Customer experiences with real-time personalisation
Where to start
Creating both offline and online customer experiences is the pinnacle goal for every organisation. Post-Covid behavioural changes have driven online personalised experiences to become the standard.
Executing integrated personalised customer experiences across offline and online touchpoints is no easy task. The benefits are obvious but starting this process seems daunting.
So where do you start?
Trust comes from being treated thoughtfully, not lost in an anonymous system. Interactions that feel impersonal — like receiving irrelevant offers or waiting on hold — run the risk of alienating customers and damaging hard-won relationships.
State of the Connected Customer: 5th Edition, 2022, Salesforce
62% of customers feel an emotional connection to the brands they buy from most.
83% of customers say they're more loyal to companies that provide consistency across departments.
96% of customers say excellent customer service builds trust.
Executing personalised experiences across offline and onilne touchpoints requires you to capture real-time interactions – a subject we covered in our previous guide. This allows you to capture every unknown and known visitor touchpoint with your brand, and stitch the data into a unified profile. This is known as affinity profiling. This lets you enrich record data with offline and digitally generated data in real-time.
Another aspect of delivering personalised customer experiences is using AI-driven optimisation targeting. This improves campaign targeting in a live state without a human needing to intervene.
Real-time content personalisation automatically serves up the best content for the customer based on contextual relevant interest, generated via affinity profiling. So you can recommend products and content across different channels wherever your customer is at that point in time.
Percentage of organisations using AI to automate customer interactions year on year. State of Marketing: 8th Edition, 2022, Salesforce
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization enables integrated customer experiences across digital and offline activities.
Here’s an example from the retail sector of how Marketing Cloud Personalization can power a customer journey:
Unknown visitor engages with your product-based website and Marketing Cloud Personalization gives them a unique cookie ID.
As the unknown visitor browses the site, Marketing Cloud Personalization collects affinities on that engagement i.e. keywords, categories, type.
In real-time it dynamically changes website content to align to the affinities collected on the unknown visitor.
Unknown visitor registers for an account to download your mobile application, becoming a known visitor.
Past unknown visitor data is updated against the known visitor using Marketing Cloud Personalization’s unique cookie ID.
Known visitor drops off from your website.
Marketing Cloud Personalization sends them an email with dynamically populated recommended content tailored to their interests.
Known visitor walks near brand’s retail store and receives an in-app beacon message about an offer for the product that interested them online.
Known visitor purchases the item from Point of Sales (POS) in-store, scanning their in-app member name to take advantage of the special offer promoted to them. They become a customer.
POS data is fed back into Marketing Cloud Personalization and links back to the customer’s affinity profile record.
Marketing Cloud Personalization sends an email thanking the customer for the purchase and asks them to complete a customer satisfaction form. Their completed form links back to their affinity profile record.
The customer calls the customer service team to make an enquiry, which is recorded and tracked in Salesforce.
The customer service team member looks at the Marketing Cloud Personalization promotional recommendations that have been auto-generated based on affinity profiling. This allows them to suggest further relevant information to the customer.
The customer returns to the website and their experience is automatically adapted (including chat function), displaying products that meet their specific needs and interests, increasing likelihood to buy again.
