Salesforce ExactTarget Launches the Next Generation of Journey Builder

Salesforce.com's ExactTarget Marketing Cloud unit has launched the next generation of its Journey Builder solution, the customer journey management platform to plan, personalize, and optimize customer interactions across multiple channels and devices.

The new Journey Builder solution will allow marketers to map customer journeys and connect them to digital marketing interactions across email, mobile, social media, the Web, connected products, and more, to power personalized customer journeys that are dynamically optimized based on customer engagement.

With the next-generation Journey Builder, marketers will be able to do the following:

• Plan the Customer Journey with Journey Maps - Journey Builder delivers a drag-and-drop interface for mapping the exact path customers will experience with a brand across lifecycle stages and channels. With Journey Maps, marketers now have a canvas – a visual process - to map customer journeys across email, mobile, social, Web and connected devices; measure performance; optimize for best results; and create a holistic view of how customers experience the brand.
• Personalize the Customer Journey with Journey Triggers – Users  can predict and automatically deliver the right message, channel, and timing for each customer experience by setting up predictive intelligence triggers. With new Journey Triggers, marketers will be able to automatically trigger content and offers based on customer behaviors, such as abandoned shopping cart, abandoned Web browser, product purchase, or affinity changes.
• Optimize the Customer Journey with Journey Metrics - New visual analytics empower marketers to test and monitor the effectiveness of every interaction and visualize which channels, messages, and times are performing best, beyond just clicks and Web conversions. Now marketers will be able to track and test every part of the journey in real time against goals using behavioral data, such as purchases, downloads, loyalty achievements, and app usage.

Scott McCorkle, CEO of Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud, says the new product is definitely needed. "Brands today have so many channels through which they communicate with their customers. Unfortunately, though, for most brands there is not a comprehensive, connected customer journey across all of these channels," he said in an email. "Our Journey Builder product aims to change that by making it simple for companies to overcome this challenge to reach their customers at each moment that matters, each event, each defining experience across all touch points and all marketing channels."  

According to McCorkle, the customer journey is  "the future of marketing." Marketers, he says, need to understand the complete journey customers have with their brands and how to measure and optimize them.

Journey Builder, he adds, gives them the tools they need to get a more complete view of customers, identify where they are in the journey with their brands, optimize every point of interaction on that journey, and measure the impact of all customer communications.

"ExactTarget Marketing Cloud's Journey Builder product is going to help us get closer to our customers," said Kevin Weiss, chairman and CEO ar SkyMall, an early Journey Builder user, in a statement. "We're building one-to-one customer journeys in real time across all channels and devices, better serving customer needs and interests through the joy of shopping."

ExactTarget Marketing Cloud Journey Builder is available today. Journey Maps, Journey Triggers, and Journey Metrics are scheduled to be generally available in a few weeks  Pricing starts at $5,000 per month for a subscription license, along with tiered pricing based on the number of messages sent.

ExactTarget launched Journey Builder in September 2013 to provide marketers a cloud-based dynamic lifecycle marketing solution to create, automate, and optimize personalized campaigns at consumer scale.

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