By Tanhaz Kamaly – Partnership Executive, UK, Dialpad UK

Consumers today expect a seamless, personalized experience across all your sales channels.

To consistently deliver this desired experience, marketing automation is the tool that your business needs. Customizing your customer journeys and attracting an endless stream of loyal brand advocates is what you’ll achieve with Salesforce in place.  

Read on to discover how to get the most from Salesforce and experience customer journey optimization success. 

Why Is Salesforce the Best Option for Customer Journey Optimization?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an enterprise marketing suite that allows your business to harness powerful tools based on templates. These templates deliver a complete view of every customer on your system. Instant call logging and integration with business-hosted VoIP services ensure that customer service representatives successfully handle customer calls. 

API integration companies and mainframe modernization can provide additional automation and integration support for your business.

Single views of customer historical data help you to understand every customer touchpoint in their journey and discover untapped pain points and opportunities to optimize these touchpoints.  It would be worthwhile adding a step in a process workflow template to remind you to evaluate and optimize customer touchpoints on a regular basis.

Touchpoints include different interactions like reading an email, buying a product or service, signing up for a subscription, downloading a whitepaper, redeeming a discount code, and clicking on an ad.  

Salesforce assists you with every stage of the customer journey, which usually addresses six key touchpoints:

• Awareness of your brand and realizing that your business offers them the solution they’re seeking. 
• Acquisition is the first interaction with your business and can include a website click, a free trial, or a form-fill exercise.
• Onboarding happens after the initial purchase of your product or service. 
• Engagement is the act of retaining your customers’ interest. It is achieved by regular email automation, specific and engaging content, and personalized offerings.  
• Retention is the phase where you must encourage your customers to stick with your business. Consider what could be missing from your interactions and services, such as a virtual phone number, to regain control of customer retention. 
• Loyalty comes from happy and satisfied customers who return to your company for repeat business and recommend you to other consumers.  

Key Features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SMC)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud encompasses application integration and automation for SMS, email, social platforms, and web technology, all in one easy-to-use interface. 

The seven steps to acing your customer journey optimization in Salesforce include the different elements of SMC, which are:

1. Journey Builder Application
2. Email Studio
3. Salesforce Audience Studio
4. Salesforce Data Studio
5. Interaction Studio
6. Social Studio
7. Advertising Studio

1. Salesforce Journey Builder

This feature within Salesforce’s dashboard allows you to create intuitive customer journeys that enhance the customer experience. Build multiple interactions based on customer preferences and behaviors for meaningful marketing insights. 

By analyzing the journeys your customers take with your brand, you can establish:

• What your customers are looking for
• How they arrive on your channel
• Typical customer profiles and behaviors
• Successful marketing campaigns 

You may need to use a combination of different journey modules within the platform to serve different customer persona purposes. This makes it easier to analyze and reiterate over time as you gather more data and insights. 

Salesforce Journey Builder helps you design the best customer journey possible to maximize the opportunity for conversions. The platform provides pre-built templates you can choose from depending on your audience profile. 

2. Email Studio 

Integrate into any department or data source with advanced email technology in Salesforce’s marketing suite. Simply personalize automated flows and make accurate predictions about customer behavior to make intuitive and timely suggestions. If your business needs to verify email accounts, email verification services are on hand to assist. 

Omnichannel automated marketing emails have never been easier to implement. 

3. Salesforce Audience Studio

This feature is a data-unifying solution that syncs with your backend as a service, communities, and sales platforms to provide meaningful insights. Salesforce Audience Studio allows you to analyze campaigns to determine the reach and effectiveness over set periods. 

4. Salesforce Data Studio

Salesforce Data Studio acts as a data-sharing platform that enables data to travel in a trusted environment and adheres to data management best practices. Buy or sell third-party data to create target personas and spread your brand’s message to a broader audience. This studio is part of your data management platform and helps you to locate more leads to nurture. 

5. Interaction Studio

Use this studio to record real-time customer actions and inherently understand what your customers are saying about your business’s brand. You can even connect offline interactions with online activities and learn how to promote your products or services to maximum effect. 

Interaction Studio captures multiple channel customer interactions to provide the best value to your customers at the most relevant time in their journey. For more suggestions on how to market your business in today’s environment, check out SME News. 

6. Social Studio

Salesforce’s Social Studio connects your business to your customers on all available social media channels. This feature encompasses publishing, engaging, listening, and analyzing content across social platforms. Track references on customer handles based on individual social media interactions. Furthermore, Einstein AI within Social Studio works to accurately track customer sentiment to reveal hidden insights previously unavailable to your business. 

7. Advertising Studio 

Advertise simultaneously on Facebook, Instagram, Google Search, YouTube, and Twitter using Advertising Studio. This feature handles customer acquisition and re-engagement to drive interactions. A combination of Salesforce Advertising Studio with Journey Builder powers coordination across multiple channels. Also, consider referral program software in conjunction with Advertising Studio for affiliate marketing requirements.

How to Get the Most Out of Salesforce Journey Builder 

The content and audiences you create in the different studios combine in Journey Builder to track customer journeys in one place. Whether your business needs promotional, re-engagement, or onboarding customer campaigns, you can create them all on this platform. 

Choose from three journey types:

• Single Send Journeys encompass a single batch message to your intended audience. 

• Multi-Step Journeys are a customized series of customer touchpoints and interactions, sometimes across multiple channels.

• Transactional Journeys enable API messages in the form of personalized interactions and messages in response to customer questions. 

Consider the four pillars of strategy before embarking on a new journey:

• Audience – Who are they, and do you have a firm grip on your target market for personalized campaigns?

• Data – Work with what you have available and strive to seek more for long-term strategies. 

• Content – Plan new content and repurpose existing content if necessary to enhance your customer journey. 

• Channels – Think about the best channels for the maximum effect and the timing of your brand’s messaging to reach your target audience. Consider options such as messaging via your business’s virtual PBX if this is relevant to your customers. 

Whichever journey you choose to implement, try and focus on a single marketing aim such as onboarding new customers. Take the time to plan the content before going ahead and creating the customer journey using Journey Builder. It’s good practice to start with a simple journey flow and monitor results before moving on to more complex customer journeys. 

Trial existing templates for automated campaigns to get a feel for how Salesforce Journey Builder can help your business to scale and enhance the customer experience. 

Now Is the Time to Ace Your Customer Journey Optimization

Getting your business’s message to the right customers at the right time and increasing your business’s online presence is no longer an uphill battle with Salesforce.  

Use the marketing platform to your advantage and leverage the powerful features to locate your target customers and reach them on the platform they reside. That’s got to be easier than just guessing, right?