Email is an important channel for this company to drive engagement with its customers and gain new ones. In particular, the company wanted to drive more sales of its food and beverage products while promoting engagement with the brand around its healthy lifestyle content. However, despite the use of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, several big challenges were keeping the company from realizing value from its email marketing efforts.

Personalzing emails with artificial intelligence (AI):

• Improve email deliverability with Salesforce Marketing Cloud tools
• One such innovation was using Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s new Send Time Optimization feature to send an email campaign at the “optimal” time for an individual, which created a personalized send time for each recipient on the email list. Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses machine learning to determine what time a specific individual is most likely to open an email.

Build better audience quality:

• Merkle implemented a confirmed opt-in program. As soon as a real customer registers to receive emails, the program sends a thank-you message for signing up and requests that the user please click a button to continue getting emails. This greatly improved deliverability by ensuring that the company is sending emails to real people.

Creating truly personalized customer journeys:

• Merkle brought the Salesforce technical capabilities, audience insights, and thought leadership that were needed to begin using data and insights to design and execute email programs based on customer journeys, in an automated fashion.
• This included using Dentsu Aegis Network’s proprietary M1 platform to look at the company’s firstparty data and gather insights to develop a tailored program for people in that program, based on their preferences.
• From there, Merkle helped leverage insights to design automated email programs based on customer journeys, which were triggered by specific customer actions, such as inputting their goal weight online or requesting coupons for products. Data insights were then used to inform the creative and the delivery of emails.
• Merkle also rolled out a push notification program for the company, which is a feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Merkle developed messages for people based on actions they take in the company’s app, which triggers push notifications to boost interaction with the app.