Salesforce customers put their customers at the center of everything they do. How? With data, of course. But let’s face it: Most organizations are struggling to keep up with customer data.
As an admin, you know this from experience. Your company uses data from many different sources, like point-of-sale, CRM, and ecommerce. You have numerous data sources, such as data warehouses, data lakes, and various systems of record. Not to mention the differences between structured and unstructured data.
Unifying this data and creating a single source of truth for your customers is a challenge in and of itself. Thankfully, Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP) is here to help you do exactly that.
The Salesforce CDP unified profile has immediate benefits! Customer service agents receive insight into customer lifetime value, loyalty status, and recent orders. By acting on this information, service agents can deliver better customer experiences, drive higher CSAT, and retain customers longer.
But the work (and the value) doesn’t end with a unified customer profile. This additional detail is valuable for marketers. They can filter these profiles to better understand, target, and analyze their customers. This is called segmentation. In most organizations marketing users can (and probably should) configure, publish, and activate segments. If you’re asked to configure the segments yourself, you’ll want to partner closely with a marketer at your company. Make sure to host a discovery session and thoroughly explore the use case, the data you’ll need to include, the desired outcome, and how the effort will be measured. Share regular updates with marketers and empower them to clearly articulate if the segment is working for their needs. Let’s take a look at the power of segmentation with a use case.
Maria is the #AwesomeAdmin at Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), a global retailer. NTO has recently implemented Salesforce CDP and Maria has finished creating unified profiles for her customers. NTO marketers are excited! They know they can provide customers with more personalized and relevant campaigns with a unified profile. But they need help. Marketers need to group these customers into different segments, to ensure they’re sending the right message to the right customer at the right time.
This means NTO will need to segment, publish, and activate its audiences. Let’s take a look at how an NTO marketer does this with Salesforce CDP.
Note: This article assumes Maria has already set up Salesforce CDP and assigned permissions by following this guide. If you have questions regarding Salesforce CDP implementation or visibility, be sure to review the guide first.
Now, an exciting use case! Let’s go!
Alex, an NTO marketer, logs in to Salesforce and starts work in the Salesforce CDP app. On the Segment tab, she reviews the segments currently in her org.
Alex wants to market a new shoe to loyalty program members. So, she clicks New and names her segment. She makes sure to choose her unified customer data as her data source. Then, she schedules how often this segment should be published, or updated, and clicks Save.
Now, Alex can filter with any attribute from her unified data. For the sneaker launch, she wants to target customers with a few criteria. They should be NTO loyalty members with a lifetime value of over $100. Additionally, these customers should have browsed shoes on the NTO website at least once.
There are also some customers Alex wants to filter out. If the customers have made a purchase in the last 30 days or have an open case, they shouldn’t be included in the segment. Lastly, because NTO marketers will use this segment in an email campaign, they don’t want to include any customers that have received an email engagement in the last 7 days.
Because Salesforce CDP is a part of… well, Salesforce, Alex can configure all of this in a familiar interface. She need only drag an attribute onto the canvas, specify her criteria, and move on to the next filter! After a few clicks, she has all her filters in place.
The coolest part? She can see the difference in the size of her audience. When she started, it was over 21 million customers. Now? It’s just over 85,000. That’s a huge difference! These customers will find the NTO sneaker launch to be relevant and are much more likely to buy.
Now that Alex has segmented the audience and scheduled how frequently she would like to publish the audience, it’s time to activate the audience.
Activation is the process of moving the segment to an activation target, like Marketing Cloud. That’s precisely what Alex wants to do so she can use the segment in Journey Builder just in time for the sneaker launch.
First, she creates a new activation from the Activation tab. Then, she chooses her segment and activation target, Marketing Cloud.
Then, she needs to choose which contact points should be part of this activation, such as email address or phone number.
Alex configures and saves her activation. She can easily publish it to Marketing Cloud, where it will become available as a data extension. Now, she can use it in NTO’s new sneaker launch journey!
You and your marketing partners can segment audiences using Salesforce CDP to drive engagement, lift revenue, boost CSAT, and help your agents and other marketers better understand your customers. It’s also part of the core Salesforce Platform, so configuration will feel familiar and intuitive. So, what are you waiting for? Start learning Salesforce CDP right now!
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