Salesforce.com is announcing a new version of its Marketing Cloud.
The company is unveiling the new features today in New York City at its Connections event for digital marketers. It’s adding new features to its Journey Builder, a drag-and-drop tool for managing customer interactions, and to Active Audiences, which connects customer data to online ad campaigns.
For Journey Builder, Salesforce is offering new “Native Journeys” that integrate with its existing Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. That means marketing teams have more capabilities when designing journeys that cross over between the marketing, sales and customer service teams. It’s also announcing new, pre-built triggers that use interactions like joining a loyalty program or downloading an app to begin a customer journey.
Vice President of Product Marketing Gordon Evans said these changes reflect a broader trend of blurring the line between different teams within a brand.
“As a consumer, they just have one relationship with the brand, whether they’re in a sales, service or marketing interaction,” Evans said.
He also described this as “an opportunity for marketers to lead,” particularly with all the data they now have: “We’re all sitting on tons of data. Email data, mobile data, location data, data we get from social channels and purchase history, web browsing behavior. There’s more opportunity than ever to deliver these great experiences for clients.”
Salesforce is also enabling advertisers to do more with that data, specifically by integrating its Active Audiences targeting with a number of display ad networks, including LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Neustar and Viant.
The new Active Audience capabilities should be available in the third quarter of this year, Salesforce says, while the new Journey Builder should be available in Q4.