“Humanizing Marketing” with Salesforce Interaction Studio enables us to enter a new “Phygital” era. Physical + digital is a successful recipe for knowing your customer.
This is a first article in the series that is intended to deep dive into Interaction Studio setup and functionality.
Interaction Studio, formerly Evergage, is now an integral part of Salesforce marketing automation platform, powered by data. Combining data-based behavioral analytics and advanced machine learning, Interaction Studio helps you gain a comprehensive view of each and every customer and prospect.
Most important challenges that Interaction Studio solves:
Efficiently leverages online and offline interactions.
Interaction Studio is truly bringing the concept of phygitization to life. In practice this means that offline (physical world) interactions, e.g. purchases will be a source of real-time personalization of web experience next time when a customer will communicate with a brand online (in a digital world). The other way around is also true: customer-facing company employees can source information about a client from Interaction Studio during the offline interaction
Variety of channels and campaigns: sky is the limit.
Interaction studio users have flexibility to easily extend campaigns across any channel, and call campaigns by various applications. This is the real definition of cross-channel personalisation, not limited to a fixed list of channels that are only supported by a certain platform.
Closes the gap between the need of real time response to customer’s actions and SFMC limitations.
No more dependency on scheduled data syncs and automations. Interaction Studio allows to tailor the experience in real time as response to customer’s actions across channels and platforms
Salesforce made a big step forward by acquiring Evergage
In early 2020 Salesforce had acquired Evergage, the leading software platform for real-time 1:1 personalization, to accelerate the company’s efforts to offer enhanced personalization solutions to its thousands of customers.
Evergage, a real-time personalization and customer data platform (CDP), must have been in Salesforces’ crosshairs for quite some time. Just before the acquisition, Evergage had been named a Leader in The Forrester WaveTM: Digital Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2019. In addition, Evergage earned numerous awards in 2019, most recently being named “CDP of the Year” and “Personalization Tech Solution of the Year” in the inaugural Rele Awards.
Interestingly enough, Salesforce has had its own CDP before this acquisition, so seemingly it did not need Evergage’s. But Salesforce did not have a personalization engine. So, it was lagging behind marketing cloud competitors like Adobe, Episerver and Oracle. With Evergage, Salesforce became an instant leader in personalization.
Why Interaction Studio is so special
Former Evergage, now Interaction Studio, is integrated with Salesforce Marketing Cloud as one of the “studios” along with Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Advertising Studio, and so on
- Interaction Studio is a paid app and therefore is not included in the standard configuration. When the account is provisioned, both Salesforce Marketing Cloud admin together with Interaction Studio admin have to work together to provide required level of access and permissions – we will cover this in details in one of the next articles
- What makes Interaction Studio pretty different from other SFMC studios there is a connector in place for Interaction Studio to directly “talk” to Sales and Service Cloud directly
- The most recent Salesforce Marketing Cloud release also enabled direct integration of Interaction Studio with Experience Cloud and Datorama
Sneak peek into the next articles – stay tuned:
- User and permission management in Interaction Studio
- Installing the Javascript beacon: why, what, and what type of integration to choose
- Catalog configuration
- Building unified customer profile
- …and more
Illustration: Salesforce (c)
