As marketers, we are always on the lookout for the best ways to ensure our messages reach our audience at the right time, with the right frequency, and in a manner that resonates with them. The tools that Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) offers, such as Einstein Engagement Frequency, are designed to help achieve just that by leveraging AI to enhance your marketing strategy. This article will dive into the real-world use cases of Einstein Engagement Frequency, discussing its practical applications, benefits, and why it’s essential for marketers to integrate this powerful feature into their campaigns.
This article builds on concepts previously explored in Day 51: Using Einstein AI in SFMC for Predictive Insights, where we discussed Einstein’s potential for delivering predictive marketing, and Day 62: Setting Up Predictive Send Times with Einstein, which introduced the foundation of using AI to predict the optimal timing for customer engagement. Understanding how to optimize engagement frequency naturally follows from these foundational topics.
Let’s start by reviewing what Einstein Engagement Frequency is and then explore how it can transform your marketing efforts.
What is Einstein Engagement Frequency?
Before diving into the use cases, let’s revisit the core concept of Einstein Engagement Frequency. In essence, this tool helps marketers find the right balance in communication frequency, ensuring that their audience neither feels overwhelmed by too many messages nor disconnected due to infrequent communication.
The beauty of Einstein Engagement Frequency lies in its ability to use artificial intelligence to analyze historical customer data and engagement patterns. By analyzing how often customers engage with emails or other marketing communications, Einstein suggests the optimal number of interactions for each customer. This can prevent “over-sending,” which can lead to customer disengagement, and “under-sending,” which risks losing customer interest.
The Importance of Optimizing Engagement Frequency
One of the biggest challenges marketers face today is ensuring that they communicate with customers at a frequency that keeps them engaged without causing fatigue. If you send too many emails, you risk overwhelming your audience, causing them to unsubscribe or, worse, ignore your communications altogether. On the other hand, if you communicate too infrequently, your brand may be forgotten, and your customers may turn to competitors.
Einstein Engagement Frequency solves this issue by striking a balance between over- and under-communication. It does so by analyzing past engagement data to identify patterns in user behavior, providing marketers with data-driven recommendations on how frequently they should engage with their customers. This ensures that your messaging remains relevant, timely, and welcomed by your audience.
Real-World Use Cases for Einstein Engagement Frequency
Now that we understand the value of Einstein Engagement Frequency, let’s explore several real-world use cases where this tool can have a transformative impact on your marketing strategy.
1. Enhancing Email Campaign Performance
Imagine running an email campaign for a product launch. Your marketing team is eager to share all the latest product details with your audience, but there’s a risk of sending too many emails within a short period. Einstein Engagement Frequency can step in and analyze the historical engagement behavior of your contacts to recommend the optimal number of emails to send to each segment of your audience.
For example, some customers may have a high tolerance for receiving frequent emails and may engage positively with multiple messages a week. Others may prefer fewer communications and could become disengaged if overwhelmed by too many emails. By leveraging Einstein’s AI-driven recommendations, you can tailor the email cadence to different segments, ensuring that your campaign achieves higher open rates, click-through rates, and ultimately, conversions.
2. Reducing Customer Fatigue
Customer fatigue occurs when your audience is bombarded with marketing messages, causing them to feel overwhelmed or even annoyed. This can lead to higher unsubscribe rates, reduced open rates, and lower engagement across your marketing channels.
Let’s consider a scenario where you’re running multiple campaigns simultaneously—one for a holiday sale, one for a loyalty program, and another for a new product release. With so many messages being sent, there’s a high risk that customers will receive too many communications in a short timeframe.
Einstein Engagement Frequency helps you avoid this by recommending limits on the number of messages a customer should receive based on their engagement history. This ensures that your audience isn’t overwhelmed, which not only reduces fatigue but also keeps engagement levels high. By spacing out your communications according to Einstein’s insights, you can maintain a consistent yet non-intrusive presence in your customers’ inboxes.
3. Maximizing Engagement in Multi-Channel Campaigns
Today’s customers interact with brands across multiple channels—email, mobile, social media, and more. Managing the frequency of interactions across all these channels can be a complex task. Einstein Engagement Frequency provides a unified view of customer engagement across channels, allowing you to optimize the number of communications not just for one channel but across the entire customer journey.
Let’s say you’re running a cross-channel campaign that involves sending email offers, push notifications, and SMS reminders. Einstein Engagement Frequency will analyze how customers engage with each of these channels and recommend the right balance of touchpoints. This means you might send more emails to customers who engage better with email, while reducing push notifications for those who prefer SMS. The result? A more personalized and effective multi-channel strategy that resonates with your customers on their preferred channels.
4. Optimizing Journey Builder Campaigns
If you’ve been following along with our previous articles, such as Day 30: Introduction to Journey Builder and Day 31: Key Components of Journey Builder, you’ll know that Journey Builder is all about delivering the right message at the right time in a customer’s journey. Einstein Engagement Frequency can take these journeys to the next level by offering insights into how frequently your customers should be receiving messages during each stage of their journey.
For instance, if you’re building a welcome journey for new customers, Einstein can help you determine how many emails are ideal during the onboarding phase. Maybe some customers engage well with a daily email for the first week, while others prefer weekly updates. Einstein Engagement Frequency tailors these communication frequencies based on customer behavior, ensuring that your welcome journey is engaging without becoming overwhelming.
5. Improving Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are a great way to keep customers engaged with your brand, but they require consistent communication to be effective. Einstein Engagement Frequency can help you determine how often you should be communicating with your loyalty program members to keep them engaged without spamming them.
Consider a scenario where your loyalty program offers monthly rewards and weekly updates on points. Some customers may prefer receiving frequent reminders about their points, while others may only want to be contacted when their rewards are about to expire. With Einstein Engagement Frequency, you can segment your loyalty members based on their engagement history and send personalized communications that align with their preferences, thereby increasing their overall satisfaction with the program.
The Long-Term Benefits of Using Einstein Engagement Frequency
Integrating Einstein Engagement Frequency into your marketing strategy offers more than just short-term improvements in email open rates or campaign performance. The long-term benefits of using this tool include:
Improved Customer Retention: By sending the right amount of communications, you reduce the risk of overwhelming your customers, which in turn improves their overall experience with your brand.
Increased Engagement: Customers are more likely to engage with communications that feel timely and relevant, which boosts open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates over time.
Enhanced Customer Insights: By using Einstein’s AI-powered insights, you gain a deeper understanding of how often your customers prefer to be contacted, which can inform future marketing strategies.
Optimized Resource Allocation: By knowing the ideal communication frequency, you can allocate your marketing resources more efficiently, focusing on the customers who are most likely to engage with your messages.
Conclusion
Incorporating Einstein Engagement Frequency into your Salesforce Marketing Cloud strategy is a powerful way to ensure your communications are perfectly balanced for each customer. Whether you’re optimizing email campaigns, reducing customer fatigue, or enhancing multi-channel strategies, Einstein’s AI-driven insights offer the precision needed to elevate your marketing efforts.
As we’ve seen from the use cases discussed, this tool can make a significant difference in campaign performance, customer engagement, and long-term brand loyalty. If you haven’t already integrated Einstein Engagement Frequency into your marketing, now is the time to start experimenting with it.
Be sure to revisit some of our previous discussions on related topics, such as Day 51: Using Einstein AI in SFMC for Predictive Insights and Day 30: Introduction to Journey Builder, to fully understand how Einstein can work in harmony with other Salesforce Marketing Cloud features.
As always, feel free to continue this journey with #SalesforcewithSumit, where we explore more exciting and advanced features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud!