Extreme Marketing Concepts Easy to Execute with Salesforce Commerce Cloud (But Hard on Any Other Platform)

One of the best things about Salesforce Commerce Cloud is its entire armory of online marketing tools. This alone puts it a cut above any other ecommerce platform — by orders of magnitude.

Things impossible in Shopify, even if you squeeze the plugins to the max, are just “business as usual” with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

Today, let’s imagine some advertising campaigns that someone who wants to stretch Salesforce Commerce Cloud to the limits could make happen. Most of these are easily doable “out of the box”, and some require custom work on top of SFCC that SFCC is just waiting to be used for.

#1 – Let’s say you want to only show a product as being on-sale in San Francisco, and plaster the site with an “Equality Sale” and the rainbow flag everywhere — but if you’re not in San Francisco, you don’t see that. Simultaneously, if you’re in a “Red State,” you can see American flags on sale. Then “someone” (obviously, not you!) can leak to the media that your company is doing this and create a scandal about it. Other than the media leak — Salesforce Commerce Cloud can do it.

#2 – Perhaps, when a previous client returns to your site, and you can calculate that more than 83% of the products he has bought have been primarily red in color, then you can show him lots of red products. Yup, you can do that with Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

#3 – You can take out a Facebook marketing campaign only towards people who have an upcoming birthday. When one of these people comes to the site, the software will know they came from this campaign and thus their birthday is upcoming — so you can show them “happy birthday” discounts and sales. Salesforce Commerce Cloud can do this, no problem; just don’t forget to have your Facebook ads sent in the right parameters.

#4 – When someone purchases your product, you can add in a new field that’s required, a date that is special to them. They can then label what that date is for. Then, when that date is approaching, you can send them reminders and discounts for that special date. (I will always remember August 6th, 2012, the day Carol, my beloved pet snail, passed away.) No problem at all for SFCC, although of course, being a unique feature, it requires a small code change.

#5 – The site can have a pop-up that asks you what your favorite animal is. Then, it can show you custom product suggestions for lovers of that animal. Yes, of course SFCC can do it, although with a small amount of custom work.

#6 – Your site can know if someone is at a particular university — at least, if that’s where they’re connecting to the internet. Then, it can recommend, say, clothing in the color of the university, or ask you if you want to donate an extra $1 to the university’s library fund upon each purchase.

#7 – Your site can have a big lottery wheel spinner, and depending on the number that comes up, it can give you a different discount code — which is usable only for that session.

#8 – You can integrate the back-end of your site with a weather API, and combined with geolocation, we can show the visitors messages or discounts based on the weather. It’s about to rain, buy an umbrella now! And there’s no question SFCC can do it; your developers however need to build the weather API integration. (This is never requested so it’s not built into SFCC!)

#9 – Or it can tie-in with a constellation API and make zodiac-inspired recommendations for you based on the positions of the stars in the firmament, errr, sky above.

#10 – Your site can ask if you’re looking for a gift, and if so, ask a series of questions about the gift recipient, and from there propose gift suggestions.

#11 – Upon checkout, it can offer you to pay 1% of your purchase price in bottlecaps (100 bottlecaps = 1 dollar). They can then be dropped off at the nearest retail store in your network, and once counted and finalized your sale will be completed and your product shipped. Of course, the bottlecaps dropped off will be sent to be recycled, as part of a recycling marketing campaign. (I didn’t say it would all be easy; this one, requiring coordination with physical logistical stores and a very unique checkout flow, would require a substantial amount of customer work.)

Yes, some of these may require some amount of custom development on top of Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s core. But they’re all reasonably able to be implemented.

Usually, with online marketing, the key limitation is the limits of technology. But with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, the limits are instead your own creativity.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud tech teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.