• by Ray Schultz , September 23, 2020

Salesforce, responding in part to the boom in digital commerce during the pandemic, has launched Digital 360, an umbrella service that combines new tools and existing ones that make up the firm’s Sales Customer 360 platform. 

The development was announced at a digital press conference on Tuesday.

“Digital marketers have been seeing holiday level traffic almost every day,” says Adam Blitzer, EVP and GM, digital at Salesforce. 

In one new offering, Salesforce is entering the payment market in partnership with Stripe. The resulting product, Commerce Cloud Payments, will enable brands to embed payments into their sites.

This seems to be a trend — Mailchimp has also gone into the payment business in partnership with Stripe.

The Salesforce service supports transactions via credit cards, mobile wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and non-card service such as SEPA, iDEAL and Bancontact. In addition, it includes fraud protection, the company says. 

Another upcoming feature is Customer 360 Audiences, a customer data platform (CDP) that will allow marketers to unify all of their customer data and have “a single source of truth.”

This capability pulls in data from all sources, including offline, enabling brands to personalize “the entire end to end journey, every interaction from the first marketing email to when they land on site to make a purchase,” says Anna Rosenman, VP product marketing, Salesforce. 

Salesforce’s data capabilities are largely fueled by the firm’a purchase of omnichannel personalization company Evergage earlier this year.  

Meanwhile, the Customer 360 platform combines several Salesforce products, including Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Experience Cloud.

This combination provides a single source for personalizing marketing emails and online shopping ads and curbside pickup, the firm says.  

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is integrated with Google Analytics 360, placing reporting on email, mobile, advertising and the web in one dashboard.

One firm that uses Salesforce to help it reach the digital future is Sonos, a provider of home wi-fi network. 

“Everything that was going to happen in five years happened in three months for us,” says Zack Kramer, Sonos vice president and GP. Sonos, which utilizes the Net Promoter Score, organizes all of its data within Salesforce. 

“We use Salesforce products on the back end to make sure people are getting the best experience,” Kramer says, adding that “some behaviors will be pretty permanent.”

Retracing the history of Salesforce, Blitzer says, the company began in sales, and after acquiring ExactTarget and Demandware, focused heavily on digital.