Salesforce, the industry’s leading CRM platform, has been helping marketers understand their customers, engage with them and personalize their experiences across multiple platforms for years.
Sitecore is riding the wave too, having been named the top Web CMS by Forrester, clearly due to its focus on creating seamless, individualized customer experiences.
So what motivated them to come together?
A study by Genesys State of Customer Experience revealed that one in three consumers is willing to pay more for a guaranteed good experience. However, what’s important to note is that the customer’s expectation for a good experience kicks in even before the purchase – a whopping 79% of them want brands to demonstrate they care before considering a purchase!
Quite naturally, the leading CMS and CRM platforms have joined forces to help marketers give their customers super-quick time to market, consequently promising unmatched Customer Experience (CX). Let’s take a look at what’s in store and what to expect from this integration.
The significance of the Sitecore-Salesforce integration
The marketer today is data-driven; s/he is also in need of power – the power to deliver to the customer on time, each time, and with precision. Hence, the ability to deliver faster time to market puts the marketer in a powerful position in the age of digital transformation. After all, being able to surpass a consumer’s expectations each time, every time is a massive differentiator for any company.
When two powerhouses like Sitecore and Salesforce come together, what digital marketers gain is the potential to deliver timely, end-to-end and personalized digital brand experiences, to each and every customer, irrespective of what the customer journey is or where the customers came from.
For more: Sitecore Announces Availability of Core Integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Merging the strengths of two digital marketing platforms
Marketers using Salesforce have been employing its robust features such as email, mobile and digital advertising studio that are available on the CRM platform, and tacking these together using the highly intuitive Journey Builder canvas. By throwing in Salesforce’s Einstein capabilities, these marketers also get the potency of predictive marketing into their kitty.
Sitecore, in the meantime, gives its users the dynamism of Goals, Engagement Plans, Path Analyzer and the Analytics Dashboard, helping marketers enhance and optimize user experiences site-wide.
When these two digital marketing platforms merge, the marketer now has the power to customize and heighten every single customer experience, be it on a mobile device, the web or email, or even on Facebook or any other similar digital advertising channel.
This integration covers every customer touchpoint, tailors experiences, and gives marketers the advantage of understanding customer interactions across journeys, while helping them create more relevant campaigns.
In the words of Ryan Donovan, EVP, Product Management, Sitecore, “With Sitecore Connect and Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers don’t have to think about how to integrate Sitecore-managed assets into their Salesforce email campaigns—it’s conveniently there and ready for them to use.” What this means is that marketers can speedily create and edit emails, templates, and other marketing assets via a fast and convenient drag-and-drop user interface. Marketers don’t need to import, export, or switch between applications.
In spite of a streamlined workflow being the most attention-grabbing benefit of the Sitecore-Salesforce integration, there’s more to this partnership. The integration also improves the total cost of ownership by simplifying marketing operations and by leveraging all the active assets. Of course, the combination of two leading industry players, Sitecore and Salesforce, means that any solution that comes from this partnership is developed, tested, maintained and supported by both, ensuring that customers always get the best and most reliable experiences.
To sum up, here’s a quick look at what to expect from this robust combination:
- Content at your fingertips – Sitecore content now available directly on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
- Quick and easy drag-and-drop – Drag and drop content into templates and emails effortlessly.
- Versatile, global content – Create, apply and deliver multilingual and multicultural content for campaigns that are relevant worldwide.
- Personalized content each time – Fresh, relevant content, tailor-made for each customer based on their journey.
- Easy and instant integration – Jointly designed connector needs no special IT operations.
Have a roadmap ready
The future lies in personalizing experiences, and organizations that recognize this will be able to create a loyal customer base. However, with a compelling combination like Sitecore and Salesforce it is important to understand how your company would like to use these powerful platforms to create unified and tailor-made experiences. Unified, because having two platforms conjoined and using them irresponsibly could arise in duplication and subsequent confusion to marketers, and send out wrong, or likely, too many messages, leading to missed opportunities. Ensure that your business has a clear roadmap on how to leverage the integration to its maximum and achieve real CX enhancement, without causing any disarray.
We have extensive experience in leveraging Salesforce and Sitecore to solve business problems. Write in to services@suyati.com for a quick demo of the projects we have done, and for a detailed proposal on how we can do the same for your business.
