This month the CloudKettle team attended Connections; one of the largest annual Salesforce events. Connections brought together a community of over 17,000 passionate Trailblazers to learn about new marketing trends in different industries. All three days were packed with new product announcements, engaging keynotes, workshops, and innovative partner solutions. This event also followed Salesforce’s acquisition of Tableau, and during the conference, Salesforce talked about their plan to integrate Tableau with the entire Customer 360 platform to deliver more personalized customer experiences.
Let’s take a look at the highlights and key takeaways from Connections 2019.
Build a 360 View of Your Customer
Last week, Salesforce announced extended capabilities of Customer 360 “to include an enterprise-grade customer data management and activation platform to build a unified profile of each customer and deliver hyper-personalized engagement across marketing, commerce, service, and beyond”.
The goal of this upgrade is to integrate all customer data under a single platform. The roadmap includes an Admin interface that connects all data sources from different Salesforce platforms. The initial release will focus on improving the experience within the B2C space and will be generally available later in 2019.
For more information on the Customer 360 changes, check out this awesome blog post by Salesforce.
Commerce Platform Powers Premium Customer Experiences
Two exciting announcements were made around Commerce Cloud at Connections.
1) Commerce Page Designer
This new feature enables stakeholders to quickly bring rich and enhanced commerce experiences for end-users. With the easy-to-use interface business, users can edit and publish pages faster and with minimum effort.
Skip to 12:50 of this video of the Connections Keynote to watch a demo of Commerce Page Designer.
2) Accelerator for Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Salesforce also announced a new accelerator that helps IT teams follow best practices for building API integrations with critical commerce components such as inventory, payment, invoicing and shipment.
Salesforce and Google Partnership
In 2018, Salesforce and Google announced their strategic partnership a couple of months before Dreamforce. Since then, the two technology giants have continued to work together to deliver smarter, more collaborative solutions.
Today, the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud integrations with Google Marketing Platform help advertisers close the gap on marketing attribution and ultimately personalize marketing interactions based on customer engagement across web and digital channels.
A new integration brings Google Cloud’s Contact Center AI (CCAI) solution into Service Cloud to assist agents with insights in every voice conversation. It can automatically transcribe real-time voice conversations, and provide intelligence signals to service agents using Salesforce Service Cloud.
Datorama & Marketing Cloud
Dataroma, purchased by Salesforce in August 2018, is an AI-powered marketing intelligence and analytics platform that helps enterprises create a single source of truth for their marketing teams. Click here and skip to the 7:30 mark to watch a demo of Dataroma in the Salesforce Connections 2019 Keynote.
Now, there is a new Marketing Cloud Campaign Performance feature in Datorama that enables marketers to see email campaign performance and compare email metrics across different channels.
For more information on how to leverage Datorama and Marketing Cloud Analytics, check out this post: Salesforce + Datorama Update: Marketing Cloud Analytics Expands With New Datorama Tools.
Salesforce Addresses Expanding Privacy Regulations
When it comes to digital marketing, privacy is a concern on everyone’s mind. The rapid evolution of technology has created valid privacy concerns and resulted in regulations such as GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Today, marketers need to understand the role privacy plays in marketing strategy and best practices. At Connections, Salesforce demonstrated how the Individual object can be part of your organization’s solution for GDPR and future compliance laws.
The video from this 2019 session isn’t live yet, however, click here to watch the video from 2018 that talks about:
- Salesforce Readiness on GDPR and beyond
- How Salesforce is addressing existing and upcoming privacy regulations
- How Salesforce solutions addressed privacy concerns for its customers
This blog post will be updated with the 2019 video when it is available.
Wrap Up
If you and/or your team weren’t able to make Connections this year we hope this blog helped get you up to speed! If you have any questions about Salesforce, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or integrated marketing reach out today.
