Activate Personalized Experiences at Scale Through CRM

CRM is crucial to any first-party data strategy because it sits at the center of every customer interaction: through behavioral and environmental triggers, your customer is feeding inputs that influence future experiences, like product recommendations and personalized messaging. Essentially, data makes personalized experiences possible—and when done right, those experiences in turn generate more data that brands can act on. With the death of the cookie on the horizon, these insights will become even more critical to your marketing strategy.

There’s no better time than now to unify data within a CRM ecosystem to improve the efficiency of teams, inform future business strategies and, of course, enhance customer experiences overall. These efforts involve building data pipelines that help them better learn about their customers and engage with the right message at the right time. With the help of automation, a powerful collaborator that helps teams pull off outcomes that only eluded them before, the sales team can focus on only the most qualified leads. 

Not sure where to get started? No worries; I’ve gathered a couple brands who have successfully transformed their CRM ecosystems to fuel personalized experiences at scale.

Translate behavioral cues to key business insights.

Beyond driving conversion, one of the most impactful results of a strong CRM strategy is being able to leverage behavior data to guide better consumer experiences—of which Australian Community Media (ACM) makes a prime example. ACM is a large media organization that operates over 140 local news mastheads across Australia, serving both free visitors and paying subscribers. That’s a lot of relationships to manage and readers to serve. To those ends, the brand relies on email marketing and onsite personalization via Salesforce Marketing Cloud to reach and continually engage with readers.

ACM wanted to better understand subscriber behavior to create more personalized, relevant experiences in the form of automated content recommendations. Previously, this content was manually selected by editors or determined by publish date. Using Marketing Cloud Personalization, we were able to pull from subscribers’ engagement and platform behavioral data (like affinities toward news categories) to build personalized recommendations—boosting not only relevance but also employee efficiency.

This data did more than simply help serve personalized content to email subscribers. Armed with insights into which topics readers enjoy the most, editors can now easily plan out future content and focus on the kinds of stories their readers care about the most. More broadly, these same insights allow ACM editors to better predict engagement across the user journey—showing how CRM data can extend beyond marketing to unlock critical business insights that ultimately serve audiences. The best part: automated content recommendations free the editors to focus more on these strategic concerns of how to build better impact.

Elicit engagement to personalize at scale.

If you struggle to glean insights from audience behavior, here’s a tip: make it as easy as possible for customers and prospects to tell you more. This simple step was the cornerstone of Woodlea’s CRM refresh. Woodlea is a master-planned community of 7,000 lots located 30km west of Melbourne. With a need to focus on buyers at the right time, their sales representatives wanted to be able to give special attention to novice buyers. But this posed a challenge: how could they personalize communication and experiences at scale?

We began by helping the brand insert forms into email sent to buyers, a move that increased engagement while generating significant user data in the process. The newly interactive emails included simple questions and a prompt for recipients to build out their profile in Woodlea’s customer portal (powered by Salesforce Experience Cloud). The fact that these forms were embedded into the actual email content made it a seamless user experience and increased the percentage of leads who engaged. This first-party data then fed back into Woodlea’s Salesforce CRM, allowing for automated lead nurturing and qualification. These efficiencies freed the sales team to focus on two key buyer personas: those ready to make a purchase and first-time buyers who needed more attention throughout the buyer’s journey.

Enhance CRM to start building your first-party data foundation now.

The best time to transform your customer experience was yesterday, but there’s still time before cookie deprecation to experiment with new ways of generating first-party data—and CRM is at the heart of the process. From eliciting user engagement to gain key insights, to building efficiencies through automation and automation, linking data and inputs across a connected CRM ecosystem goes a long way in serving stronger, more personalized customer experiences and key business goals—so don’t wait.

Need help or don’t know where to start? Reach out to learn more.