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How Marketing Cloud + Sitecore XP Could Transform Customer Experiences

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What if your website knew whether your visitors had opened the last email offer you sent them? What if you could trigger an email offer to customers featuring the top products they viewed on your website? What if you could see the important interactions that customers had taken on your website, right alongside their sales histories?

Welcome to a world of exciting new possibilities ahead. This November, Salesforce announced its partnership with Sitecore, connecting Marketing Cloud to Sitecore’s Experience Platform (XP).

3 Key Opportunities Ahead

While details are still limited around how it will work, here’s where that integration could lead:

1. Sharing Content Across Multiple Channels

Sitecore contains a lot of rich content to create a great website experience. Imagine being able to leverage that same content in an email or another channel in Marketing Cloud.

As a marketer, this could impact how you write content and enter into Sitecore. In fact, your content model within Sitecore might need to change to support a single piece of content being used in multiple channels.

FOR EXAMPLE: Let’s say you have a Hero Spot in both Sitecore and Marketing Cloud. You could have fields for Headline Line 1, Headline Line 2 and Subheadline for that Hero Spot. You could use the Headline Line 1 in both Sitecore and Marketing Cloud, but maybe the line length is too long for your email design. You could create additional fields for the Email Headline Line 1 and Email Headline Line 2. Bottom line: you have the content for BOTH the webpage and email together in one place.

2. Complete Customer Data Profiles with Visitor Data and Analytics

Sitecore captures a lot of analytics data on visitors. This data is used to score visitors based on goals that marketers define in Sitecore. Imagine being able to trigger an action in Marketing Cloud or Sales Cloud when that goal is met on your website or looking at a dashboard of your customers and seeing which ones achieved that goal on the website. As a marketer, this could affect how you plan journeys in Marketing Cloud. The additional visitor data and analytics could also help refine and improve your customer journeys overall.

FOR EXAMPLE: Let’s say you define a goal in Sitecore for visitors to visit a family of products a certain number of times. Once a visitor achieves that goal, the prospect could be dropped into a journey and receive an email to move them further along the purchase path. That email could include the top three viewed products for that product family.

3. Creating 1-to-1 Customer Experiences

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Imagine being able to know if the visitor is already a customer. Or if they opened that last offer you sent to them. Or if they already registered for that webinar you’re offering. As a marketer, this could affect your entire marketing strategy. Now campaigns can truly span multiple channels, and what happens in one channel could affect another.

FOR EXAMPLE: Let’s say you’re hosting a webinar and the registration page is within Sitecore. A visitor signs up for the webinar. A thank-you email is sent, and a lead is created. Next, that journey includes a reminder email about the webinar and related links. And when the visitor is brought back to the site, we can welcome him/her by first name, showcase other related webinars or share other links related to the same topic.

What’s Next: The Road Ahead

So far, everything we know about this integration was revealed during the Marketing Cloud Keynote at Dreamforce 2017. Sitecore also released a blog post with minimal details about the capabilities. So stay tuned! We’ll be keeping a close eye on this integration as more details emerge to help you better understand the benefits and what it offers to marketers.

Have any other Sitecore questions? Check out some of our recent Sitecore posts, or reach out to talk with our experts anytime. We’ll be happy to help.

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Chris Kulish

Chris has 10 years of expertise as a consultant and technical architect within the manufacturing space. He brings a manufacturing-focused point of view to his many Salesforce accolades - he's 10x Salesforce certified and a Manufacturing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform Accredited Professional.

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