Today, customers have more information, choices and power than ever before, making the customer experience extremely important to businesses. Creating seamless, personalized customer experiences requires collaboration across the company, but, as the lines between sales, service and marketing continue to blur, marketers are leading the charge in this effort. In fact, according to Salesforce’s recent 2016 State of Marketing report, the majority of high-performing marketing teams (58 percent) are driving customer experience initiatives across the business, compared to 8 percent of underperformers.

Unite Marketing, Sales and Service Teams

To lead the initiative, marketers need a new platform that enables them to deliver a consistent brand experience across every touch point, regardless of channel or device. The answer? 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.

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. Marketing Cloud Lightning is Salesforce's vision to bring the power of Lightning to digital marketers so they can create more intelligent and personalized customer experiences.

Marketing Cloud Lightning will enable marketers to:

• Have a consistent user experience across the Customer Success Platform. The new Marketing Cloud Lightning will offer a modern and intelligent user experience across any device, enabling marketers to work faster and smarter, and deliver better results. With common Salesforce identity and navigation, marketers will now be able to work seamlessly across the entire Customer Success Platform—streamlining processes that span marketing, sales, service or other departments and enabling more comprehensive, integrated customer journeys.
  

• Leverage Lightning Components to extend and build new apps. Marketing Cloud Lightning includes new Lightning Components—the reusable building blocks for assembling apps with drag-and-drop ease—enabling companies to develop and customize new business apps that meet their unique needs, leveraging the combined capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, custom apps and now Marketing Cloud. Salesforce will deliver Lightning Components ranging from core email functionality, like previewing emails and tracking email open rates, to journey capabilities, like automatically adding a lead or contact to a journey and reviewing the journey history of a specific lead or contact. In addition, customers will be able to use third-party components built by Salesforce partners and available from the Salesforce AppExchange.

• Leverage data science to analyze information from the web and data throughout Salesforce to predict customer behavior. With new Predictive Journeys technology, marketers will be able to use data science to analyze information from the web like browsing activity and purchase history, along with all of their Salesforce data, like service hold times, customer satisfaction scores and email marketing campaign performance to anticipate customer behavior and ultimately drive business results.
  

• Build and automate journeys for the entire customer experience. With Marketing Cloud Lightning, any activity in Salesforce can trigger a customer journey. For example, if a customer clicks on a Facebook Lead Ad, which automatically populates the lead with the information the customer has shared with Facebook, that lead can then be routed to Salesforce where a more personalized journey can be triggered based on what is known about the customer. Similarly, if the customer indicates in a post purchase follow-up email survey that she’s not satisfied, a case could be automatically opened, triggering a new journey.
  

Customer Experience Starts Here

Today’s customers expect seamless customer journeys with every interaction. Equip your brand for success with Marketing Cloud Lightning—and make customer experience everyone’s mission throughout the organization.

Watch the Connections 2016 livestream for more exciting announcements!

This post was originally published on MarketingCloud.com