Salesforce.com Expands Design Capabilities for Community Cloud

Salesforce.com today announced expanded design capabilities for Community Cloud, with the goal of simplifying the process of building branded digital destinations. The new capabilities aim to hasten time to market, lessen reliance on custom development, and reduce development costs and maintenance expenses.

“Companies want to be able to quickly create and launch experiences that are not only functional but also visually appealing to their customers, partners and employees. But too often, they have to struggle with disconnected tools in order to create a seamless experience,” says Anna Rosenman, senior director of product marketing for community cloud at Salesforce. “It’s because of these pain points that we’ve focused on building out Community Cloud’s design capabilities. Now, it's easier than ever for marketers to create branded digital destinations since 50 percent of the work is completed right out of the box. Companies don’t have to rely heavily on custom development, and there’s an overall reduction in development costs and maintenance expenses.”

“It's fast to start with a template, and then add in branding, logos and components—like rich content, a carousel, or logos—using simple drag-and-drop functionality,” she adds.

As Rosenman notes, users start by selecting a template with prepopulated layouts and components that are already installed; they can then add custom branding and connect to their data. The communities feature mobile-responsive design and are SEO-optimized. Additionally, the CMS Connect component enables users to easily integrate content such as headers, footers, banners, and fonts from a content management system. 

“Communities makes it easier than ever to extend your CRM and create an engaging experience using a single platform: Salesforce,” Rosenman says. “Because Communities is built on the Salesforce platform, the same CRM apps, business processes, and data can extended to customers, partners, and other employees…but it’s not just about extending data and business processes: an engaging experience also needs to be branded and beautiful. With the new design tools in Community Cloud, marketers and designers can easily create a branded, customized, and even pixel-perfect digital destination.”

Marketers can create personalized page experience based on user data as well as standard web rules such as geography and referring domain, Rosenman notes. “For example, a sports apparel brand wants to create a highly personalized customer community. Backed by rules-based data and AI, marketers at the company can create a branded community that delivers highly personalized experiences—a San Francisco Giants fan would be shown different content and visuals than a New York Knicks fan,” she says.

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