3 New Ways Marketing Cloud Helps You Succeed With AI

The magic of Dreamforce is back, and it’s been truly wonderful to come together as a community and share the excitement of new marketing innovations to come — especially in AI. 

We recently found that 71% of marketers believe generative AI will allow them to focus on more strategic work. At Dreamforce, I announced the newest Marketing Cloud releases that will help you not only focus on more big-picture ideas, but help you build lasting customer relationships. If you want to get the most from your data, become more efficient, and scale your marketing efforts, here’s where you can start.

A preview of our new marketing innovations

As you explore how AI can help your company, we want to make sure we tell you both the what and the why of our AI innovations. This way, you can feel confident in knowing what they mean for you and your business. 

What do these Marketing Cloud updates mean for you? You’ll be able to transform the way you interact with your customers and your marketing systems, to do things like:

• Fuel creativity with data-driven answers with new embedded intelligence, strategic partnership integrations, and segmentation capabilities for marketers in Data Cloud.
• Unlock efficiency with AI-powered campaigns by automatically generating segments,  email subject lines, body copy, and visual assets based on your natural language inputs and your first-party data.
• Personalize at scale with new ways to share behavioral insights and data across marketing and CRM, launch customer referral and promotional programs, and jumpstart your journeys with out-of-the-box industry best practices and templates.  

Let’s take a deeper look.

1. Fuel creativity with data

These three marketing innovations will help fuel your ability to use and measure the effectiveness of your customer data.

Segment intelligence

In our research, marketers tell us that proving their impact on growth is a top challenge. That’s why we’re making it easy to track and optimize the performance of every segment activated from Data Cloud across paid media advertising, Marketing Cloud Engagement, and Commerce Cloud – including return-on-ad-spend (RoAS).

You can use these insights to create, test, and enhance segments with help from Segment Creation in Data Cloud, with fast drag-and-drop tools and new natural language prompts powered by Einstein.

Availability: This will be available by request from your account team in October’s Winter ’24 release, followed by full general availability in February’s Spring ’24 release.

Waterfall Segmentation

After launching Nested Segments this year, we’re excited to now bring Waterfall Segmentation to Data Cloud.  Unlike traditional segmentation based solely on attributes (such as identity, interest, behavioral factors), Waterfall Segmentation allows you to set up a prioritized list of audience segments where an individual customer can exist in only one segment at a time for even more precision and control against oversaturation of key audiences. 

You can use Waterfall Segmentation within our drag-and-drop and generative AI segmentation interfaces, with no coding required.

Availability: This will debut in pilot this October (Winter ’24 release) followed by Spring ’24 general availability release.

New zero-ETL data-sharing and BYOM partnership integrations

I’ve heard from so many of you about the immense value our breakthrough Data Cloud partnership integrations with Amazon Sagemaker, Snowflake, and Google Cloud and Vertex AI are bringing to your companies. Now your marketing, IT, and data science teams will be able to use the same zero-ETL (extract, transform, load) data-sharing model with Amazon Redshift and Amazon data lakes, as well as Databricks Lakehouse to create a unified customer profile within Data Cloud.  

Both integrations are bi-directional, so you can also securely share and use your unified customer data from Data Cloud in Amazon (Redshift, SageMaker, EMR, Athena, and more) and Databricks too. 

This will make your data Salesforce-accessible across your stack. With zero-ETL, there’s no need to move the data, taking the traditional costs and complexities out of the equation so you can focus on connecting your data wherever it lives and activating it to enhance the customer experience.

Similarly, using data securely stored in Data Cloud, new Bring Your Own Model (BYOM) integrations within Einstein Studio will enable data science teams to train and deploy AI and machine learning models in:

• Databricks (for example, propensity to buy or churn, Customer Lifetime Value)
• Google (new support for Bring Your Own LLMs deployed on Vertex AI, including Google’s PaLM family of models)
• Amazon Bedrock (Bring Your Own LLM)

You can then access model outputs for use in Data Cloud segmentation, actions, and activation to unlock their value within your customer interactions.

Availability: The new Amazon and Databricks integrations will debut in pilot next year. The Data Cloud and Google Vertex AI integration will be in pilot mid-2023, and generally available late 2023.

2. Unlock efficiency with AI

First-party customer data is the key to untapping the real power of generative AI. Our new Einstein marketing innovations give your generative AI direct integration to Data Cloud for first-party data grounding, with security built in through the Einstein Trust Layer for data-masking of sensitive information. This ensures your prompts and outputs are never stored in Large Language Models (LLMs), as well as automating toxicity detection, audit trails, and more.

Einstein for Data Cloud and Engagement 

It feels like just yesterday at Connections ’23 that we were talking about how much smarter your marketing will be with Segment Creation. You’ll be able to build audience segments quickly with natural language prompts to improve discovery and targeting. We also covered how Email Content Creation in Engagement will help scale personalization and testing while reducing the writing workload by auto-generating personalized email subject lines and body copy.

Availability: You’ll have general availability access this October within the Winter ’24 release for Email Content Creation, and February within the Spring ’24 release for Segment Creation.

Einstein for Data Cloud and Account Engagement  

B2B marketers using Account Engagement (Pardot) have something to get excited about, too. Account Engagement users will also be able to use Segment Creation in Data Cloud to fine-tune demand generation, pipe maturation, and account targeting. 

Once that’s done, you’ll be able to use Einstein as a digital assistant to generate and test content for your email subject lines and body content too, plus forms and landing pages, all using natural language prompts. By letting Einstein help your content production process, your marketing teams can be more productive, and your content more personal across the entire customer lifecycle.

Availability: This will debut in pilot October, with general availability coming Spring ’24.

Typeface partnership 

AI is unlocking incredible time and money savings. When it comes to building personalized content at scale, our new partnership with Typeface allows you to create brand-specific and guideline-controlled images that you can drag and drop into email and messaging within Marketing Cloud Engagement. 

This will dramatically accelerate production times and increase your ability to scale personalized visual content within your campaigns and journeys.

Availability: This integration will be generally available in the coming months.

3. Personalize at scale

Now as you’re able to better understand and manage your data — backed by the power of generative AI from Einstein — let’s talk about three new marketing innovations that will help you scale your personalization. 

Real-time customer event stream for CRM 

You can already use Marketing Cloud together with Sales and Service Cloud to connect the full customer journey. Now you’ll also be able to share next-best actions and behavioral data insights from Marketing Personalization directly into the CRM so your teams can deliver a consistent customer relationship experience that learns from every interaction. 

Service agents can now see real-time customer behavioral insights like pages viewed, product affinities, and next-best offers right inside the Sales and Service Cloud. Marketers can use the real-time data from those sales and service interactions to personalize the customer’s next best offers and recommendations across the entire journey.

Availability: General availability access this October within the Winter ’24 release.

Referral Marketing 

Turning your most loyal customers into brand advocates is a powerful way to grow your business. That’s why we’re launching Referral Marketing to manage your referral programs and promotions with native integrations to Marketing Cloud, Data Cloud, and Salesforce CRM. 

To get you up and running quickly, it provides out-of-the-box templates and a ‘Likely to Refer’ model to predict which of your customers are most likely to participate and convert. Additional features include vouchers and the ability to create immersive experiences for customers using widgets and journey templates – all without ever leaving the Salesforce platform.

Availability: General availability in November ‘23.

New industries for Package Manager

Marketers everywhere are investing more in their journeys to attract, engage, and retain their diverse communities of customers. To help with that, we’re packaging industry best practice journeys, content, automations, and templates directly in Marketing Cloud Engagement. This gives you the tools to make your teams smarter, faster, and more agile.

Package Manager is included in Marketing Cloud Engagement. Following the Package Manager Industry releases for retail and automotive earlier this year, we’ll continue the momentum with financial services and health & life sciences next. Stay tuned for more industries to follow.

Availability: General availability this October as part of the Winter ’24 release.

Creativity, efficiency and personalization are three things every business is looking to improve. When done well, they are the keys to unlocking next-level productivity and customer experiences. New AI capabilities are helping us get there fast – much to the delight of marketers and consumers alike.