Customers interact with brands across a variety of platforms and devices—whether it’s browsing products on a website, receiving emails, engaging with social media, or interacting with mobile apps. As marketers, the challenge is no longer just about creating a single, personalized touchpoint but about delivering a seamless, personalized experience across multiple channels. This is what we refer to as multi-channel personalization.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) provides a comprehensive suite of tools that enable marketers to achieve this level of personalization. In today’s article, we’ll dive into how to do multi-channel personalization the right way, ensuring consistency, relevance, and a customer-centric approach that keeps your audience engaged no matter where or how they interact with your brand.
We’ll build upon ideas from previous discussions, such as Day 59: Using Dynamic Content in SFMC Emails and Day 60: Personalizing Emails Based on Customer Data, but now with a focus on how to extend that personalization across other touchpoints, including mobile, social, and web interactions.
As always, this article is part of our #SalesforcewithSumit series, where we help marketers navigate the power of SFMC with a blend of strategic insights and practical know-how.
Why Multi-Channel Personalization Matters
Today’s customers expect personalized interactions, but more than that, they expect those interactions to be consistent across all channels. Imagine a scenario where a customer receives a personalized email promoting a special offer on a product they’ve been browsing. They open the email, excited by the offer, but when they visit your website or app, the offer is nowhere to be found, and the messaging feels disjointed. This break in the customer experience can lead to frustration and disengagement.
That’s where multi-channel personalization comes in. By delivering a unified experience across all platforms, you not only meet customer expectations but also create a more cohesive and relevant journey that fosters trust and drives conversions.
In SFMC, multi-channel personalization is facilitated through features like Journey Builder, Mobile Studio, Advertising Studio, and Social Studio. These tools allow marketers to create consistent messaging across various channels, tailored to individual customer profiles, behaviors, and preferences.
Understanding the Key Channels for Personalization in SFMC
Before diving into best practices, let’s briefly revisit the key channels where personalization can be implemented through Salesforce Marketing Cloud:
Email Marketing: Through Email Studio, you can send highly personalized emails using Dynamic Content, customer data from Data Extensions, and even advanced scripting via AMPscript (explored in Day 72: Introduction to AMPscript for Advanced Personalization).
Mobile Marketing: Mobile Studio enables personalized SMS and push notifications, helping you reach customers directly on their devices with tailored messages.
Web and E-commerce Personalization: Personalize content on your website or e-commerce platform based on browsing behavior, purchase history, and other real-time data.
Social Media: Social Studio allows you to create personalized ads and organic content for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, ensuring your social media strategy is aligned with other channels.
Advertising: With Advertising Studio, you can leverage customer data to deliver personalized ads across search engines, social platforms, and display networks, ensuring your paid media campaigns are also tailored to your audience.
By personalizing these channels, you ensure that no matter where a customer interacts with your brand, the experience feels connected, relevant, and tailored to their needs.
Best Practices for Multi-Channel Personalization in SFMC
1. Create a Unified Customer Profile
To personalize across multiple channels effectively, you need a single, unified view of your customer. This means consolidating all available data—whether it’s transactional, behavioral, demographic, or engagement data—into one centralized profile.
In SFMC, Contact Builder plays a critical role in creating these unified profiles by combining data from different sources into a single view. This allows you to track a customer’s interactions across email, web, mobile, and social, ensuring that every touchpoint is informed by their entire journey, not just isolated interactions.
For example, if a customer abandons a shopping cart on your website, that data should flow seamlessly into SFMC, triggering a personalized follow-up email or push notification encouraging them to complete their purchase. This consistent, cross-channel awareness helps prevent fragmented experiences and ensures that all channels work in harmony.
2. Map the Customer Journey with Journey Builder
One of the key tools for executing multi-channel personalization in SFMC is Journey Builder, which allows you to map out the customer journey across different touchpoints. Whether it’s a welcome series, post-purchase follow-up, or re-engagement campaign, Journey Builder lets you create tailored, automated workflows that span email, mobile, and other channels.
We explored the basics of Journey Builder back on Day 30: Introduction to Journey Builder and have continued building on that knowledge with articles like Day 32: Building a Welcome Journey in SFMC. For multi-channel personalization, Journey Builder is particularly powerful because it enables you to respond to customer behavior in real-time.
For instance, if a customer engages with a personalized email but doesn’t make a purchase, Journey Builder can trigger a retargeting ad or send a push notification with an additional offer. The key here is to ensure that your messaging flows naturally from one channel to the next, creating a sense of continuity in the customer journey.
3. Tailor Content to the Channel
While it’s important to create a unified experience across channels, it’s equally important to recognize the unique strengths of each channel and tailor your content accordingly. The way customers engage with emails, for instance, is different from how they interact with push notifications or social media ads.
Emails often allow for longer, more detailed content, while push notifications and SMS messages need to be concise and to the point. Social media ads, on the other hand, are more visual and require catchy copy that grabs attention quickly.
SFMC’s Dynamic Content capabilities (covered in Day 59: Using Dynamic Content in SFMC Emails) allow you to tailor the content for each channel based on customer data while still maintaining consistency in your messaging. This means that while your overall message remains the same, the presentation adapts to the channel’s format.
For example:
In an email, you might include a detailed product recommendation with images and pricing.
In a push notification, the message could be a brief reminder about the same product with a link to complete the purchase.
On social media, you could run an ad featuring the product, along with a personalized discount code.
By adapting your content to each channel, you ensure that it feels natural and engaging for the customer, no matter where they encounter it.
4. Use Real-Time Triggers for Personalization
Timing is a crucial element of personalization, especially in multi-channel campaigns. SFMC’s ability to leverage real-time triggers is what sets it apart when creating personalized experiences that feel immediate and relevant.
For instance, when a customer makes a purchase or subscribes to a newsletter, you can trigger a welcome email, followed by a series of push notifications offering tips or additional product recommendations. These real-time interactions keep customers engaged and show them that you’re responding to their actions.
We touched upon real-time event triggers in Day 40: Real-Time Event Triggers in SFMC Journeys, and this concept applies strongly to multi-channel personalization. By using real-time data, you can adjust your messaging dynamically across channels, ensuring that every interaction feels timely and contextual.
5. Maintain Consistency Across Channels
One of the biggest challenges of multi-channel personalization is ensuring consistency. While each channel has its unique strengths, the core message you deliver should remain cohesive across all platforms. A disconnect between messaging on email, social media, and mobile can lead to confusion and dilute the effectiveness of your campaigns.
For example, if a customer receives a discount offer in an email, they should see the same offer reflected in social media ads, push notifications, or on your website. Consistency builds trust and creates a more seamless experience.
This is where tools like Journey Builder and Content Builder come into play. Content Builder allows you to store assets and manage content centrally, so you can reuse the same creative elements across different channels while adapting the messaging to fit each platform’s format.
6. Test, Optimize, and Iterate
Personalization is not a set-it-and-forget-it strategy. What resonates with your audience today might not work as well tomorrow. Therefore, it’s critical to continuously test, optimize, and iterate your campaigns.
In SFMC, tools like A/B Testing and Einstein AI (discussed in Day 61: Using Einstein Recommendations in SFMC) allow you to test different variations of your messaging and automatically adjust your campaigns based on customer behavior. For example, you can test different subject lines in emails, different types of personalized offers, or even different timing for push notifications to see what resonates best with your audience.
Through constant testing and optimization, you can refine your multi-channel personalization strategy to ensure that it’s always aligned with customer preferences and behaviors.
Creating a Seamless Multi-Channel Experience
Personalizing across multiple channels is not just about delivering different messages to different people. It’s about creating a cohesive, seamless experience that follows customers throughout their journey with your brand. Each touchpoint should feel like a continuation of the last, regardless of whether it happens via email, social media, or mobile app.
Multi-channel personalization is the key to building this kind of connected experience. By combining the power of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s tools like Journey Builder, Dynamic Content, and Einstein AI, you can ensure that every interaction feels relevant, timely, and personalized to each customer’s unique needs.
As you continue on your SFMC journey, remember that personalization is an ongoing process. Keep refining, testing, and optimizing to ensure that your multi-channel strategy evolves alongside your customers.
For more insights on personalization, be sure to revisit our previous articles on related topics, such as Day 58: Introduction to Personalization in SFMC and Day 60: Personalizing Emails Based on Customer Data.
Continue your exploration with #SalesforcewithSumit, and let’s unlock even more personalization potential in the next topic!