After Krux acquisition, Salesforce rolls out smarter marketing tools
The Krux platform will let Salesforce users segment their customers into different clusters.
After closing its acquisition of Krux, Salesforce on Thursday rolled out new innovations based on the data management platform.
By incorporating the Krux platform into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce will enable marketers to better fine-tune and personalize marketing campaigns. At the same time, the new technology will give marketers the tools to seek out new, broader markets.
More specifically, Krux brings three key improvements to Salesforce: It's improving cross-channel ad delivery management, it allows marketers to incorporate any Salesforce data into their digital ad campaigns and it will power Einstein Journey Insights -- a new dashboard that lets marketers segment and target audiences in new, more sophisticated ways.
Traditional data management platforms are built as web cookie collection and distribution platforms, associating a cookie with an audience segment. Krux, by contrast, is better suited for a multi-device landscape because it "is very focused on people," Leslie Fine, vice president of data and analytics at Salesforce, told ZDNet. "At the core of all those devices and interactions are your consumers."
Because Krux focuses on the consumer behind the devices, it can calculate the optimal ad frequency range for marketers by testing and measuring the ads customers actually engage with.
"Finding that Goldilocks moment requires understanding people across all interactions," Fine said.
It improves customer interactions further by drawing from all data within Salesforce, such as data from the Service Cloud or Commerce Cloud. For instance, an internet provider could ensure they stop advertising to any consumers with an open customer service case.
Meanwhile, the new Journey Insights dashboard helps marketers find the most efficient path to conversion by analyzing hundreds of millions of data points. For instance, a retailer might discover that a customer who was reached via email and then watched a video is nearly three times more likely to make a purchase.
Krux can also help Salesforce users find new market segments they might not have known about before, by segmenting customers into different clusters. For instance, an outdoor lifestyle retailer could segment its website visitors to find both women and fitness enthusiasts, and then find out what's driving their participation on the site.
This kind of insight has helped drive B2C interactions for brands like Conagra, the packaged foods company. Using Krux, the company discovered that its reputation for being ecologically responsible and nutritionally sensitive was driving a cohort of fans to their web property, Fine said, and they've been able to tailor their advertising accordingly.
"Your most valuable asset is your information about your consumers," Fine said. "All of that is incredibly powerful, and these technologies allow brands to leverage that."