Salesforce is introducing a version of its ExactTarget Journey Builder tool exclusively for managing customer journeys and experiences on mobile.
The new product, titled “Journey Builder for Apps,” was announced today at Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud’s Connections 2014 conference in Indianapolis, coming out almost two months after the original Journey Builder tool was released.
While Journey Builder helped marketers automate specific responses to customers across multiple digital channels, Journey Builder for Apps focuses exclusively on the creating personalized experiences for customers using the brand’s mobile app. That means creating, and more importantly automating a response to every action a customer takes within the app, funneling them along towards more sales, or increasing brand loyalty and engagement.
Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud CMO Michael Lazerow says Journey Builder for Apps was created to help brands easily optimize customer experiences through their apps. The goal is to provide a service that emulates the high quality mobile app experiences from companies like Netflix and Uber, without needing developers to build out new functionality from scratch. “Journey Builder for Apps is connecting any company to its customers with an Uber-like app experience out of the box,” says Lazerow. “We’ve made it simple for you as a company to deploy these technologies,” says Lazerow.
Here are some of the tasks marketers can perform using Journey Builder for Apps:
– Create multi-channel automated responses and notifications for every action a customer takes within the mobile app.
– Access “Journey Templates” that provide a starting point when it comes to planning customer journey interactions.
– Trigger customer journey mobile interactions based on data from external devices such as iBeacons, wearables and geo-fences. These connections, along with the app itself, can be built using Salesforce’s recently acquired Heroku development platform.
One of the most impressive features of the original Journey Builder platform was its ability to craft automated responses to every customer interaction. That same “If customer does X, then perform X” functionality is applied in Journey Builder for Apps, but it is even more effective since each mobile phone represents the actions of a single unique individual. Lazerow says this gives brands the opportunity to create powerful one-to-one responses for each customer interaction. “We’re moving from a world of anonymized cookies to a world of known relationships with customers managed through mobile and social,” says Lazerow.
To illustrate the platform’s value, Lazerow uses Kimpton Hotels, which recently used the Salesforce platform to revamp its rewards program. Instead of giving out reward points to customers over a set number of check-ins or long blocks of loyalty, Kimpton could use Journey Builder to start rewarding customers every day for actions they were taking through the app. For example, if a customer checked in through the Kimpton app, they could receive immediate notifications giving them their room number, a complimentary meal or a discount coupon to a local show, based on their profile. For repeat customers, the hotel could anticipate their needs based on previous interactions with the app and hence spend promotional budgets on customers more effectively.
ExactTarget Marketing Cloud Journey Builder for Apps is generally available today for customers, and its pricing starts at $12,500 per year for a subscription license.
