Marketers use only 1-3% of the data they collect, a research scientist for a major marketing cloud recently told me. And yet data is critical to personalizing experiences, targeting offers, and boosting relevancy of communications.
Salesforce thinks it has the solution.
It’s called Einstein, the AI that Salesforce is layering throughout all its tools. Today, the company is unveiling new segmentation and multivariate testing tools driven by machine learned which, it says, dramatically increases marketing effectiveness.
“There is no such thing as a wasted signal,” Salesforce’s marketing cloud chief strategy officer Jon Suarez Davis told me yesterday. “There was a time when we would reduce the data we looked at due to limited computer space …. now we’re taking in billions of digital signals and unifying that around audiences.”
Naturally, since the puny intelligence of merely mortal humans can barely review hundreds of customer datapoints — never mind billions or even millions — artificial intelligence is required.
“Technology is the only way,” says Davis.
The goal is simple: surfacing insights from how consumers browse, what they do in an app, what offers they tend to click on, and which products they ignore, and using it to craft a brand’s communications and marketing. And, of course, since a marketing cloud is just part of what Salesforce does, continue to absorb and utilize the learnings through the sales, service, commerce, and post-ownership periods.
Just because technology is the only way, however, doesn’t mean that humans are unnecessary, or will be assimilated, Borg-style.
Quite the contrary.
“There’s no black box … machine learning is the way we surface the insights, but humans will take the insights that Einstein surfaces,” Davis told me. “Humans come in and understand what to do with those insights.”
But the machine does one other thing that humans cannot: respond in real-time to thousands or even millions of virtually simultaneous customers. In other words, manage one-to-many communications in a personalized way.
That’s largely driven by what research firm Forrester calls “mobile moments,” those instants of customer attention that are increasingly driven by smartphones and which brands need to treat like gold. Each is an opportunity to serve, to delight, to provide, and to engage.
Ultimately, of course, to sell.
“The whole goal is to drive growth,” says Davis. “Increasingly that growth is dependent on engaging right in the moment that they need information … this allows marketers to visualize and analyze real-time interactions on real-time digital channels as well as offline channels.”
Visualize and analyze, sure, but also to suggest next steps.
The new AI capabilities are being released along with new functionality in IoT (Internet of Things), Davis added.
Increasingly, smart objects populate our world.
While now they’re mostly smartphones and smart speakers, eventually, everything in our world will be smart, connected, and communicative — something I call “smart matter.”
Making something smart fundamentally changes the relationship between a customer and a brand, because it changes our experience of a product. Data flows from our use of a Sonos speaker or a Nest thermostat, for instance, and manufacturers now have the opportunity to enhance and improve their product after shipping it.
Tesla software updates, for instance, significantly enhance the car’s self-driving capability.
Salesforce wants to help brands analyze this kind of data, which is key to the customer experience, and key to marketers understanding who their customers are, how they use the products a manufacturer produces, and what they might want in the future.
Partially to enable this kind of future, Salesforce is futher integrating its service cloud and commerce cloud, the company says, as well as tying its commerce cloud closer to the marketing cloud.
“For our customers it’s critical that the marketing commerce and service are engaging with all the connected devices to deliver more relevant and engaging messages,” Davis said. “The key theme is integration: the customer is at the center as we integrate marketing and commerce all the way through to transactions, purchase, and service.”
Importantly, in this age of GDPR and heightened privacy concerns, Salesforce says this is using first-party data — the data that a brand has gotten directly from a customer and received explicit permission to use.
