Salesforce spent January retooling its product offerings: here’s what’s new

"With nearly 7,000 marketing technology solutions available to marketers, the majority of companies use numerous products for different marketing objectives," Jon Suarez-Davis, chief strategy officer and senior vice-president of product marketing at Salesforce Marketing Cloud, told The Drum. "As a result, they struggle to get a holistic view of their marketing efforts. Commonly, marketers manually stitch together different systems and reports from disparate solutions, attempting to build a single view of marketing performance."

As more marketers want to see their campaign analytics in one place and monetize on mobile, take a look at how Salesforce is adapting to an ever-changing industry.

Introduced Mobile Publisher for Community Cloud

Research from Kleiner Perkins shows that 3.3 of 6 hours of daily internet usage are spent on mobile.

As customers move to mobile, companies follow, so Salesforce added Mobile Publisher for Community Cloud, which allows companies to build apps using drag-and-drop tools.

Mobile Publisher automatically updates and publishes any changes made on desktop to the mobile app.

Anna Rosenman, vice-president of Community Cloud and B2B commerce marketing at Salesforce, told The Drum that there is an extra cost to the new feature, but it means Salesforce customers won't require mobile developers or coders to build their apps.

"Regardless of who you're creating an experience for, I think there's a new standard for ease of access and flexibility that everyone expects. Your customer experience has to be phenomenal. I think that companies in every single vertical are trying to remove any barriers to making their customers successful," said Rosenman.

Mobile Publisher features include pixel-perfect branding to customize the app imagery and name, persistent authentication, local file access, push notifications, security, multi-channel updates, and don't require third-party integrations or mobile SDKs.

New APIs to monetize entire shopping experience

E-commerce data from Salesforce shows that 50% of e-orders come from mobile, 69% of traffic comes from social and 26% of revenue is driven by artificial intelligence.

To stay current and help marketers stay flexible, Salesforce updated its Commerce Cloud with tools to “embed intelligent commerce experiences into every touchpoint to help drive sales growth,” said Gordon Evans, vice-president of product marketing for Commerce Cloud.

“Customer behavior is transforming commerce. It used to be a more linear process. Customers today are redefining what commerce looks like; they’re interacting with chat bots, paying with their watch, and purchasing from virtually anywhere,” Evans told The Drum.

The new APIs include extending Einstein AI-powered commerce and image search everywhere.

• Einstein Recommendation lets merchants integrate AI-driven product recommendations to reach shoppers wherever they interact with a brand, whether on its site or mobile app
• Einstein Visual Search allows shoppers to "snap and search" for products using images

Evans added that using new tools like On-Demand Developer Sandboxes and Commerce Cloud API Explorer aim to help marketers test ideas more quickly.

Datorama integration

Salesforce acquired Datorama, an AI-powered marketing intelligence platform, last August.

A month ago it announced it was expanding its marketing analytics with new Datorama data integration, activation and developer tools.

• Datorama Marketing Cloud Connectors will provide side-by-side comparision of social, mobile and email marketing campaigns
• Datorama Developer Portal for developers to build custom integrations, like new connectors or widgets
• Activation Center, generally available this spring, to leverage real-time Datorama insights directly in a single portal