“A personal relationship with our customers is something that is absolutely essential and required – it is not the icing on the cake, it is what’s needed to succeed,” says Sony’s vice-president of relationship marketing, Darren Carter.
The company turned to Salesforce Marketing Cloud to enable a personalised experience for its PlayStation 4 customers.
“The tools [on the platform] make it simpler, automated, quicker, and more relevant in terms of the messaging we can provide, and that’s shown itself in the success of the campaigns that we now deliver,” says Carter.
That success is measurable. “Between 2011 and 2012 we improved our engagement by 45%, and from 2012 to 2013 we’ve seen engagement rising by at least 23%. We’ve managed to do that through building customised tools with Salesforce Marketing Cloud,” he says.
Marketers need to reach people where they are. Sony’s position is unusual, since in PlayStation it has its own connected device with which to connect with customers, but for most businesses that device is a smartphone or tablet.
“People are just working on their phones,” explained Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, speaking to the press at the company’s Dreamforce conference in late 2013. “This is where companies are going. I don’t carry a laptop with me anymore. It’s very important that a phone is all I need.”
This is where Salesforce1 comes in. Last year salesforce.com rebuilt its platform for the mobile era, greatly increasing the number of hooks in its cloud services that allow mobile apps to transmit data and present rich content. It also delivered the new Salesforce1 mobile app for iOS and Android.
Salesforce has had mobile apps before, but the difference is the way that Salesforce1 enables businesses to use all the customisations they have made to their Salesforce-based applications, or to build their own custom apps on the same cloud platform.
“Gartner research says 90% of enterprise apps are going to be mobile and desktop by 2017. Today, it’s only 20%,” said Kendall Collins, Salesforce EVP of Mobile and Product Design. “We wanted to democratise this process, to fill that app gap.”
Jeroen Tas, CIO at Philips, says Salesforce1 is helping to enable a profound change in how the company interacts with its customers.
“We’re going back to the one-on-one relationship where people knew you, but now we’re doing it on a scale of 100 million. That’s where the big opportunity is. We use the platform to create a new generation of applications that are focused on interaction and collaboration. It really is strategic.”
What comes next? The buzz today is about mobile computing beyond phones and tablets, whether that is the smart devices and rich data from the “internet of things”, or wearable computing such as fitness trackers and Google Glass. The impact on marketing is profound, since these trends mean new ways to interact with customers.
The Salesforce1 platform is ready to help businesses embrace the huge opportunity offered by these new technologies. In June 2014, the company announced the Salesforce Wear Developer Pack for the Salesforce1 Platform, making it easier than ever before for any business to connect with their customers via wearable devices
“We sum it up as the internet of customers – behind every tweet and behind every post and behind every “thing” is a customer. You have to be ready. You have to engage with that customer. This is going to be the era of engagement,” says Benioff.
