Salesforce announces retail media network innovations

Salesforce for Retail today announced a series of measures designed to help retailers grow their customer data-based advertising businesses and generally enhance the retail customer experience.

Based on new research, disconnected experiences are the top frustration for retail customers, while 65% of those surveyed said they would remain loyal to retailers who provide personalized experiences (data from a double-blind study of over 5,000 consumers across the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada and Singapore).

Why we care. The retail media network innovations are very broadly described by Salesforce in today’s release, but they amount to an acknowledgement that this is a rapidly developing and valuable space. With the looming deprecation of third-party cookies, advertisers will be looking to buy or target audiences based on first-party data.

Who has vast troves of such data? Big retailers. Retailers are suddenly in the advertising business and Salesforce wants to be their partner.

Dig deeper: 2023 Predictions: Retail media networks

The innovations. Salesforce for Retail Media announced initiatives aimed at helping retailers grow their advertising business:

• Use first-party data to allow ad buyers direct access to target audiences.
• Use automation and workflows to enhance speed and efficiency for advertisers.
• Use actionable insights to optimize campaign performance.

Salesforce Commerce Cloud announced measures to decrease friction in the retail customer experience:

• Salesforce Payments can now be used as payment provider in physical stores, creating a single view of digital and physical customer transactions.
• Implementation accelerators, and out-of-the-box analytics and dashboards, to improve digital experience for Composable Storefronts (highly flexible and scalable website properties available to retailers using a headless CMS).
• The addition of more commerce partners to Salesforce AppExchange.

In addition, the recently announced Genie Data Cloud will provide connectors allowing retailers to securely ingest customer data from Azure Data Lake into Salesforce Marketing Cloud CDP.