SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Salesforce
[NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today announced new
innovations that empower retailers to deliver more connected and
personalized shopping experiences across a consumer's marketing,
commerce and customer service journey.
The 2017 holiday shopping season was one of the busiest and most
competitive to date, with a net digital revenue growth rate of 18
percent over the previous season. The world's biggest retailers now
gather at NRF 2018 to identify the trends, technologies and tactics
that will increase sales and drive shopper loyalty in the year
ahead. As a brand's digital footprint expands across multiple
channels, consumers today expect to have highly personalized and
consistent shopping experiences at every touchpoint. However, 55
percent of all shoppers say their retail experiences are generally
disconnected from channel to channel, and 63 percent don't feel
like retailers understand who they are.1
"The world of retail that so many of us grew up in has changed
in more ways than we ever could have imagined. Technology has given
consumers incredible power to quickly find whatever they need, but
it has become difficult for brands to keep up with those demands,
and really understand the needs of consumers on an individual
level," said Shelley Bransten,
senior vice president retail industry solutions, Salesforce.
"Salesforce enables the future of retail with a unified platform
for intelligent shopping experiences on any channel, ensuring the
fastest path to shopper success."
Introducing new Salesforce innovations for the future of
retail
For retailers to compete effectively, and win the
hearts, minds and wallets of modern consumers, they need a unified
platform that builds connected, consistent and personalized
experiences across marketing, commerce and customer service. With
Salesforce business to consumer (B2C) CRM, retailers have a single,
unified platform for commerce, marketing and service that can drive
personalized shopping experiences wherever consumers interact with
a brand, including mobile, web, social and store. Today at NRF
2018, Salesforce is delivering several new enhancements for its
retail platform:
- Integrate digital commerce with email marketing
journeys
-
- Online shoppers abandon carts prior to checkout as a common
part of the buying process, at a rate as high as 75
percent2, representing a high-value
conversion opportunity for retailers. Currently, less than a third
of major U.S. retailers send shopping cart abandonment emails,
representing an opportunity to connect with consumers and convert
sales.3 The Commerce Cloud and Marketing
Cloud connector easily enables connected customer journeys with
dynamic triggers from commerce to marketing. For example, if a
consumer using a Commerce Cloud site adds items to their shopping
cart but does not check out, they could be automatically sent a
follow-up email by Marketing Cloud that reminds or even
incentivizes them to complete their purchase.
- Transform Instagram into a commerce destination
-
- Instagram is now an essential first-screen for retail, with
more than 500 million daily active
users.4 With new integrations for
Commerce Cloud Shopping on Instagram, retailers can connect product
catalogs on Instagram, tag products in their posts and create
shoppable content for a seamless experience for consumers on their
favorite social network. In addition, AI-powered Einstein Vision
image recognition on Instagram enables brands to automate the
discovery and identification of images, such as brand logos and
products, to uncover sales, marketing and service
opportunities.
- Deliver intelligent customer service with messaging and
bots
-
- Messaging is rapidly becoming consumers' preferred service
communication channel with retailers. In fact, about a quarter of
all shoppers — and more than a third of millennial shoppers — use
instant messaging (25 percent of all, 36 percent of millennials)
when requesting customer service from an online retailer.¹ With
Salesforce LiveMessage, retailers can engage with shoppers via
two-way conversations on their preferred messaging apps, such as
SMS or Facebook Messenger. And because LiveMessage is built on the
Salesforce Platform, retailers have a holistic view of a shopper's
history made possible by seamless integration with Commerce Cloud
and Marketing Cloud. Additionally, with Einstein Bots, retailers
can automate service communications via web or mobile chat channels
to resolve routing issues like tracking order status, resetting a
lost password or initiating a return, freeing up agents' time to
deliver a more personalized experience to the consumer.
- Connect corporate and local stores consumer engagement with
distributed marketing
-
- For retailers with large partner networks, including local
stores and resellers, delivering connected consumer experiences is
challenging. In fact, fifty-two percent of consumers are likely to
switch brands if a company doesn't make an effort to personalize
communications to them.5 With Distributed
Marketing from Salesforce, corporate retail marketers can pre-build
personalized customer journeys with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and
deploy them to local stores and resellers. From there, retail
partners can easily manage and personalize these consumer
journeys--such as onboarding consumers to loyalty programs or
launching holiday promotions. For example, the corporate marketing
team at a national sporting goods chain can build a brand-approved
winter sports campaign in time for the holidays that local stores
can then leverage and tailor based on the popular winter activities
in their region where consumers have shown interest.
Salesforce Powers the 2017 Holiday Season
Salesforce
delivers massive scale in business to consumer (B2C) CRM. Here's
how Salesforce helped retailers power personalized commerce,
marketing and customer service throughout the 2017 holiday
season:
- Commerce Cloud - For the second year in a row, Black
Friday was the biggest day of the holiday shopping season,
comprising 26 percent of Cyber Week's total revenue in digital
commerce. Commerce Cloud customers delivered nearly 94 million
AI-powered product recommendations on Black Friday and just over 73
million on Cyber Monday. Holiday shoppers that engaged with
recommendations were this season's best shoppers. While only
accounting for 5 percent of clicks, these shoppers contributed 30
percent of Cyber Week's revenue. In addition, during the 2017
holiday shopping season, 62 percent of all traffic to-commerce
sites came from mobile devices, officially surpassing desktop
traffic.
- Marketing Cloud - Customers sent a total of 17.5
billion emails, mobile, SMS and push notifications during Cyber
Week. Delivering on the value of AI, Marketing Cloud powered more
than 3 billion Salesforce Einstein engagement scores during Cyber
Week, an indicator used by retailers to determine how likely a
subscriber is to open an email, click links and stay
subscribed.
- Service Cloud - Customers viewed more than 55 million
customer service cases and received more than 17 million customer
service calls on Black Friday. This increased to 98.6 million
customer service cases viewed and more than 44 million customer
service calls received on Cyber Monday, topping out with more than
400 million service cases viewed and 162 million calls received
during Cyber Week.
Salesforce Empowers Retailers to Unify Shopping Experiences
Across Commerce, Marketing and Service
According to a recent
IDC study, the Salesforce ecosystem of customers and partners will
create more than 400,000 retail jobs and enable $92 billion in retail revenue creation by
20226. Salesforce empowers retailers to build
fast, personalized and connected consumer experiences across all
points of commerce, including mobile, web, social and store. With a
single unified platform for marketing, commerce and service,
Salesforce delivers personalized shopping experiences that help
retailers reach consumers wherever they interact with a brand. And
with Salesforce DMP, marketers with rich online and offline data
can leverage data management to drive better audience segmentation
and get improved efficiency in media delivery. Combined with
embedded artificial intelligence powered by Salesforce Einstein,
retailers can deliver intelligent experiences at scale, and drive
better experiences from awareness to retention. Commerce Cloud
customers sell more than $16 billion
worth of merchandise annually through more than 2,750 websites in
50+ countries, and enjoy 40-60 percent higher conversion rates than
with legacy platforms.
Pricing and Availability
- Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud connector is generally
available now at no additional cost to Commerce Cloud and Marketing
Cloud customers.
- Commerce Cloud Shopping on Instagram is generally available now
in the U.S., and Einstein Vision on Instagram is now generally
available.
- Salesforce LiveMessage is generally available now, and Einstein
Bots are currently in pilot and expected to be generally available
in Summer 2018.
- Distributed Marketing is available now in limited pilot for
Marketing Cloud customers, and will be generally available in
February, 2018.
Additional Resources:
- Read more on the Salesforce blog here: Salesforce Going Bigger
Than Ever at NRF Big Show 2018
- Like Salesforce on Facebook at
http://www.facebook.com/salesforce.
- Follow @salesforce, @marketingcloud, @CommerceCloud, and
@ServiceCloud on Twitter
- Come visit us at NRF:
https://www.salesforce.com/campaign/nrf/
About Salesforce
Salesforce, the global CRM leader,
empowers companies to connect with their customers in a whole new
way. For more information about Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), visit:
www.salesforce.com.
Any unreleased services or features referenced in this or other
press releases or public statements are not currently available and
may not be delivered on time or at all. Customers who purchase
Salesforce applications should make their purchase decisions based
upon features that are currently available. Salesforce has
headquarters in San Francisco,
with offices in Europe and
Asia, and trades on the New York
Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "CRM." For more information
please visit http://www.salesforce.com, or call
1-800-NO-SOFTWARE.
1 2017 Salesforce Connected Shoppers
Report
2 Online shopping cart abandonment rate as of
2nd quarter 2016, by region
3 Shopping Cart Abandonment Email
Trends
4 Instagram now has 800 million monthly and
500 million daily active users
5 2017 Salesforce State of Marketing
Report
6 Source: IDC White Paper sponsored by
Salesforce, "The Salesforce Economy Forecast: 3.3 Million New Jobs,
$859 Billion New Business Revenues to
Be Created from 2016 to 2022," October
2017.
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