Gone are the days when sellers were considered the most influential driving force in the realm of retail. With time and modernization, the retail industry has dynamically changed. Today the modern customers don’t want to be sold to; rather they like to be engaged.
According to a report by Salesforce, around 70% of consumers have become in charge of their consumer journey. The smart consumers of the present time become aware of products through means outside of retailer or brand communication.
In another State of Commerce Report, it has been revealed that around 66% of big retailers had replaced the physical shopping experience with digital.
Seeing the inclination of consumers towards the digital way of purchasing, companies are now investing 88% more in enhancing the digital experience of their consumers. The experts are calling this phenomenon – shopping at the edge.
To help the retail industry in building strong customer relationships and to help retail companies to target, track, and analyze every customer at the right time in a unified manner, Salesforce brings Marketing Cloud.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud and the Retail Industry
Listed among the most important products by Salesforce, the Marketing Cloud is an interesting platform that enables brands interaction with the current and potential customers across the channels in a highly personalized manner.
A retail brand has to work on multiple tasks to keep running the operation, and while doing so, they often face certain challenges like high operational cost, unavailability of goods, glitches in transportation and many more.
To eradicate such problems, Salesforce has introduced the ecosystem of marketing cloud integration services.
For the retail industry, the Salesforce marketing cloud comes as a boon. It has empowered businesses to influence their customers in a more conceivable manner.
Let’s learn more about the Salesforce marketing cloud.
What is Marketing Cloud and Its Multiple Tool?
Known as the feature-rich marketing automation platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps businesses increase their customer engagement and improve the personalized experience across multiple channels like social, web, mobile, emails, etc.
Some of the most amazing tools of this platform that you can leverage during Salesforce marketing cloud integration service are as follows:
Journey Builder – It helps companies to build a well-planned & personalized journey of their clients at different stages of the campaign and via different channels.
Social Studio – This tool by marketing cloud helps brands to create and run personalized social campaigns. They can easily convert fans on social media into highly converting leads.
Email Studio – It is a tool that creates and send a personalized marketing email campaign with engaging messages that helps brands establish a one-to-one connection with customers.
Mobile Studio – It helps retail brands leverage personalized mobile interactions through SMS, push notifications, etc., on the basis of events, location, and proximity. Hire a Salesforce marketing cloud integration service provider to learn more about the mobile studio.
Audience Studio – Brands from the retail industry strengthen consumer relationships across every touchpoint through robust data management platforms. Retailers can keep all the data of their audience in one place, and help you achieve social listening objectively.
Interaction Studio – It is a framework that enables retail brands to visualize, manage, and track customers’ experiences in real-time and establish communication across every touchpoint in a personalized manner.
Data Studio – It works as a premier data ecosystem that helps retail brands to bolster their marketing strategies. From audience discovery to data acquisition and data provisioning, the data studio offers all. Discover and leverage high-quality audiences at scale through Salesforce marketing cloud consulting services.
The tools mentioned above make the ecosystem of Marketing Cloud complete. A business from the retail industry can hire a Salesforce consulting company and take advantage of Salesforce marketing cloud tools.
Not only can you garner customer loyalty but also, build a strong and personalized relationship with your customers with Salesforce marketing cloud implementation services. There are many more benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud for the retail industry.
Best Advantages of Salesforce Marketing Cloud for Retail Industry
Multi-Channel Messaging
Salesforce Marketing Cloud or, as it is called SFMC, allows businesses to build customer journeys that have SMS and email messaging included for seamless business-customer communication.
A retail business can use a multi-channel messaging feature for many use cases, such as –
- Communication with customers for services and support is one of the most prominent use cases, wherein a company uses SMSs to communicate with their consumers in real-time and letting them know updates related to their support/service, new launch, closure, etc.
- Multi-channel communication also comes in handy for retail businesses when they have to communicate with their clients after their purchase. For example, shipment status emails, package delivered status, review emails, etc.
- SMSs and email communication is also executed by businesses to communicate their financial status, such as loans, credit, etc.
Better Client Understanding
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is backed up by the power of Einstein Analytics that helps you build precise customer profiles based on all the important data of customers collected through an online marketing place. It is the data that tells about the behaviour of customers related to your goods.
Whenever a customer goes through an online marketplace, browses your website or connects with your brand through any medium, SFMC collects the data and helps you understand their needs in the best way possible.
Then there is predictive intelligence that will empower the retail industry to create and send personalized emails to customers.
Do you know that email personalization has a 6 times higher conversation rate?
Better Customer Segmentation
One of the important benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud for retail businesses is the segmentation of consumers. Salesforce understands the importance of customer bifurcation, and so it empowers the retail industry to plan their customer experience and marketing strategies with streamlined and managed customer segmentation.
Some of the popular segmentation services that Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers are as follows: Segmentation on the basis of demographics, segmentation on the basis of geography, segmentation on the basis of customer behaviour, segmentation on the basis of spending habits of customers, and many more.
When a business learns so many things about its customer, it will become easy for it to design a separate customer journey with personalized email, SMS, or any sort of communication.
Team Collaboration
Now the retail businesses can focus more on customer-centred goals. Thanks to the advanced technology of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud that empowers businesses to build seamless cooperation between the in-house teams such as sales, operations and marketing.
Outstanding Customer Support
The world retail industry is highly dynamic. Customers can easily switch to competitors if not catered to properly. According to the connected shoppers’ report by Salesforce, around 79% of shoppers accept have personalized offers based on their purchase history.
With the key of Salesforce Marketing Cloud on their side, retail companies can unlock the doors of excellent customer service that brings greater success.
There are different tools such as AI analytics, Chatbots, and other automation features that empower retail businesses to solve customer issues rapidly, efficiently, and in real-time.
Customer Health
Customer health is paramount in retail business, and one should never avoid or overlook this factor if they want to fully leverage Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration services.
Through SFMC, a retail company can take care of the well-being of its consumers. Through this marketing automation tool, companies can easily monitor customer reviews, their demands, and their answers on multiple channels.
A retail business can efficiently execute commands, monitor every customer’s behaviour, and send a response as private notification through the Salesforce marketing cloud.
Fecund Prediction
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform boasts of the future-oriented Einstein AI analytics technology. It empowers the retail industry by helping them understand and analyze the collected information on the basis of which they can make a precise prediction on their consumers’ next move.
The platform has infinite data collection capability, and it can process billions and trillions of data and present it to companies in the most simplistic manner.
A retail business can easily strategize its next move and forecast results with greater precision & consumer insights.
Best 5 Strategies That Empower Your Retail Business with the Marketing Cloud Integration Services
The realm of retail has evolved a lot since its inception. With it, the way consumers want to have interacted has also dynamically changed. The smart customers of the present time want to be communicated and not sold to.
And with Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration service you not only can communicate with your customer but also solve and serve clients in a more personalized and realistic manner.
Here are the top 5 Salesforce Marketing Cloud strategies for the retail industry:
- Through SFMC implementation services, you can improve your customer segmentation by using email studio. You can inform your customer about the launch of new products, notify your subscribers about the new store, re-engage with inactive subscribers, and many other exciting things that you can do with Marketing Cloud.
- Retail businesses can easily build personalized customer journeys with a journey builder. For example, you can connect your customer by analyzing their action on your online store, such as new subscriber welcome, abandoned cart, anniversary campaign, birthday campaign, time spent on a particular item, etc.
- Leverage Marketing Cloud and user retail personalization to connect with customers. Do you know that around 57% of consumers are ready to share their personal data in exchange for personalized offers and discounts?
- Another way to leverage the marketing cloud is by integrating digital commerce platforms with email marketing journeys.
- Harness the power of the live message and deliver personalized and real-time customer service.
Conclusion
Gone are the days when retail businesses were limited to the brick and mortar stores. In the present time, consumers have become smarter and they seek custom messages from companies that are tailored according to their specific requirements.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps in collecting humongous data from multiple channels, bringing it to one place, processing it, and presenting it in a legible format, so that you can strategize & formulate your marketing plan.
If you belong to a retail business and wish to simplify daily operations, then you can hire Salesforce consulting company. A professional Marketing Cloud integration service will be highly impactful and make your business future-oriented.
