From First Message to Loyal Customer: Harnessing the Power of Salesforce Data Cloud and WhatsApp
Imagine the potential of tracking and analyzing a customer’s interactions—every click, purchase, view, and preference—and using this data to send them personalized promotions directly through WhatsApp. Envision how this targeted approach could enhance engagement by reaching customers on a platform they use daily. Now, extend this concept further: consider the advantages of utilizing the rich, comprehensive, unified profile that you’ve meticulously compiled in Salesforce Data Cloud and using that to further drive personalization and relevance.
In this blog post, we’ll explore a compelling use case that showcases how to effortlessly send the perfect messages to your customers on WhatsApp, ensuring timely and personalized communication that resonates using Data Cloud + Marketing Cloud Engagement.
SkyJoy Airlines Flight Notification with Promotional Offers via WhatsApp Powered by Data Cloud
Introducing SkyJoy Airlines, a fictional airline with a mission to elevate customer experiences. By leveraging Salesforce Data Cloud, SkyJoy aims to send personalized flight notifications and exclusive promotional offers via WhatsApp to customers with upcoming flights. This real-time data-driven strategy ensures timely and relevant communication, enhancing customer engagement at every step of their journey.
Now, let’s explore the essential steps to bring this seamless experience to life.
Data drives value – Connecting the relevant data
To create a robust Data Cloud implementation that provides a 360-degree Single Source of truth of each customer, and to enable more personalized marketing, improved customer service, and enhanced operational efficiency the right data needs to be available in Data Cloud. Remember. Personalizing customer experiences is only effective if based on accurate and relevant data. The right data allows businesses to tailor communications, offers, and services to individual customer preferences and behaviors.
Keeping in mind the considerations for ingestion into Data Cloud and following the principles outlined in Salesforce Well Architected Data Integration guide SkyJoy airlines has finalized their data strategy, identifying the crucial data needed in Data Cloud to maximize value and support their use cases. The Data Architecture team focused on these high level tenets while planning their data strategy:
1. Data Quality and Consistency – Ensuring that the data is accurate, consistent and is not redundant.
2. Data Integration
- Source Identification: Identifying and validating all data sources ensuring that all necessary data is captured.
- Integration: Method of integration of various data sources into the Salesforce Data Cloud, whether it’s native Salesforce Connectors, Ingestion API or Bring your own Lake.
- Key Identification: Determining the keys needed to unify their data across all their source systems
3. Data Governance
- Security and Compliance: Implementing robust data governance policies to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements.
4. Scalability and Flexibility
- Future-proofing: Planning a well-thought-out data strategy to accommodate future data growth and new data sources.
- Flexibility: Ensuring that the system can adapt to changes without significant rework.
5. Enhanced Insights and Analytics
- Data Enrichment: Ensuring the right data is collected and integrated to enhance the quality of insights and analytics.
- Improved Decision-Making: High-quality data leads to more accurate and actionable insights, facilitating better business decisions.
6. Alignment with Business Goals
- Strategic Alignment: Ensuring that the data strategy aligns with business goals helps in achieving desired outcomes
Listed in the appendix below are the all the potential sources of data for this airline, that are going to be ingested into Data Cloud. Pay close attention to the types of data – they have profile information, purchase information, preferences, behavioral data, campaign data plus the airline is also using third parties to further enrich the first party data they own. By integrating these diverse data sources into the Data Cloud, the airline can create a comprehensive, 360-degree view of each customer.
Building a rich unified profile
Using the varied sources of profile, transactional and behavioral data available in Data Cloud SkyJoy airlines is able to utilize Identity Resolution in Data Cloud and create a single rich unified profile of each of their customers. This profile includes all their includes all interactions, transactions, preferences, and behavior of the customer in one view. This unified profile enables SkyJoy Airlines to understand their customers better, tailor communications and offers to individual preferences, and deliver highly personalized experiences.
Audience Creation
SkyJoy Airlines ingested all their customer data into Data Cloud, encompassing preferences, interactions, transactions, and behavioral data. By leveraging Salesforce Data Cloud’s Identity Resolution feature, they were able to create a rich, unified profile for each customer. This comprehensive integration ensures that every data point, from booking history and service interactions to marketing engagements and purchase behaviors, is available in a single view. With this unified profile, Data Cloud now has all the relevant touchpoints needed to create highly targeted audience segments.
Using this rich unified profile SkyJoy airlines was able to to create an audience with the following criteria:
- Customers with a flight the following day
- Customers who have not upgraded their seat
- Customers who have opted into WhatsApp notifications
- Customers who are Star Alliance members
While activating to Marketing Cloud, when selecting Contact Points – WhatsApp is selected as the contact point. On activation, a new Data Extension is created in Marketing Cloud, that is then used to send a WhatsApp message to the activated audience.
Marketing Cloud Engagement Setup
Prior to sending a WhatsApp message, there are certain steps that need to followed in Marketing Cloud before you can start using the feature. A WhatsApp message template needs to be created and submitted to WhatsApp for approval.
Example WhatsApp Message Template:
[Customer Name], your flight from [Departure City] to [Destination City]
is tomorrow [Flight Date] boarding at [Boarding Time].
As a valued Joy Rider [Member Status] member,
we would like to offer you a free seat upgrade.
Please click this link [Mobile App Deep Link] to claim your free seat upgrade now.Once it’s been approved, configure the approved message template in Mobile Studio within Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Build a Journey in Journey Builder:
- Entry Source: Use the Data Cloud audience segment as the entry source.
- Messaging Activity: Add a WhatsApp messaging activity to send the approved template message.
- Personalization: Use dynamic fields to personalize the message with customer-specific details (e.g., Customer Name, Departure City, Destination City, Flight Date, Boarding Time, Member Status, and Mobile App Deep Link all available in your activated audience from Data Cloud.).
Showing Value
While it’s possible to send WhatsApp messages directly from Marketing Cloud, the real value lies in creating the right audience using the comprehensive unified data available in Data Cloud.
SkyJoy Airlines tracked engagement, conversion, revenue, and cost metrics in Data Cloud and were able to create a comprehensive dashboard based on that data, allowing them to regularly review the impact of their engagement strategies on customer satisfaction and business performance, clearly demonstrating ROI.
With Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and WhatsApp, SkyJoy Airlines increased customer satisfaction and ROI, gathering the following insights:
- Timely Notifications: Proactive reminders and seat upgrade offers enhance customer engagement, reduce no-show rates, and promoting seat upgrades and additional services generates extra revenue streams.
- Personalized Offers: With Tailored offers powered by Data Cloud they demonstrate the airline’s value for customer preferences, boosting loyalty, repeat business, and conversion rates, increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
- Increased Engagement: : WhatsApp’s high open and response rates ensure messages are seen and acted upon, enhancing customer engagement, resulting in positive reviews, referrals, and repeat business and opens more opportunities for upselling and cross-selling, contributing to higher revenue.
- Automation: With Data Cloud SkyJoy is able to automate campaign processes ensuring communications are consistently timely and relevant, maintaining high standards of customer engagement. Automation reduces manual effort in sending notifications and managing interactions, leading to significant cost savings. Automated systems handle large data volumes and interactions, enabling scalable marketing and customer service efforts without proportional cost increases.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we explored how to seamlessly send the perfect messages to your customers on WhatsApp, ensuring timely and personalized communication using Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Engagement. While sending WhatsApp messages directly from Marketing Cloud is possible, the true value lies in creating the relevant audience by leveraging a unified profile created by Data Cloud. As you have read, this comprehensive approach enables highly tailored, personalized responses that drive customer satisfaction and significantly impact ROI.
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