Salesforce Updates Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud

Salesforce today at its Salesforce Connections virtual event introduced a number of enhancements across its Digital 360 portfolio, with the additions mostly affecting its Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud products.

Among the biggest changes, Marketing Cloud is receiving an expanded customer data platform to deliver real-time engagement, audience segmentation, and loyalty management, while Commerce Cloud introduces new data integrations, enhanced order management, and headless commerce capabilities.

With the next generation of Marketing Cloud, marketers can get to know their customers through a single source of truth, provide artificial intelligence-powered personalization, and optimize overall marketing impact with unified analytics.

As part of that initiative, Salesforce is integrating its Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP) with Interaction Studio to analyze cross-channel brand interactions and apply Einstein AI to instantly determine and send a message, product offer or content recommendation, and with Loyalty Management give companies a real-time view of their best customers, including membership status, loyalty tier, and points balances.

Other innovations introduced today include the following:

• Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud: Powered by Datorama, Marketing Cloud's analytics offering, marketers now have direct access to email, mobile, and journey reports to analyze and optimize performance.
• Snapchat Audience Match: Marketers can now use their first-party data stored in Salesforce to create targeted, personalized advertising audiences for Snapchat.
• WhatsApp Integration: Companies can use Marketing Cloud's WhatsApp Business Solution to increase customer engagement with keyword detection, transactional messages, and more.

New technologies in Commerce Cloud will help companies identify business trends, personalize customer experiences, and connect the end-to-end commerce journey from online storefront to order management and beyond. They include the following:

• Salesforce CDP for Commerce: With Commerce Cloud data integrated into Salesforce CDP, companies get a complete view of first-party customer data across every touchpoint, providing a true single source of truth and the ability to use commerce data in cross-channel marketing.
• B2B2C Commerce: Allowing companies to launch connected, direct-to-consumer (D2C) ecommerce storefronts, capture first-party data, and connect directly with marketing, sales and service.
• Salesforce Order Management: With Omnichannel Inventory and Distributed Order Management, companies can see real-time inventory across an entire network of stores and fulfillment centers. And with the addition of Order Management capabilities for B2B, business buyers will have more transparency and control over their orders with self-service fulfillment tracking, cancellations, order modifications, and more.
• Headless PWA Kit and Managed Runtime: With the new Progressive Web Application (PWA) Kit and Managed Runtime, developers can decouple front-end and back-end technologies to create highly customized consumer-facing experiences.

Salesforce also today launched a marketer career path on Trailhead, its free online learning platform, with resources for anyone looking to start or build their marketing careers, including access to job-specific learning, a community of expert marketers, and custom learning paths to upskill for marketing career paths in email, demand generation, marketing analytics, data science, and leadership.