• by Ray Schultz , October 24, 2019

Salesforce has added several email features to its Marketing Cloud, including enhancements to its Einstein suite and an interactive tool resulting from its acquisition of Rebel earlier this year.

The goal is to help brands troubleshoot and deploy email campaigns more quickly, saysBobby Jania, VP, product marketing, Salesforce. 

The new AI-driven Einstein features include Einstein Content Selection, Einstein Copy Insights and Einstein Messaging Insights. 

Einstein Content Selection will “automatically recommend which digital assets are used based on preferences and behaviors,” Jania says. The objective is to provide better personalization. Jania adds that Einstein content selection determines what you get when email is opened, not when it is sent. If you send it on Sunday and they open it on Thursday, their activity will determine the content on Thursday.”

Einstein Copy Insights uses natural-language processing to find the best words to use in subject lines and message copy. Jania notes that writing subject lines, text messages and social media copy can often be a guessing game, and this tool is designed to eliminate that problem.   

Einstein Messaging Insights notifies marketers when their emails are “under-performing or over-performing,” Jania adds. “If your open rates are lower than expected, it finds correlated factors such as a lack of personalization, and recommends changes."

The new suite of features also includes:

Interactive Email — This is fueled by the technology integration with Rebel. “We found cuts like interactive emails that let them take action without leaving the inbox,” Jania says. Using this feature, a “brand might send out a net promoter score survey. You can just click on the email.”

In addition, Interactive Email “removes friction in the conversion process,” he adds. 

Journey Templates — This allows brands to create templates and share them throughout the organization. For example, “if a company has similar events taking place throughout country, it can use same path and templates” and apply it to each audience in an appropriate way, Jania explains.

Testing and validating — Brands can use this tool to troubleshoot errors -- for example, “a marketing email with an incorrect name, a greeting line that doesn’t make sense, a last name in all caps or a missing name associated with an email address,” Jania says.

Orvis has used the Saleforce content selection feature to “curate highly personalized conversations within our marketing emails,” states Tim Delles, senior manager for email strategy and innovation at Orvis. “We’ve been able to rethink our approach to email,” Delles says.

United Way has “revolutionized” its email Salesforce Marketing Cloud, achieving a 90% increase in open rates targeting new donors and a 42% increase in click-to-open rates targeting new leads, states Amy Floryan, director of digital engagement at United Way.

Floryan adds that the new Journey Templates enables United Way to “save time on implementing campaigns and reduce human error by being able to copy pre-built Journeys and share them with our local United Ways around the world." 

Another Salesforce client, the real estate company Rentpath, has used the interactive technology to “better understand which properties a customer prefers after viewing them,” states Shanna Thompson, email marketing manager at Rentpath. 

Thompson adds, “By making it easy for customers to share their comments without ever having to leave one of our emails, we are able to get instant feedback and apply it right away." 

Jania notes that email still pulls the highest ROI and that “it’s not going away.”