How Einstein AI is Shaping the Future of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce has always been at the forefront of artificial intelligence, launching Einstein more than a decade ago, and continuing a steady stream of advancements that help make marketing easier to create and more effective. Generative AI has seen exponential growth in 2023 with investments across many organizations and technology companies. A recent McKinsey Global Survey found that one-third of surveyed companies regularly use generative AI within their organizations. Now, with their $500 million dollar Generative AI Fund, Salesforce is harnessing the power of AI with the introduction of Einstein GPT across all clouds—and we know there will be more announcements in September at Dreamforce 2023. 

What Does Einstein GPT Mean for Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

While Einstein GPT is poised to benefit many of Salesforce’s products, we are particularly excited about how Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Einstein GPT will empower marketers to gain a deeper understanding of personalization throughout the customer experience by leveraging first-party customer data. With the help of AI, marketers can deliver personalized and relevant content, offers, and recommendations to each customer based on their behaviors, preferences, and interactions. This level of personalization leads to increased customer engagement, value, loyalty, and ROI. 

Salesforce Marketing GPT Tools 

One of the greatest benefits of AI is that it can automate repetitive tasks and work as a digital assistant in the background, so marketers get all the benefits of knowing valuable insights without having to search for the information manually. Here are some of the tools that are improving efficiencies and streamlining marketing processes. 

• Einstein Engagement Scoring: Based on engagement, scores are assigned to customers based on their likelihood to subscribe, open, click, and convert. The AI scoring system then creates segments based on this data. 
• Einstein Messaging Insights: Alerts are provided to the marketing team based on email and journey performance. Emails are monitored and metrics are provided and analyzed compared to historical data, which provides teams with actionable insights to strengthen campaigns. 
• Einstein Engagement Frequency: Messaging and frequency are analyzed so marketing teams never have to guess if they are sending too many or too few emails. The AI provides insights on email send times and frequency. 
• Einstein Segmentation: Improve your list segmentation with persona development from machine learning to optimize targeting strategy. 

Using Einstein Insights for High-Quality Content

Creating engaging and relevant content for your customers can be time-consuming for your team. Einstein assists by generating content and helping you improve email copy, subject lines, and social media posts with its natural language processor. As the AI analyzes past performance data and identifies previous high-performing content, content suggestions are continuously optimized. Here are some of the exciting elements of the Salesforce Content Builder.

• Einstein Copy Insights: Einstein and the natural language model will evaluate your content for the best subject lines and provide words and phrases that have had a positive response based on analysis. 
• Einstein Recommendations: Provides products, content, or offers that will best resonate with your customers based on their behavioral data and preferences. 

Improved Customer Journeys with AI Predictions 

Now that high-quality content and the ability to adjust based on customer preferences is in place, make sure to provide personalized touchpoints. This way, customers can continuously engage, which increases conversion opportunities.

AI-driven Journey Builder enables marketers to create dynamic customer journeys that adapt in real time. This can lead to more relevant and timely interactions, increasing the likelihood of conversion. Using provided tools like Split Type, journeys are created based on a subscriber’s predicted actions or persona. This allows for more direct, one-on-one personalized communication that can be orchestrated for optimal customer touchpoints. This, paired with the Einstein send time optimization tool, optimizes your campaigns to increase engagement and get the right message to the right people, at the right time. Highlighted Journey Builder AI enhancements:

• Einstein Split Type: Gives marketers the ability to separate engagement paths based on the predictive actions of the customer based on their persona. 
• Einstein Send Time Optimization: Launches and sends content based on when a customer is more likely to open and engage. 

Smarter Social Media with Einstein 

Marketing Cloud Engagement and Einstein social media campaigns and messaging are enhanced due to the active sentiment monitoring and real-time insights that predict your customer actions and intentions to convert. The Einstein assistant in Social Studio can save your team time with the AI-powered social listening tool to provide you with all the data on your brand mentions across social platforms and sentiment analysis so you can understand how your brand is resonating with customers. Social Studio now allows you to use predictive AI to find the most effective images for conversion so you can optimize the imagery in your social posts. Here are some of the tools that are now available in Social Studio.

• Einstein Vision for Social Studio: Vision capability uses AI for image recognition to analyze and categorize images shared on social media platforms to help marketers gain insights into the visual content that is associated with the brand. 
• Social Media Listening and Engagement: AI-powered social listening tools help marketers monitor all their brand mentions and customer sentiment. This provides marketers with the ability to enable timely and relevant responses. 

Why Does All This AI Matter? 

AI-powered analytics and insights provide marketers with a deeper understanding of their audience and their behaviors. This data-driven approach allows for more informed decision-making and better-targeted campaigns. Enabling Einstein throughout Marketing Cloud tools frees up marketing teams to spend time on what really matters: strategy and campaign creation. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud's AI capabilities have the potential to transform how marketers engage with audiences, offering personalized experiences and efficient automation. By delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time, AI can help marketers improve their return on investment by maximizing engagement and conversion rates. 

Salesforce Einstein at Dreamforce 2023

AI capabilities across the Salesforce ecosystem will continue to be the talk of Dreamforce with many AI visionaries, including Sam Altman the CEO of OpenAI, scheduled to speak. AI is transforming the perception of marketing and opening up new opportunities to connect with customers. 

What do we predict are some of the announcements to come out of this year’s event for Marketing Cloud? 

• Increased enhancements to email marketing including predictive list segmentation, content building, and automated workflows.
• Data strategies and predictive analytics to harness the power of first-party data as we move into a cookie-less future. 
• How AI can help B2B marketers get better results and ROI as resources like budget and time continue to tighten. 
• Personalization and customer profile enhancements with Einstein and Data Cloud. 
• Ethical AI and how governance within the platform gives marketers piece of mind as they continue to learn and use artificial intelligence.

As Einstein GPT continues to be integrated across all Salesforce Clouds, expect to see groundbreaking use cases and opportunities to use AI to help companies drive deeper loyalty and engagement with customers.