Converting clicks to sales is a constant battle and Salesforce uses artificial intelligence to provide good marketing insights and ultimately improve sales.
Dreamforce 2019: How Salesforce uses AI to improve conversion rates and boost sales
Converting clicks to sales is a constant battle and Salesforce uses artificial intelligence to provide good marketing insights and ultimately improve sales.
TechRepublic’s editor-in-chief Bill Detwiler spoke with Chris Jacob, product marketing leader at Salesforce at Dreamforce 2019. The following is an edited transcript of the interview.
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Chris Jacob: Our marketing solution consists of four core components and we believe in every marketing solution, knowing your customer, personalizing what the customer sees through artificial intelligence, being involved in every channel and analyzing, to ensure that you know that you are successful in optimizing . We have one or two important announcements in each of those four areas. A big announcement is our product called Customer 360 Audiences. Part of the general Customer 360 Truth announcement we made in our opening address. Customer 360 Audiences in fact gives marketers the opportunity to bring the known and unknown worlds together in a uniform profile for the marketer, so that they can then personalize and activate target group segments that are relevant to their business.
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I might want to activate for a certain group who, for example, want to respond to a certain Black Friday offer. It is attractive for a certain SKU or whatever. That is Customer 360 Audiences, so marketers gain insight through this known and unknown uniform profile and can activate that data in segments.
For the personalized perspective, we are increasing our investment in Einstein and AI, and we have three great announcements that we will present in the marketing keynote: Einstein Messaging Insights, Einstein Copy Insights and Einstein Content Selection. In short, Einstein gives message insights to marketers, when they log in to their marketing cloud console in the morning, to gain insights into things that have happened and things that I may need to take action on. For example, I launched a campaign the previous day, Messaging Insights says: “Oh, the open rate was 30% lower or 30% lower than the comparable campaign last quarter or last year. And it was lower because the subject line was wrong or incorrect. “
That is important because suddenly all this data comes together, artificial intelligence, not just to tell you that something is wrong, but why it is wrong. What is next that Einstein can do? It can then tell you what to do to fix it. That is what Einstein Copy Insights is. Okay, the subject line was the problem, what should I do about it? Einstein Copy Insights tells me exactly what I should change it to, the words and sentences that I should use to improve the open rate. It is actually starting to use artificial intelligence, not just to warn you about what’s wrong, but also to give you the corrective action to fix it. And then Einstein Content Selection, probably my personal favorite of the three personalization announcements, the ability to not only recommend Einstein and AI the content displayed in an email, so the email you received versus the email -mail I received, but also that content changed in real time based on involvement.
Suppose we were both part of a campaign, we both received an email, and I opened that email on the first day because I had nothing to do. You’re a busy man, Bill, who doesn’t open you until day three. Based on all those people who opened the email on the first day or earlier, we may or may not participate in the offers contained in that email. When you finally get the time to open that same email and day three, that offer, that hero image may have changed in real time because we were all involved or not, did not respond to that offer. So it makes no sense to show you something that is not relevant to you and did not involve the previous audience, so personally in real time.
Bill Detwiler: Is there some real-time AB testing that can happen?
Chris Jacob: Yes, just right. Yet, based on you and who you are, you don’t want an irrelevant offer, but also taking into account all these people who have previously been involved with that content, it is very, very powerful.
That is a personal announcement. With Engage, our big announcement is interactive email. I think we all know in marketing that when you do a conversion rate funnel, things always fall away. I receive an e-mail, I click on the landing page, the conversion rate drops. If you fill in the form, the conversion rate drops. When you purchase the product, go to the shopping cart page, and so on, there is always a drop-off at every step. Interactive e-mail brings all that power into the e-mail itself. This means that I do not have to leave the e-mail to take action. I can embed reviews, I can embed forms, I can embed a SKU of product selection, all in the email itself. This means that I never have to leave the email to go to a landing page or anywhere else to complete the promotion or for the brand to get that information. So we think it will be very, very exciting. I personally think that this is probably the biggest thing that e-mail comes across as a channel, since the smartphone itself changes the form factor of e-mails. We think it will be very attractive, and hopefully it will improve conversion rates and everything else for people, and people will love it.
And then we analyze the important part of knowing whether you are successful or not and we undertake Datorama Marketplace. Datorama Marketplace is actually the possibility to build applications on top of Datorama, so that it is suitable for your company. For example, you can build skills that are based on things like voice or things that are suitable for the industry. In the marketing keynote we are going to share the ability to use Amazon Alexa with Datorama, retrieve the dashboard using voice and then get insights back, that is, “One of my best performing channels”, and then comes a dashboard and show me the best performing channels for a particular campaign. It gives marketers a different interface to communicate, not just with their hands and fingers.
Bill Detwiler: That is really the theme here at Dreamforce this year, is voice and the announcements around it. Talk a bit more about how it makes a more natural interaction. Maybe then, as you said, using your hands, being able to come in in the morning and get the information you need to make a decision without having to follow, typing many questions, understanding how to communicate, waiting for someone else who has the information to contact you and tell you, “Oh, this subject line is better than this,” or “This is why this campaign is underperforming,” or “This is my best performing campaign in the last few months or in the last few weeks. “As someone who really does this for my company, as someone who works with our audience to try to find out:” Hey look, is this story a good story? Is this one -mail a good e-mail that we sent? Is this tweet a good tweet? ” Be able to sit down and say, “Alexa, tell me about this.” That’s pretty powerful.
Chris Jacob: It is powerful. I think we all, you and I are now having a voice conversation, it is so natural that this is how we communicate. I think none of us working in this industry is surprised at how fast the voice has grown. So many of us have Amazon Echos and Google Homes. We use Siri, Apple’s Home Pod and all other devices that have speech enabled. We have adopted this en masse in the consumer world. And this includes all generations, right? I think what you saw yesterday with the announcements is very normal for many of those options, that voice finds its way into the business world, right? Things often start in the consumer world and end in the business world. Why should an organization or account sales representative not be able to ask, “Will I probably make my quarter? What does Einstein tell me about my ability to make my number? What recommended action should I take?” Can I do that instead of just looking at it in a standard interface?
And then the second part is because we know that we cannot build everything, giving developers the opportunity to build their own skills that are relevant to their own business and make it interoperable. Because voice is not just about having a closed ecosystem. If you use Alexa and you use Siri, you have the Einstein and Salesforce capabilities with speech to work with those devices. That is why I am so enthusiastic about it, because the possibilities are endless.
I don’t know where it’s going, you probably know better than me, Bill. But being able to give business people the power of voice in their interface, whether it’s querying the database in a CRM use case, querying their database in a marketing use case, I think it’ll be super powerful to be. The service interaction, getting things transcribed in real time, AI service and recommendations, that service agent to give a little experience to the people who call the call center. It has so many options and I’m just excited to see where it goes. Hopefully people were excited about what they saw yesterday, I was sure, and we’ll see where that goes.
Bill Detwiler: Talk to me a bit about the kind of feedback you get from people who helped you on your way to integrate voice to make some of these changes. From your customers, what are they looking for in marketing, the tools they used to bring and reach their customers?
Chris Jacob: I think it comes back to the first principles in many ways, right? In the end, our goals are almost the same, right? I want to increase the turnover, increase the conversion ratio, the open prices at channel level, the lifelong value, net promoter scores, increase customer satisfaction. All those things are still important. And so, when we think about what we do, we still put those end goals into operation. If voice is now a limit that makes that end goal possible, I make someone more likely to take advantage of a marketing campaign offer and it makes a marketer more efficient at running his business, and she is just more powerful at being able to do what they do daily at the office. Then that should be somewhere, right? Just like the introduction of touch a generation ago, well, a technological generation ago.
Voice is just another mechanism, another medium, another limit to enable someone to do something, either for the consumer at the brand or with the marketer running the campaign or the salesperson running his business. And that’s how we viewed it for everyone. Can we make that professional better at work, and does this improve the customer experience for their brand? To their end customer, business buyer or end customer? And so we went there with it. As I said, we are clear in the early days of it all and it is interesting to see where it is going. But we hope that because we have made it into an open ecosystem, developers can use it to build their own customized solutions to see what is appropriate for their business and ultimately what their end customers tell them they want and need. And their internal employees tell them what they want and need.
Bill Detwiler: In addition to speech, something that is always important for making useful decisions about all this data and integrating what you do with AI, talk to me about visualizations. Talk to me about just being able to visually paint a photo so that people can see: “OK, well Einstein told me to do this in an email.” Salesforce, one of the major acquisitions it has recently made, of course, and it is being integrated into the platform to provide this type of visualization and that information that Marketing Cloud can deliver to people in an individual way. How does that work
Chris Jacob: Yes, I think visualizations are interesting because you have two types of visualization. You have the visualizations that give you insights, i.e. the graphs, the graphs, the trends, all that stuff. And voice can be a mechanism that takes you there. Artificial intelligence can evoke insights that are much harder for someone to do manually, even a team of data scientists to do manually. You can just do things more efficiently and on a larger scale. Especially with all contact points that are available. So that is a form of visualization.
The other gives professionals visual clues about what to do and do. So think like the next best offer: if I am that person on the other side of that service request, and this is a service request problem, and Einstein tells me: “You know what, you need to talk to them about this specific offer. This helps maybe not just to resolve the situation, but also make them buy something else from you. “That’s really powerful, right? Because suddenly that service agent is not just a cost center, but now also a profit center for the company. And all you have to do is use AI to bring up an offer that that person can see in his console and can communicate back in. To be able to do that on a large scale, the service employee must not only be authorized to that technology, but also the service employee connected to the marketing side of the company, because the offers are mostly generated from marketing, which is where it comes back to that idea of ​​a unified profile. he company must have access to that uniform profile, but maintain it in a way that is relevant to them. A service employee needs offers to talk to the person, the marketer needs content and an AI service to generate insights and support the next campaign.
Bill Detwiler, left, spoke with Chris Jacob from Salesforce about new AI concepts.
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