Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, kicked off Connections 2016 in style. Though there were many memorable moments and game-changing announcements, let's check out six of highlights.
- Salesforce Stands for Equality
Every member of the Salesforce team is proud that our company has steadfast values. We were founded on four principles: Trust, Growth, Innovation, and Equality. For that reason, it was an honor to launch Connections with a true American icon - Congressman John Lewis, U.S. Representative, Georgia. He humbly shared many memories of his work for civil rights during the tumultuous struggle for equality, and what he described as his moral obligation to speak out against inequality. When asked about the role businesses can play in continuing his mission, he affirmed it must remain prominent by saying, "A company like you [Salesforce] has a major role to play in equality. Businesses must be a headlight, not a taillight, and must point the way." Want to be inspired? Check out the interview.
- We've Entered the Age of the Customer
There is no doubt we're in the midst of a profound digital transformation. The lines between the physical world and digital world continue to blur. Yet the most profound change isn't happening in technology, it's happening with customers. Marketers are ideally positioned to lead the evolution and connect with customers in a whole new way. Salesforce's Customer Success Platform empowers organizations to deliver the personalized, 1-to-1 experiences today's customers expect across marketing, sales and service.
- Marketing Cloud Lightning Will Transform Customer Experiences
Earlier this year, Salesforce introduced Sales Cloud Lightning and Service Cloud Lightning, the next generation of its sales and service solutions built on the Lightning Platform. Today, Salesforce announced Marketing Cloud Lightning-a new user experience, platform, and ecosystem that gives marketers the power to run 1-to-1 customer journeys across sales, service, marketing, and more. Marketing Cloud Lightning will enable marketers to have a consistent user experience across the Customer Success Platform; leverage Lightning Components to extend and build new apps; leverage data science to analyze information from the web and data throughout Salesforce to predict customer behavior; and much more.
- Email Studio Delivers Personalized Experiences at Scale
Email marketing just got a whole lot easier with Email Studio, our new email marketing solution that gives marketers the ability to deliver personalized, relevant content to their customers' inboxes at scale. With Email Studio, marketers can now create great messages with no code experience, streamline content development by leveraging our new content management system, Content Builder, and send with confidence with foolproof testing to reduce errors. Check out how Fanatics, the provider of authentic, officially licensed sports merchandise for organizations like the NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL, and NCAA uses the power of Email Studio to deploy smart, personalized email campaigns at scale for more than 300 brands, 23,000 times per year with 3.5 billion messages.
- Advertising Studio Powers Smarter Digital Advertising
Today, Salesforce announced Advertising Studio, a new advertising solution which allows users to leverage Salesforce CRM data to deploy smarter digital advertising across the open display ecosystem through LiveRamp, Krux, Neustar, Viant, and LiveIntent; and across leading platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter. By integrating with Google's Customer Match API, users of Advertising Studio can reach their highest-value customers--those that are part of loyalty programs or are regular shoppers--at critical moments, like when searching for other products and services, watching YouTube or reading Gmail. They can also generate similar audiences to reach new customers on YouTube and Gmail who are likely to be interested in key products and services, and save money on search advertising by ensuring that they're only reaching true prospects, not existing customers. The announcement also includes automated lead capture from Facebook Lead Ads to create a virtuous lead generation engine as well as lightweight Facebook campaigns right from within Journey Builder, allowing non-media teams to enhance their marketing efforts with ads.
- Marketing Cloud Mobile App Takes Digital Marketing Everywhere
Salesforce Marketing Cloud users are now able to run their marketing programs on the go. The Marketing Cloud Mobile App is available in the Apple App Store for iPhone and iPad users. This app takes our robust digital marketing desktop experience and optimizes it for a mobile device so that marketers can see at a quick glance how their messages are performing. These analytics will show things like email opens/clicks and subscribes/unsubscribes, as well as journey paths and how close they are to reaching goals like 100 people signing up for an event or 60 percent of customers having made a purchase after abandoning a cart. Technical marketers will also rest easy knowing whether their automations are running as scheduled and they can even see where exactly an error has occurred. See how brands like Berkshire Hathaway are using the new Marketing Cloud mobile app to manage digital marketing.
Want to experience all the day's news and announcements first hand? Watch the Connections keynote and many other memorable moments.
