Accelerate your digital can-do with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Dotdigital

McKinsey states that the speed of this change is unprecedented. For example, in July last year, they reported that ecommerce penetration in the US had moved from 17% to 33% in just two months (surpassing a previous forecast that this would reach 24% by 2024).

This acceleration also brings challenges around trust, scalability, security, flexibility, and importantly, the ability to adapt quickly to ever-evolving customer expectations.

Many companies are set to continue their digital growth and want to do so without compromise to these factors. And so these same companies have made choices around the technology they use, choosing vendors that are experienced in the upscaling of digital business practices, and enable them to do so without delay or disruption to their business goals. Trusted by many, one of these platforms is Salesforce’s (a longstanding dotdigital partner) Commerce Cloud.

To achieve all this it takes a complementary tech stack of platforms that play nice together. Offering seamless and deep integrations to your most important tools is a key part of what we do.

Salesforce B2C commerce (formerly Demandware) was built to allow merchants to create unified, highly personalized, and intelligent digital commerce experiences, putting innovation and flexibility at its core. And what do you know, this as it happens aligns rather nicely with what marketers have come to expect from us at dotdigital!

Dotdigital integrates with Salesforce Commerce Cloud via a certified cartridge. With it, businesses can drive highly personalized customer experiences and execute engaging cross-channel marketing campaigns that drive revenue. We’ve made some key updates to our integration which we think you’ll approve of, and in particular will help you overcome challenges around trust, localization, and scalable personalization as you ramp up digitally. Let me take you through the top three…

Transactional emails

“Good design lasts forever!” Right?

Unfortunately for marketers, this design principle doesn’t always ring true in the world of digital. Baking your design into templates, and testing your sends are just two simple ways in which you can avoid your brand from being ‘broken’. But there’s more…

Marketers understand the value of delivering consistently beautiful, on-brand experiences at every stage of the customer journey. This is about connecting emotionally with your customers, even in those seemingly little but highly significant moments of them receiving a shipping confirmation, or an invoice.

Yes, transactional emails are just as important as your marketing campaigns. And yet, they are often a very visibly overlooked part of the customer journey. Historically, these types of communications would often require a developer or even an agency to make a simple copy change.

So we set out to make things easier. Our new and improved Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge lets you design stunning, on-brand transactional emails with our drag-and-drop EasyEditor and replaces Salesforce’s native notifications for account creation, new password requests, order and shipping confirmations, and more.

We’re not just talking about static emails here, the relevant data objects are also made available to you and fully documented, so they can be personalized to your heart’s content. Updates can be made in real-time to match your brand bible or guidelines on tone of voice.

Besides being a nicer way to say ‘Thank You’ for that all-important first purchase, branded transactional emails can now be tracked and reported on with ease (all from within Dotdigital, of course), and bring deliverability benefits too.

Multi-store support

Having a greater captive audience online has resulted in a more international customer base for many businesses. If you’re one of them, you’ll know that customer needs and emotions differ from country to country, not to mention language. Having a localization strategy is key to making it away from home. Oh, and your customers will thank you too.

CSA Research report that 31% of international consumers are unlikely to purchase products without information in their own language. Naturally, how you market to them and how effectively or not you localize content to their preferences is going to have an impact too.

So it would make sense if you’ve chosen Salesforce Commerce Cloud for the flexibility with which it lets you manage multiple digital commerce sites with ease and conquer new geographical areas with speed, all from a single multi-tenant instance.

The flexibility doesn’t stop when you integrate with Dotdigital. Depending on how your organization is structured, you can either decide to connect each of your storefront sites to a dedicated child account or link multiples storefront to one main account.

If some of your storefront sites are available in different locales (think multilingual countries), we now give you access to the preferred locale of your customers so you know what campaigns to send and in which language.

And what’s more, all the ecommerce reporting data now supports order-based filtering, which means you can drill down to get insights on how a particular storefront or region is performing or responding to your marketing strategy.

Build AI product recommendations with your custom product data

Product recommendations and their value probably need no introduction. As Salesforce Commerce Cloud merchants, you could already access a comprehensive library of recommendation types, all of which can be overlayed with advanced filtering to match a particular brand campaign, type of products, or specific price range.

With our latest integration upgrade, we now automatically sync any and all product information to your product catalog in Dotdigital. This gives you full control over the products you put in front of customers by letting you filter on native and custom product attributes.

For example, you may want to amplify products made from a particular material, color, size, or weight. Or filter your AI-powered recommendation to only surface products that are available for in-store pick-up! With your custom data at your fingertips, you’re better equipped than ever to make your recommendation strategy a success and redefine what good looks like for email and on-site ROI.

All the details about our latest certified Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge can be found on our Help Center. If you prefer to speak to us and find out more about Dotdigital or how to connect your Commerce Cloud store, book a demo with us.