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Salesforce has announced the launch of Marketing Cloud Lightning this week – a new user experience, platform and ecosystem that it claims will give marketers the power to run one to one customer journeys across sales, service and marketing.
The new announcement follows the launch earlier this year of Salesforce’s sales and services offerings built on the Lightning platform – Sales Cloud Lightning and Service Cloud Lightning. The Lightning platform is based on the Salesforce App Cloud and combines the Lightning Design System, Lightning App Builder and Lightning Components.
The new marketing version will offer a consistent user experience across any device with common Salesforce identity and navigation allowing marketers to work across the entire Customer Success Platform, claims Salesforce.
Key features
One of the key features of the Lightning platform is Lightning Components – reusable building blocks for assembling apps with drag and drop ease. This means that companies are able to develop and customise business apps for their needs combining the capabilities of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, custom apps and Marketing Cloud. Such Lightning Components range from core email functionality such as previewing emails and tracking open rates to reviewing the journey history of a specific lead or contact.
The platform will also use new Predictive Journeys technology to allow marketers to use data science to analyse information, such as web browsing activity and purchase history along with Salesforce data to anticipate next moves.
With the use of Marketing Cloud Lightning any activity in Salesforce will also trigger a customer journey. For example a user clicking on a Facebook Lead Ad would automatically populate that lead with the information they have already shared with Facebook. That lead would then be routed to Salesforce and a personalised journey created based on the customer information provided.
