capturing important first-party data and delivering exceptional experiences and rewards to loyal customers. An important feature of Salesforce Loyalty Management is that it lives in the same platform as your other Salesforce tools, making it easier to integrate your loyalty efforts into your existing Salesforce processes and marketing strategies. Another key feature of Salesforce Loyalty Management is its intuitive user interface that makes it easy for program managers to administer their loyalty program. Built-in reporting allows you to track performance of both the program as a whole, as well as what program members are doing.

Salesforce Data Cloud + Loyalty Management

So, what can be done with Salesforce Data Cloud and Salesforce Loyalty Management together? EPAM recently finished an engagement with a world leading sunglass manufacturer and retailer Maui Jim. Maui Jim was looking to create a 360-degree view of its customers, which would enable the company to better segment and target unique audiences. In addition, its legacy marketing platform did not provide the essential capabilities needed to automate its loyalty programs – previously managed via spreadsheets. To modernize its environment and help the sunglass manufacturer operate more efficiently, EPAM implemented three key pieces of technology: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Data Cloud and Salesforce Loyalty Management. Salesforce Data Cloud provided crucial functionality that enabled Maui Jim to integrate its B2B database, as well as its website into Salesforce Marketing Cloud to create personalized 1:1 experiences. Loyalty Management was layered into this B2B solution, giving Maui Jim better visibility to enable the company to properly reward its best customers.

It is important to note that the tools alone did not make Maui Jim’s efforts successful. The implementation process for these platforms was the catalyst for the sunglass manufacturer to clean up its data, develop a more data-centric culture internally and review its current ways of working. To get the most out of platforms like Salesforce Data Cloud and Salesforce Loyalty Management, you need to have an open mind to change and the infrastructure to support it.