Salesforce adds AI, interactive components to its email platform

Salesforce has announced updates to its Marketing Cloud email solution to support new inbox functionalities provided by several major Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The new features include Salesforce’s AI solution, Einstein and interactive email capabilities that could serve as an alternative solution to AMP for Email. The interactive capabilities will be integrated from the company’s acquisition of Rebel beginning early next year.

Why we should care

Email consistently outperforms other digital channels as an ROI driver for marketers, but consumer expectations keep climbing. Studies show that personalization is a key driver of engagement and sales. Salesforce’s combination of AI-driven personalization and interactive email components could help marketers improve engagement with their campaigns.

“At the start, marketers approached email like digital mass-mailer postcards,” said Salesforce senior director of product management Joe Teplow. “New things are happening. We’re seeing more and more of this functionality being supported by email clients, where they’re jumping on the bandwagon and proposing their own ideas for future uses. Those who aren’t forward-thinking about email can get left behind.”

Gmail and Outlook, for example, support functions such as in-email payments, survey responses and more. Subscribers and customers can take action without ever leaving the email.

These capabilities could also add significant automation to email operations processes. Salesforce’s AI aims to improve email campaign deployment by recommending images and identifying optimal send-times, the company said. It also uses natural language processing (NLP) to automate copywriting tasks such as personalized subject lines based on customer preference data.

More on the news

• Starting in early 2020, Salesforce Marketing Cloud will pilot Rebel’s integrated interactive capabilities, called Interactive Email, in Email Studio and Journey Builder.
• Einstein features include Einstein Content Selection which makes automatic recommendations for visual assets for emails based on customer preferences and behaviors.
• Einstein Copy Insights uses NLP to identify the optimal words for email subject lines, as well as text messages and social media copy,
• Einstein Messaging Insights notifies marketers of under or overperforming messages and makes recommendations for improvements.