Salesforce Launches Marketing Cloud Lightning to Deliver Better Customer Experiences

ATLANTA: Salesforce announces the launch of Marketing Cloud Lightning, a new platform and ecosystem for marketers to create a seamless user experience for customers spanning sales, services and marketing.

Salesforce, a provider of internet services and solutions, previously introduced Sales Cloud Lightning and Service Cloud Lightning, its sales and services solution built on the Lightning Platform and now extends the service to digital marketers to deliver intelligent and more personalized customer experiences. The new Marketing Cloud Lightning aims to help companies streamline and unify their interactions with customers from the first point of contact to the final sale, with a wide range of tools for predictive data analysis, automated lead management and custom app development to name a few.

Marketers are looking to deliver a unified customer experience as customers today are seeking a more personalized user experience whether querying a service department online or receiving a promotional SMS. According to a recent Salesforce report titled “2016 State of Marketing”, 58 percent of high-performing marketing teams are driving customer experience initiatives across the business as compared to 8 percent of underperformers.

The new Marketing Cloud Lightning offers a modern and intelligent user experience across any device, enabling marketers to work faster and smarter, and deliver better results. With common Salesforce identity and navigation, marketers will now be able to work seamlessly across the entire Customer Success Platform—streamlining processes that span marketing, sales, service or other departments and enabling more comprehensive, integrated customer journeys.

The new Marketing Cloud Lightning leverage Lightning Components to extend and build new apps. Marketing Cloud Lightning includes new Lightning Components—the reusable building blocks for assembling apps with drag-and-drop ease—enabling companies to develop and customize new business apps that meet their unique needs, leveraging the combined capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, custom apps and now Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce will deliver Lightning Components ranging from core email functionality, like previewing emails and tracking email open rates, to journey capabilities, like automatically adding a lead or contact to a journey and reviewing the journey history of a specific lead or contact. In addition, customers will be able to use third-party components built by Salesforce partners and available from the Salesforce AppExchange.

The new Marketing Cloud Lightning also leverages data science to analyze information from the web and data throughout Salesforce to predict customer behavior. With new Predictive Journeys technology, marketers will be able to use data science to analyze information from the web like browsing activity and purchase history, along with all of their Salesforce data, like service hold times, customer satisfaction scores and email marketing campaign performance, to anticipate customer behavior and ultimately drive business results.

Salesforce also announced Marketing Cloud for Google Customer Match, the latest innovation in its ongoing strategic partnership with Google, which marketers can use to deploy Customer Relationship Management (CRM)-powered advertising across Google Search, YouTube and Gmail.

"In today's connected world, marketers manage the entire customer experience," says Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce. "With Marketing Cloud Lightning, marketers will now have the tools they need to create smarter, faster 1-to-1 customer journeys that span sales, service, marketing and more—enabling them to deliver seamless, highly personalized experiences," he added.