Today, the role of the marketer is more important to business success than ever before. We are in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and disruptive technologies like AI and IoT are rapidly changing the nature of customer engagement and consumer expectations. Seventy-nine percent of consumers now say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services. That fact alone pushes the marketer right to the front of the stage, owning every customer connection across the customer life cycle.

In Europe, leading brands are utilising Salesforce Marketing Cloud to intelligently engage with today's connected consumers. To enhance support for our customers, we're investing in new innovations and partnerships for marketers as well as increasing our data centre capabilities to serve our Marketing Cloud customers from Europe.

Big Brands Take Customers on a Personalised Journey

Many European businesses are at the forefront of intelligent marketing and use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to support the delivery of truly personalised customer experiences:

• Centrica Hive, one of the largest connected home providers in the UK, uses the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to personalise their customer communications and build engagement and loyalty. “With Marketing Cloud, we can communicate with customers based on how far they’ve travelled on their Hive journey. We can also try out different approaches to see how customers respond to content. It enables us to learn and fail fast,” says Andrew Jones, Head of Customer Experience at Connected Home.

• Icelandair has been flying passengers around the world for 80 years. It’s growing steadily, with total passengers up 10% year-on-year. As the airline industry becomes ever more competitive, Icelandair needs to keep up with its customer’s digital demands. It's using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce DMP (Data Management Platform) to better understand each customer and their individual needs and build highly personalised customer communications. “We’re not the biggest brand, and we don’t have the biggest budget, so when it comes to marketing, we have to be smarter and more sophisticated than the competition,” said Joshua Popsie, Head of Digital Marketing at Icelandair.

• Thomas Sabo, a leading watch and jewellery manufacturer with more than 300 stores globally, has turned digital shopping into an experience by leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud together with Commerce Cloud to deliver personalised email campaigns to customers faster than ever before, reducing the cost of customer communications significantly, while also handing 2,400 orders per hour across multiple markets with Commerce Cloud.

Salesforce Invests in Trust and Innovation For Marketers

To fuel the growth and success of our customers in EMEA, Salesforce continues to invest in new product innovations and partnerships, as well as GDPR support and increased data centre capabilities. Here are some of our latest announcements:

• Data Centre Capabilities: We are pleased to announce that we have recently expanded our data centre capabilities in Germany to serve our Marketing Cloud customers and to support the growth and success of customers across the entire EMEA region. This is an important milestone for our German and EMEA-based customers as we grow together.
• GDPR: The GDPR has had a significant impact on every marketing team in 2018. Salesforce has provided innovative solutions across the Customer Success Platform to help our customers on their GDPR and privacy journeys. From the Marketing Cloud capabilities supporting the 'right to be forgotten', data portability, consent and restriction of processing, to Consumer Rights Management in Salesforce DMP, and guidelines and readiness steps to GDPR. For forward looking marketers, GDPR is a tremendous opportunity to deliver greater value, and a deeper, more trusted relationship with customers and consumers
• Google Analytics 360: Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics 360 have come together to help marketers create meaningful experiences for consumers. Together, they empower marketers to deliver connected, engaging, and tailored consumer journeys and optimized web experiences to cross-channel audiences.
• Datorama: We're also excited to welcome Datorama, the leading cloud-based, AI-powered marketing intelligence and analytics platform, to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Datorama is cross-platform marketing intelligence that gives marketers a single source of truth they can use to evaluate actions to take across their marketing investments. It automatically interprets and classifies marketing data and can capture all marketing data from any source to instantly provide clearly detailed insights about campaign performance.
• Interaction Studio: Marketing Cloud now gives marketers the capability to deliver contextually relevant and real-time interactions with Interaction Studio. This solution reacts to the real-time behavior of consumers as they interact with a brand across email, social and mobile, and offline via in-store or kiosks. For example, if a consumer clicks on a certain offer from a brand and then logs into the mobile app or calls the service center, Interaction Studio instantly updates individual consumer profiles with those real-time actions. With that context, Marketing Cloud can deliver the next best promotions, discounts or other content.

In the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it is vital that marketers keep pace with the industry's new dynamic changes. In today's world, the most successful brands will be those that put the customer experience at the heart of their operations and continue to innovate on delivering intelligent and engaging experiences at scale.

It's been an incredible year for our European Marketing Cloud customers and we are grateful for your support, trust and guidance. We can't wait to see you at our upcoming events in Europe, where you can learn more about what we have in store for marketers. Find out what's coming up in your region: https://www.salesforce.com/eu/events/