Personalization is like a boomerang; What goes around …comes around.

There is only a fine line between sending a creepy message and sending a hyper-personalized message.The chances are quite high that your personalization efforts will backfire and you will lose customers.

On flip side – Personalization is one of the Digital Marketing Trends you can’t ignore in 2020.

“80% say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers personalized experiences”

Practically speaking, you can neither type email to every single individual nor send generic email blasts.

All you need to do is strike a balance between templatized messages and hyper-personalized messages. What better tool than Salesforce CRM could help you and your team with this ?

In this article, we will cover 5 different ways in which Salesforce AI – Einstein can help you personalize Communications:

1. Segmenting Prospects Using Salesforce Audience Studio
2. Best times to send messages to customers
3. Personalize Email Subject Lines Using Einstein Copy Insights
4. Content and Image Optimization
5. Media orchestration using Einstein
6. Bonus Content: Privacy and Content Management in Salesforce

1. Segment Prospects using Salesforce Audience Studio

“The biggest challenges with personalization are gaining insight quickly enough (40%), having enough data (39%), and inaccurate data (38%)”

In-order to send personalized messages, you need to know who you are sending these messages to. You should figure out your target customers or customer persona.

Salesforce Audience Studio (Formerly Salesforce DMP) creates an all-inclusive user profile using its own and third-party data. Data flows inside Audience Studio from multiple platforms like analytics, CRM and ad servers.

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Once you load the data, you could create a target segment which is a near match to your Customer Persona. This way you will communicate to prospects who have interest, need and power to purchase your products.

“74% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations”

Salesforce AI – Einstein can do analysis of your entire audience and show interesting patterns. For example: Men who purchase Jeans watch Netflix and like climbing mountains.

Interesting?

It doesn’t stop there. Einstein Segmentation can also do Lookalike Modelling i.e., it will generate a list of customers who match the same profile as your Persona.

2. Send Messages at Right Time

You can’t deny the fact that we receive 100s of emails everyday but we open only a few. For some of us it might be in the 1000s too. Look at this interesting stat,

“In 2019 alone, 293.6 Billion emails were sent and received each day. This figure is expected to increase to over 347.3 Billion daily emails in 2022”

We all take time and send emails, with the aim that the receiver opens them and responds positively.

Have you ever wondered what would be the best time to send emails?

There is no right or wrong answer to this question. The answer is always “It depends on your customers”.

Salesforce Einstein has a Send Time Optimization (STO) feature, which guarantees that you send messages at a time when customers are likely to read them. It also suggests the number of messages and frequency at which you can send messages to customers.

Salesforce presents this data in Einstein Engagement Frequency Dashboard. It matches send volumes vs engagement and shows which subscribers are undersaturated or oversaturated.

After leveraging Salesforce AI, you wouldn’t be sending too many or too little emails to your customers.

3. Personalize Email Subject Lines Using Einstein Copy Insights

Email Subject Line is the most important part of your emails. It decides whether or not your customer opens an email.

“Personalizing email subject lines can lead to higher open rates—as high as 50%”

Now that we have proof that personalizing email subject works well, we will see how Einstein Copy Insights can help.

• You can see average open rates of all your past subject lines and compare them
• You can see which Language factors like emojis, question marks work well
• You can identify what is the emotion and tone of the Subject Lines (Positive, Negative..)
• You can check what are the top performing phrases and frequently used phrases

You would notice higher email open rates and ultimately more conversions if you have killer subject lines. Thank Einstein later.

4. Content and Image Optimization Using Einstein Content Selection

Marketers can have a centralized repository of assets and then use it based on customer segments. You definitely don’t want to show the same image saying “Buy our products” after the customer purchases your products. This is just an example, but the list can go on.

You need to tailor the content, images based on customer segments, customer’s previous actions, etc. Choosing the images, content for every segment can be a painstaking process, fortunately Einstein can help here.

You need to save all your assets along with attributes like Expiry, Interest, Location, etc and match this with customer’s attributes.

Once you do this Salesforce can help in following ways

• You could track and filter all assets by Interests, Expiry, etc
• You could create exclusion lists and fallback assets (Plan B)
• While building emails, messages using Content Builder, you could get Image, content suggestions from Content Selection feature

5. Media Orchestration using Einstein Journey Insights

Conversion is top priority for many of the companies, may be including yours. To drive conversion, you need to be where your customers are. Einstein can help you understand which Marketing channel, combination of channels or series of channels (Paths) to use fasten the conversion process.

The best part of this feature is Einstein tells the best path to conversion along with a prediction of conversion rates.

Bonus Content: Privacy and Consent Management in Salesforce

Customers sometimes want to stay anonymous due to trust issues and data breach concerns. That’s completely understandable and companies have to comply with local regulations and policies – like GDPR in the EU.

You could work with the inhouse legal team and create a compliance plan and review Privacy statements. Failure to comply can lead to huge fines and reputational damage. So it’s important to have an eye on this.

“76% of marketers said they had changed the way they ask for consent from site visitors as a result of GDPR.”

Don’t worry Salesforce has inbuilt tools to get consent/opt-in from customers for all Marketing related activities.

• Consent Management Tool – This tool helps in getting customer’s content. If they say no, you can add DoNotTrack functions in Emails and Mobile App to stop collecting customer’s behavioral data.
• Data Deletion Tool – You can remove any contact, personal information using this, when customer requests to delete.
• Data Portability Tool – Sometimes customers might ask for a copy of their data stored, using this tool you could provide it.

Conclusion

Personalization is now way beyond adding names of the customers at the start of email.

Complex people data (habits, interests, etc) can be processed by Einstein AI, this will eventually help in personalizing communications. It’s time to leverage AI at no additional costs to write personal messages to your customers and win their hearts.

To take it to the next level, read more about how Salesforce Einsten can help you with your sales process in our blog post here.

Otherwise, reach out to us!  We are happy to help with all things Salesforce AI.