With all eyes turned towards San Francisco and the start of Dreamforce, it would have been easy to miss the announcement that Salesforce have continued their acquisition strategy by agreeing to buy Krux – a category-leading data management platform who brand themselves as the ’Intelligent Marketing Hub’
With this acquisition, Salesforce are creating an almost irresistible mix of marketing goodies. We have had access to the Marketing Cloud for a while now, harnessing the power of Exact Target for B2C email marketing, and bringing social listening to a new level.
This was quickly followed by the launch of Pardot, to provide a robust B2B email marketing tool. If you were to throw Krux into the mix at this point, then this would already excite the marketers amongst us who would already be calculating the potential of bringing marketing lead email automation together, with the data management of Krux.
True to form though, Salesforce haven’t just stopped there. September also saw them announce the availability of Salesforce Einstein, which will enable their customers to access artificial intelligence (AI), which can be integrated into their own data to generate deeper insights. AI would normally be beyond the capability of most companies, so to bring this function to the mass market is game-changing.
You can now imagine a scenario where Salesforce is able to read and understand the content of the email you wish to send out. From automatically segmenting your customers according to who is likely to open an email and read it, to working out the best time to send, and which medium is best to use. The ability to change any of the suggestions is a basic click and drag functionality, and at the end you click a button to confirm and Salesforce takes care of sending it out.
The intelligence that sits behind this was only accessible through sci-fi movies until very recently, so when Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO, made the claim that the Salesforce suite of tools will be the ‘smartest on the market’ - it’s easy to see how he can justify that position.