What is Salesforce commerce cloud and the benefits of using it?

With the different Salesforce commerce clouds, companies can create integrated procurement processes to align them between Marketing and Sales.

Table of content

• What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
• Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Customer acquisition integrating Pardot, Social Studio, Service Cloud, Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud
• Considerations for Optimizing Customer Engagement Using the Salesforce Ecosystem
• Conclusion

What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?

With the latest generation of artificial intelligence integrated into Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you will be able to customize the order in which your products appear, predict the purchasing behaviour of your customers, suggest promotions and discounts, etc., allowing you to take intelligent actions for your strategy.

Benefits of SalesforceCommerce Cloud

• Boost e-commerce with the world's number 1 CRM.

Boost every interaction with artificial intelligence, the best applications, and tools to personalize your e-commerce. Connect the customer experience by sharing all your data in one integrated platform.

• Get personalized information from each client.

Improve your conversion rate by creating personalized shopping experiences. Get more real information about each of your clients with the integration of the areas of sales, services, marketing, commerce, and IT.

Customer acquisition integrating Salesforce Cloud

With the different Salesforce clouds, companies can create integrated procurement processes to align them between Marketing and Sales. This entails having an operating model and governance of marketing with sales, which requires alignment between all areas that impact the customer experience: marketing, sales, IT, marketing agencies, community management and customer service, including internal or external call centres.

The acquisition processes involve the management of Inbound Marketing, the use of social networks, digital marketing, SEO / SEM, social ads, nurturing and scoring rules, contact management, and their opportunities, and customer journeys for onboarding and upselling.

Considerations for Optimizing Customer Engagement Using the Salesforce Ecosystem

In order to integrate the different Salesforce clouds, the following important considerations must be considered to implement customer acquisition processes.

• Data Quality: Have a data profiling on the most important customer data: Name, Surname, Telephone numbers, Emails, Addresses, and Country. Have data quality rules between all clouds to keep it at a high percent. Tools on the AppExchange can help with data quality management.
• Customer Data Model across all clouds: Identification of Consumers vs Businesses using Person Accounts (B2C), Business Accounts (B2B) or other methods. The hierarchy between contacts and deals using roles and types of relationships. Standardize the different types of communications: objects to maintain multiple emails, telephones, addresses, and other contact methods. For example, you can use JavaScript in Pardot (Landing Pages), AMPScript in Cloud Pages of the Marketing Cloud, and business rules in Sales Cloud or Service Cloud to manage data quality.
• Duplicate Management: Use of duplicate rules to identify duplicate contacts between clouds based on the data model. Aside from the Salesforce duplicate functionality, tools on the AppExchange can assist with handling duplicates.
• Contact Preferences: have the contact preferences synchronization (Opt-In / Opt-Out) between the different clouds. Pardot and Marketing Cloud have their processes for managing Opt-In / Opt-Out in their different preference centers and their synchronization methods with the Sales Cloud.
• Using the Lead Object (Leads / Candidates) vs Contacts: Pardot offers the opportunity to sync Contacts. If the company has brands with consumers (B2C) and with companies (B2B), you should consider not using leads and handling everything with the object of contacts using Person Accounts and Business Accounts or a method of identifying these 2 types of contacts.
• Management of different brands: Pardot and Marketing Cloud offer the functionality of Business Units and the Sales Cloud (or Service Cloud) has options to manage divisions, record types, and hierarchies of permissions and roles of the company to be able to have in a single instance multiple brands or business units. Social Studio uses Workspaces instead of the Business Units concept. They also have to consider whether different email and Internet domains are needed for each brand or business unit.
• Definition of Buyer Personas: the criteria for creating Buyer Personas must be based on a database, which is already in the Sales Cloud and the Service Cloud. Pardot and Marketing Cloud data and functionality should be used as well. Social Studio has listening functionality that helps in this definition as well. Apart from using the data from the different Salesforce clouds, you must use audience data from digital ads and SEO techniques.
• Have a Campaign structure and governance:

Social Studio does not have a campaign concept. Marketing Cloud has the functionality to synchronize campaigns via Data Streams with Sales Cloud for use in Journeys, but it is not like the synchronization between Pardot and Sales Cloud that synchronizes everything in the campaign using "Connected Campaigns". With the use of Sales Cloud campaigns via integration and manual processes, a campaign structure and governance can be managed using approvals, hierarchies, costs, dates, metrics, and any other type of campaign criteria. The important thing is to be able to have a campaign government for its planning, development, execution, and measurement.

• Use of Campaign Members: With the use of "Campaign Members" in the Sales Cloud you can measure the "performance" of the campaigns for the contact, account, and opportunity. Even though the opportunities can have a primary campaign, multiple campaigns can be related (Campaign Influence) and thus know that other types of campaigns supported the sale.
• Synchronization model between Pardot and Sales Cloud: Not every contact that enters via a campaign to Pardot must synchronize with Sales Cloud. You must have scored and nurturing rules so that when a contact is a Marketing Qualified Contact and synchronizes with Sales Cloud. Likewise, not every contact in Sales Cloud needs to sync with Pardot. Via selective permission rules between Pardot and Sales Cloud, it must be defined which contact synchronizes to Pardot.

Conclusion

Enhance the capability of your marketing department and marketing team by integrating Salesforce marketing cloud into their operational processes. We can assist you with the integration of all Salesforce solutions so that you can take your business to the next level. Enjoy all the benefits of the Salesforce marketing cloud.

Author Bio:

HarnilOza is CEO of Hyperlink InfoSystem, a leading mobile app development company. At offices in both USA and India, his team comprises great app developers who deliver high-quality mobile solutions, mainly for Android and iOS platforms. Harnil regularly contributes his knowledge to leading Websites.