Overview & Business Landscape
In today’s time and age Digital marketing is crucial for businesses due to the significant amount of time consumers spend online. Over 65% of digital media time is now spent on mobile devices. The ability to reach targeted audiences effectively and promptly to meet sales targets and push the revenue growth, makes digital marketing an essential component of modern business strategies.
However, the ever increasing competition between brands has a direct correlation to businesses vying for the consumers’ attention to promote their products, amp up their ad and marketing spends and overwhelm their audiences! What this means is an end-consumer is exposed to repetitive content and ads in the form of in-app push notifications, emails, texts, messages and even voice bots and telemarketing calls. Ad Fatigue is the obvious phenomenon where an individual feels disinterested and annoyed and builds a negative perception about the brand. To compound the predicament there is a risk of crackdown by regulatory authorities and also diminishing returns on investments!
Challenges faced by Businesses & Emerging Opportunities
Lets dive into some of the salient challenges encountered by companies across industry sectors. They are mostly tethered to breaching privacy guardrails, ineffective campaigns, dwindling customer engagement and unsatisfactory conversion rates!
Staying Compliant
On an average a consumer could be exposed to 500 to 1000 ads daily across brands regardless of intent and content. Owing to grievances and complaints voiced with telecom providers against this excessive ad exposure, regulatory authorities have been taking this situation seriously to protect user experience rights. The Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) of India slapped a fine of ₹1M on a leading Pharma player for misleading unsolicited advertising of their products. In the US, under the CAN-SPAM act, the sender or the promoting company could be liable for penalties up to $51K for each violation of any type of commercial messages. Similarly the Canadian Anti-spam Legislation (CASL) can impose fines up to $10M on businesses for unsolicited commercial messaging. Likewise laws are becoming increasingly stringent in the countries of LATAM and ANZ. Apart from financial loss, organisations cop a lot of bad press because of crackdowns such as these.
Building & Retaining Consumer Experience
Enterprises invest a lot to build brand awareness and loyalty amongst its target consumer segments by means of running promotions and campaigns of its products. However, the emotional connection that costs a lot to build runs a risk of erosion owing to an irreversible change in perception about the brand when ads become monotonous. To compound the situation, the marketers owning a specific brand or business unit would compete with one another and lack the enterprise wide perspective of a marketing executive (CMO) to control the overall corporate brand sentiment. Customer surveys indicate that a significant portion of consumers – 64% – find ads annoying, and 54% feel that ads disrupt their activities. Publicly available stats clearly illustrates this brand aversion – as high 30% drop in engagement, CTR can go down by 50% and conversion rates might take a hit to the extent of 55%.
Optimising Budget
Companies worldwide encounter the proverbial challenge of effectively leveraging their marketing campaign budget. In the times of break-neck competition between brands, fastidious consumer traits an enterprise must balance its omnichannel engagements. There is also an implicit call to action to apportion spends across its lines of business, campaign categories, customer hierarchy/net worth, regions of operation etc to improve conversion, growth and ROI.
Intelligent Marketing
Across each industry segment the number of players and the competition between brands is on a steep gradient. The medieval strategy of “spray and pray” has proven to be counter-intuitive when it comes to customer acquisition and retention. To generate brand awareness, attract and retain customers, and sustain growth, enterprises must stress on making smarter spend decisions and sharpen the focus of their campaigns to improve ROI. This entails an infusion of AI to lay bets and spend more on the more loyal customers, and the stronger leads for instance.
A Customer Story of Pain
It might become easier to appreciate by considering the example of a fictional non-banking financial institution called “Pinnacle Finance Limited (PFL)” headquartered in Mumbai, India. They are using Salesforce CRM Marketing Cloud along with Data Cloud. Data Cloud is enhancing their CRM implementation by offering the following usual capabilities:
- Bringing in PFL’s profile (Existing-to-Bank (ETB) & New-to-Bank customers (NTB)) and engagement data into Data Cloud from disparate sources (CRM clouds, their official web portal and mobile app).
- Harmonising all their data sources into Canonical objects (CIM) glued to the metadata layer of Salesforce platform.
- Generating the unified single source of truth (SSOT) for each customer profile by Identity Resolution
- Building rules-based Calculated Insights such as the LifeTime Value of loyal ETB customers.
- Powering Einstein Studio to build predictive models to assess useful metrics such as net worth category, lead quality etc.
- Carving out audiences to run marketing campaigns by Segmentation and engaging omnichannel (sms, email, whatsapp, mobile app-push) via Activation to Marketing Cloud
This is all smooth sailing so far. Let’s now delve into the tricky part. PFL has 35 lines of business (Insurance, Credit Cards, Home Loans, Personal Loans, Fixed Deposits, Securities etc). Each line of business has employed 50 to 75 Marketers who come to their day, get a list of campaigns to run on that day from the campaign managers, build segments with the campaign guidance, and fire them away across channels. Some of the direct and indirect fallouts of this slam dunk approach are the following:
- PFL’s end consumers end up getting spammed with repetitive communications devoid of value and relevance.
- There is widespread annoyance within their ETB customer-base. A significant percentage of them block them or file a complaint with the telecom providers. CSAT score takes a hit, attrition also creeps up.
- Regulatory authorities have already cracked down hard for apathy towards their customers’ right to privacy. This has already splashed a couple of times in the media leading to bad press, loss of business.
- PFL has highly diversified business units, they operate nationally across 30 states. Their CFO and CMO struggle to efficiently distribute and optimise the Marketing budget and spend. Their customer engagement is largely skewed, lopsided across businesses and regions, often leading to cannibalisation!
- The “spray and pray” tactics of their marketers are by and large lacking reasoning, logic and intelligence. Hence for the past couple of years their yield or conversion rate is an unenviable 0.04%!
Cross-channel Communication Capping promises to deliver & How
Every challenge presents an opportunity! Challenges have been aplenty in the premise of digital marketing specially for regulated industry segments to help identify and nail one solid product opportunity! This is how Cross-channel Communication Capping came into being!
Cross-channel Communication Capping is a new product built on top of Data Cloud core. It’s a customer configurable cockpit that empowers enterprises to regulate, optimise and audit their marketing spends and activities fine-grained to Channel and any conceivable enterprise dimension such as line of business, campaign category, lead quality etc.
First Principles
- Fully customisable with clicks: 100% customer-configurable rules by channel, department, geography, budget, and more.
- Platform construct: Cross-channel coverage. Both Pull & Push. Caters to B2C, B2B, D2C customer segments.
- API First: Extensible as a Service to address last-mile calls. Invocable via Flow to light up Customer360 and cross-cloud enrichment opportunities.
- Agent Ready: A rich API inventory under the covers serves up options to ground prompts for an agentic experience in the future (safe harbor).
- Observable: Regulated persistence of data powers end-to-end telemetry.
- Reliable: Accuracy of outcome is deterministic to the order of Three Nines. This is critical for regulated industries.
Product Synopsis
Rewinding back to the experiences of PFL and the emerging opportunities, the product is carefully conceived, architected and crafted to ensure it addresses the following key asks from the customer:
- Aids regulatory compliance: Stay compliant with regulatory requirements by constraining unsolicited, unregulated targeting/retargeting to stipulated thresholds
- Avoid communication fatigue and oversaturation: Constrain all forms of outreach across channels to help improve customer experience
- Optimise spend to maximise returns: Allow AI powered parameters to prioritise and skew investments on channels and leads with high propensity
- Serve up audit and analytics: Record enforcement of rules for BI and external audit.
This segues to the heart of the architecture and the underlying dynamics of Communication Capping.
The 100k Foot View
Cross-channel Communication Capping is built as a safety net or funnel that is juxtaposed to the immediate right of the Activation layer in Data Cloud. Marketers employed in the different business units of an enterprise would author segments to select the audiences for specific campaigns, and activations to decorate the audience, apply consent filters and route it to the desired channel at the last mile martech or adtech destinations. The segment would publish on-demand or on a schedule before activation curates the audience for dispatch. Each member of the activated audience prior to getting propagated to the last mile gets evaluated sequentially in the Communication Capping module to arrive at the decision whether or not to engage!
It’s easy to set up
A one time system setup allows the Data Cloud Admin of PFL to preconfigure the channels for engagement (eg sms, email , whatsapp, app push, direct call etc), the bespoke enterprise dimensions the businesses care for (eg line of business, campaign category, region etc), the capping frequency (daily, weekly, monthly) and the capping grain (profile, enterprise). PFL can benefit immensely from this feature as it allows them to stay compliant by honouring individual privacy guardrails, and also to manage and distribute budget and spends across the channels and dimension. Upon setting up the necessary components, the admin can next go configure a Rules console that would eventually power the Communication Capping module at runtime!
You can make it act smart!
AI powered metrics such as lead quality, propensity to buy, churn risks, net worth category might also be leveraged to frame rules aligned with optimised investment strategy. To layer into this further, the product would allow businesses to punt their investments on the strongest leads having higher chances of conversion to maximise ROI from campaigns. This is also a case in point for PFL as they lack data science and intelligence in their investment decisions.
Experience of an End-user
Let’s layer into this product further through the lens of the operational end-users’ experience. Varied personas get at it when it comes to setting up the system and configuring the rules console.
Setup
User Persona: Data Cloud Admin
This is a one-time operation where the admin must configure some components in the Data Cloud setup that would eventually govern the framework of the Communication Capping app.
These include the relevant engagement channels and the user-defined enterprise dimensions with corresponding values leveraged by the business. The hierarchy order between the dimensions can also be changed using the buttons for the “up-arrow” and the “down-arrow” in the “Edit Parameter” section. The admin might also use AI powered metrics such as customer net worth category to infuse AI in the capping strategy, like High Net Worth (HNW), Low Net Worth (LNW) etc!
Additionally, the Capping Frequency and the Limit type options are also managed here.
Console object creation
User Persona : Data Cloud Admin
This is by and large a one time operation where the admin creates the first active instance of the console object. It is predicated by an option to choose the preferred combination of dimensions in the order of hierarchy as defined in the setup.
Subsequently if the business requires to add or remove a dimension, the admin can disable the current object before creating a fresh one with the desired combination.
Managing the Rules framework
User persona: Data Cloud admin
The record home of the Console object is the seat for the Capping rules and the Priority rules (optional).
The Capping rules can be created from the UI or via upload of an offline file.
The rules are created with a validity period allowing businesses to program rules into the future. This is a useful value added feature for PFL as their marketers can preempt and plan ahead of time for peak traffic ephemerals like Diwali in India. Likewise peak holiday periods across the world could be prepared proactively.
Also every enterprise dimension prompts to choose values from a picklist fed from the setup. Additionally the user can pick “All” as a value from the picklist to impose a collective limit as in “all modes of communication” or “all lines of business”. This clever piece of improvisation is key for PFL to maintain rules to manage budget and compliance at an enterprise or a national grain! That’s not all, this flexibility also allows enterprises to honour state-imposed blackout periods dynamically!
Activation Target with Dimension Metadata
Persona: Marketing Admin or Marketing Manager
The last step in the configuration experience is to create the Communication Capping specific Activation Targets and assign the dimension metadata to them.
Execution & Outcome
Once the Setup and Configuration is accomplished by the Admin and Marketing Manager, the Marketer creates segments and activates them to the Communication Capping specific Activation targets in line with the campaign strategies. Once the segments publish and activate, the Funnel module kicks in and evaluates the audience based on the rules managed inside the Console object.
A real example
Lets vet the complete end-to-end functionality of Communication Capping out with an example curated for a FINS player similar to PFL.
- The Data Cloud is earlier set up with the enterprise dimensions “Line of Business” and “Customer Net worth Category”.
- Highlighted capping rule: Caps Daily Emails at the Enterprise grain to 18 for HNW customers.
- Two Segments “HNW Individuals – Male” and “HNW Individuals – Female” are activated in the order as highlighted below to Marketing Cloud. Their audience sizes are 13 and 8 respectively.
- All 8 members of the segment “HNW Individuals – Female” that activated first get accepted and sent to the target. However, the rule highlighted above kicks in during the second activation of the segment “HNW Individuals – Male”. (13 + 8)-18 = 3 profiles get dropped out of the 13 in the segment. Remaining 10 profiles get accepted and propagated
- The 3 dropped profiles are recorded in the custom object Dropped with the precise rule that got enforced
- Finally the 10 qualified profiles from the segment “HNW Individuals – Male” make it to the corresponding Data Extension in Marketing Cloud.
To keep your auditors happy
PFL might need to host the auditors periodically for inspection of their operations. So evidence with data points needs to be proactively prepared and managed. Both the custom objects – Qualified and Dropped are subject to the data retention contracts with the customer. With the traceability of each disqualified profile to the violated capping rule, the Dropped object carries immense value as a source for BI and analytics that can be harnessed for external audit and internal controlling procedures. This native integration of Communication Capping to Salesforce’s visualisation layer can stand out as strategic and impactful to PFL’s business ethics!
Under the Covers
Now that we have unravelled the user experience in its entirety from left to right, it’s time to wear the hat of a technologist to appreciate the innards of Communication Capping much as how it processes the input audience to spew out a compliant contactable payload at optimal cost and performance!
The Console
The module under the covers contains a console object where PFL’s Data Cloud Admin defines two types of rules:
- Capping Rules (mandatory) with limits pivoted on the engagement channel and other enterprise dimensions pre-configured as part of initial setup. The limits could be stipulated either at the profile grain to control individual privacy or at the dimension grain to manage enterprise budget.
For instance you can set a rule to limit Emails sent to each consumer by each business unit (Insurance, Home Loan, Credit Cards etc) to once daily, while setting the limit to 3 for all communications sent across all brands, business units (limit type as profile). Likewise one can fix an enterprise wide budget (limit type as dimension) of 1M WhatsApp, 5M SMS, 10M Emails in a month. - Priority Rules (optional) to set a precedence within a particular dimension to allow prioritising one entity over the other while consuming the allocated limits.
For instance if only one communication could be made for the day, prioritise Whatsapp over Email, or a special campaign category over a regular one to break the tie!
Something Unique about the Activation Targets
Each activation at the point of authoring is tethered to one amongst a special set of activation targets whose metadata is also augmented with the same set of dimensions in line with the communication channel and the purpose of the engagement conceived by a Marketing Manager in the PFL ranks. This enhanced target metadata plays a key role in indexation of the rule(s) to apply on a profile being evaluated.
Inside the Engine Room
The console feeds the main module or the “Funnel”. The PFL Marketers would come to their day and build their respective segments. Every activated segment audience queues up at the top of the funnel where the evaluation kicks in. Each profile in the aggregated audience is processed sequentially as the same person could be targeted for multiple campaigns/segments. The dimension metadata derived from the activation target of a particular activation merges with each profile of that activation payload. This allows the module to look up and retrieve the relevant rules applicable for each activated profile based on the metadata.
At the point of creation of the console object, Calculated Insights are created via invocable Connect API with the “count” function pivoted on all the preconfigured dimensions to track the number of times a profile is engaged. The limits calibrated against each enforceable rule are compared with the corresponding counter states to decide the fate of a profile. Only if none of the limits is breached, is the profile allowed for last mile engagement and emerges with a “clean chit” from the funnel to get staged in a custom object tagged as “Qualified”. A breach of any one of the limits leads to “disqualification” of the profile and it ends up inside another custom object tagged as “Dropped” with an additional data element that stores the semantic of the rule that was breached.
The “Qualified” object becomes the feeder for the dispatch module which routes every member to the destination (Marketing Cloud Engagement or Hyperscalers) commensurate with the activation target.
Looking ahead & Closing out
Cross-channel Communication Capping in the current state is local to Data Cloud and is triggered by Activation. However, in the foreseeable future this product is envisioned to be exposed as a service which could be invoked by any CRM cross-cloud function and Agent Actions via Flow leveraging Apex Class embedding the execution API. Some classic use cases could be Einstein Personalisation, Marketing Cloud on Core (UMA). It’s not far when marketers can even delegate to digital agents to craft complex rules, deliver fine-grained balances, query real-time the contactability of a lead, or even fire the capping engine on-demand!
Cross-channel Communication Capping is thus a significant piece of innovation in the premise of CRM software and Salesforce Data Cloud. It stands out as an efficient and apt enabler for the Marketing arm of businesses with its multifaceted offerings in the realms of respecting consumer privacy, exercising constraint, building and retaining customer loyalty, smarter investments and ROI, and of course audit and control!
As a wrap, Pinnacle Finance Limited’s story of pain was heard with intent and vindicated to a great extent by Cross-channel Communication Capping. PFL’s adoption of this product is already leading to tangible outcomes and paving a clear path of redemption!
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