At this year's Dreamforce, the Salesforce DMP data science team presented a session called “Making ROI out of AI: Marketer's New Journey”. Below is a recap of that presentation with the full video recording available here.

The Fourth Industrial revolution has fundamentally changed how marketers understand, grow and connect with their customer base. The growing ubiquity of internet connectivity, cloud computing, social platforms and mobile devices are creating data at exponential rates^[1]. The emergence of this big data coupled with faster technology has created a world where intelligence reigns supreme. Old tools and work-streams are not enough in a world where business demands a unified view of the consumer with real-time, big data analytics.

So, how can the modern marketer wrangle this vast universe of data into structured insights which align with their goals and drive ROI?

This is where Einstein comes in, to provide guidance on new ways that marketers can answer their core business questions:

1. Who are my customers?
2. How do I find new prospects?
3. How do I better connect with them?

The Salesforce DMP, Data Studio, and cutting-edge AI and machine learning have opened up a brave new world of intelligent marketing, which has enabled marketers to rethink how they approach these critical aspects of their remit.

For example, in the (very recent) past the best way to execute against each of these imperatives for many marketers was to retarget visitors from their website. However, now the modern marketer can segment their customer base, cultivate a deeper understanding of their audience, find new prospects who exhibit similar attributes, and connect with them in more optimized and personalized ways^[2].

Below is a summary of how collectively, the DMP Einstein suite of data science products redefine the modern marketer's journey. Each data science product description is framed by using the hypothetical Travel Rewards Program enrollment as the business conversion goal.

Einstein Segmentation: While many marketers have organized their current and target customers into segments with names like “Travel Rewards Members” or “Weekly Newsletter Subscribers” there’s a clear need in this age of personalization to gain a deeper understanding of these people. With AI-driven Einstein segmentation, DMP customers can further segment these targets. For example, a marketer could analyze their 'Travel Rewards' audience with Einstein Segmentation to discover unique personas within this audience like “Travel Rewards Members with Children.”

Custom Index Tool: As marketers develop creative messaging for their advertising, they can make that messaging more effective by aligning target audience attributes with the creative. The DMP’s Custom Index Tool can help reveal which attributes are more present for a sample audience compared to its population audience. For example, the custom index tool could reveal that “Travel Rewards Members with Children” are much more likely to have visited an amusement park than “Travel Rewards Members” in general. In turn, this insight can drive creative development, like choosing an image of a family on a roller-coaster, to help drive Travel Rewards enrollment for prospects who are similar to this niche audience.

Einstein Lookalikes: One of the biggest tradeoffs marketers often face when building an audience targeted campaign is deciding between increasing their audience reach and maintaining the precision of their target audience. Salesforce DMPs Einstein Lookalikes allow marketers to intelligently access new potential customers by precisely calculating the tradeoff between reach (adding more consumers) and precision (making sure these consumers are similar to their target audience). For example, a marketer could take their target audience of “Travel Rewards Members with Children” and intelligently find new but similar potential customers using Einstein Lookalikes.

Frequency Management: Measurement and optimization are critical to the any marketer's ongoing success. In a data rich world, this means using AI to drive better and better experiences for consumers. Frequency management intelligence can help marketers determine the optimal frequency to engage a particular consumer with a given message. This can mean ensuring that a consumer in the “Travel Rewards Members with Children” lookalike segment sees messages about amusement park vacations only four times in a given week before the message they see changes. Identifying the optimal impression frequency for a given campaign is done through the DMPs frequency management capabilities.

Einstein Journey Insights: Salesforce DMP uses Einstein Journey Insights to help marketers analyze millions of pieces of data to reveal insights about which journey is correlated with the most conversions. This allows marketers to optimize their campaigns towards guiding consumers on these journeys. For example, knowing that customers who open an email and then watch two videos are 2x more likely to enroll in the Travel Rewards Program is a powerful insight that can increase the return on marketing spend.

AI is poised to change the nature of marketing during the next few years. Building target audience models, finding intelligent access to new prospects, and connecting with consumers in more optimal and personalized ways are just the beginning. These are just some of the ways leading-edge marketers are leveraging Einstein within the DMP to embrace AI as a core part of their marketing strategy.

Footnotes

[1] Salesforce DMP sees over 4M user match requests and data capture events, 1.6M page views, 700k ad impressions per minute

[2] Consumers now expect a personalized experience that is “push” rather than the “pull.” Indeed, Salesforce Research’s State of the Connected Consumer (add link) found that 65% of consumers say that personalized offers influence their loyalty.