Take Your Shopify To The Next Level With Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Why this Combo Helps You Deliver Better CX

With the pandemic causing people to hunker down in their homes, online shopping is bigger than ever. While the trend of online shopping has grown significantly over the past ten years, for many shoppers, shopping online is quickly becoming status quo. Shopify has taken this trend by the reins, seeing a 75% increase in sales the past year. Online retail has never been more viable.

Shopify has become the go-to app for online businesses. Whether you sell novelty apparel – like socks with Garfield dressed like Darth Vader – or a more traditional product like exercise equipment, Shopify makes it easier than ever to grow an online business. As your business grows, you need to bolster Shopify to get the most out of it. Salesforce Marketing Cloud empowers Shopify in some key ways that can take your Shopify business to the next level.

Two is Better than One

Perhaps you are already using another software, and that software is getting the job done. So, the prospect of switching to Marketing Cloud can seem arduous. Maybe you haven’t anticipated the features of using Salesforce Marketing Cloud — you are unaware how much better things could be. Either way, you are missing a big opportunity. You want to be well-poised for growth by anticipating your business needs before they arise.

Shopify and Marketing Cloud are distinct, each having their own domain of functions. However, the two softwares play well together, almost as if they have a handshake deal. Once you get to a certain threshold, you will need to outsource a variety of aspects of your business. For example, maybe asking team members to send confirmation emails manually every day is no big deal, but at some point, it makes more sense to have it automated.

Since Shopify is not a native Salesforce integration, you need to set up Marketing Cloud before you are able to take advantage of the wealth of features this software offers to embolden your Shopify business.

Building Trust

A major way that Marketing Cloud enhances Shopify is by allowing you to capture real-time data based on Shopify activity. This helps you sharpen strategies to better retain your customers. By using data to focus on critical customer touchpoints, your Shopify business will be situated to understand your customers’ needs and give them an experience that suits those needs.

Transactional emails — any necessary non-marketing correspondence between seller and customer — are the most commonly automated data. If customers don’t get a confirmation email within a few minutes after placing an order, it erodes confidence in your business. They might become suspicious that they were scammed or wonder if their order went through. Similarly, order tracking is a big component. By giving status updates, you are better able to keep your customer in the loop of what is happening with their order, where it is along its journey. Finally, surveys where customers can rate their experience give you valuable feedback on how your store is performing.

All this streamlines your ability to understand your customer and provide them with a seamless experience that creates a foundation of consistency. This automation instills a sense of reliability — that your company tends to your customers’ needs, giving them what they expect when they expect it. Consistency and reliability build that trust.

Peeling the Onion

After establishing your business as trustworthy, you will be situated to take advantage of another big benefit of the marriage between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Shopify: marketing. Once a customer purchases something from you, you know something about them — their location, their sex, age, and, of course, that they are interested in what you are selling. Layering Marketing Cloud over Shopify and putting that data to good use has real rewards.

Integrating allows you to peel the onion of your customers’ preferences. You can begin creating customer journeys, segmenting customers in ways that tease out what they like so you can offer the right incentives for them to shop with you. Maybe people are adding items to their cart but not purchasing. Maybe they are returning customers who subscribed to your blog. With analytics, you are able to understand who they are and what interests them. You can then tailor their buying experience to what they need. Perhaps, you offer them a discount at checkout or a free gift if they subscribe to your blog.

Let’s say a customer buys some resistance bands from your exercise equipment brand. It isn’t a stretch to assume they are interested in home workouts. So, given that, you can now show them dynamic, hyper-relevant ads based on that information (or on different information entirely). Maybe the resistance bands are one of your less expensive items and you want to let them know using Interaction Studio about other items around the same price, like certain weights.

Similarly, you could even create a journey to win back customers who have not purchased anything in a while, crafting a promo with exclusive content aimed at getting the customer to shop with you again. Knowing whether such campaigns are successful is a huge benefit. If a customer isn’t opening your promo emails, after a while, it will begin to trigger their spam filter and affect your user reputation. So, with Marketing Cloud’s ability to aggregate Shopify data, you know to stop sending them offers.

The system, once set up, actually learns customer preferences on its own, taking the guesswork out of marketing to them while simultaneously improving CX. This saves your team time and energy.

Partners in Success

It is safe to say that, if you have a Shopify business, you want to maximize its potential. Yet layering Marketing Cloud atop Shopify won’t necessarily give you the kind of pinpoint accuracy in your marketing that you want. This is where a partner enters the scene.

Think of having a partner like having an interior decorator. You tell them you want a sleek Scandinavian minimalist or Dark Academia vibe to your apartment. You both know what that entails, so they go off and search for things that fit that aesthetic. Similarly, an experienced partner needs to understand, at a high level, why you want to integrate Marketing Cloud into your Shopify. Specifically, they need to know where in your sales funnel you are losing customers so as to determine which customers — or potential customers — to target.
So, while the strategy might change depending on what you’re selling and what your business approach is, the goal is the same: to get the most value out of your Shopify business. Contact our team today to get Salesforce Marketing Cloud working with your Shopify store.