Day 66: Customer Profiling and How to Leverage It in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

At the heart of every successful marketing strategy is a deep understanding of your customer. Today’s consumers expect brands to know their preferences, anticipate their needs, and deliver highly personalized content that resonates with them. But how can you, as a marketer, achieve this level of insight? The answer lies in customer profiling. Customer profiling allows you to create detailed personas based on customer data, helping you tailor your messaging, optimize engagement, and build long-term loyalty.

In Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), customer profiling is the backbone of effective personalization and segmentation. With the rich data available within SFMC, from behavioral to transactional data, marketers can create comprehensive profiles that inform every interaction—whether it's through email, mobile, social, or web. Today’s article will explore the process of building customer profiles and how to leverage them within SFMC to enhance your multi-channel marketing strategies.

We’ll refer to some of the concepts discussed in previous articles, such as Day 60: Personalizing Emails Based on Customer Data and Day 21: Segmentation Strategies in SFMC, to create a complete picture of how profiling fits into your broader marketing ecosystem.

As always, this article is part of the #SalesforcewithSumit series, designed to help you master Salesforce Marketing Cloud and take your marketing strategy to the next level.

What is Customer Profiling?

At its core, customer profiling is the process of gathering and analyzing data about your customers to create detailed descriptions, or personas, of different customer segments. These profiles go beyond basic demographic information like age, gender, and location—they incorporate behavioral data, preferences, purchase history, and even predictive insights about what a customer might do next.

A good customer profile helps you answer key questions like:

• What motivates your customers to make a purchase?
• How do they interact with your brand across various channels?
• What kind of content resonates with them?
• How do they prefer to engage (email, SMS, social media, etc.)?

In SFMC, customer profiling is made easier with tools like Contact Builder and Audience Builder, which aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a 360-degree view of each customer. This allows you to create not only static profiles but dynamic ones that evolve with every customer interaction.

Why Customer Profiling is Essential in SFMC

Customer profiling plays a pivotal role in optimizing your marketing efforts across multiple channels. It enables more targeted messaging, higher engagement rates, and a more personalized customer journey. Here’s why it’s essential in SFMC:

1. Precision in Personalization: As we discussed in Day 64: Best Practices for Personalization in SFMC, personalization is only as effective as the data you use to create it. With customer profiling, you can tailor every interaction—whether it’s an email, SMS, or social media ad—to the unique preferences and behaviors of each customer.
2. Better Segmentation: Customer profiling allows you to move beyond broad audience segments like "males aged 18-35" to create highly specific segments based on more meaningful criteria, such as purchase history, engagement frequency, or preferred communication channels. We touched on this in Day 21: Segmentation Strategies in SFMC, where segmentation based on behavior and preferences significantly enhances campaign performance.
3. Informed Decision Making: With a clear understanding of who your customers are and how they engage with your brand, you can make data-driven decisions about where to allocate resources and how to optimize each step of the customer journey.
4. Predictive Insights: SFMC’s integration with Einstein AI allows you to go beyond historical data and start predicting future behavior. This opens the door to more sophisticated customer profiles that not only reflect what your customers have done in the past but also what they are likely to do in the future. We explored Einstein’s predictive capabilities in Day 62: Setting Up Predictive Send Times with Einstein, but its applications go much further in helping you anticipate customer needs.

How to Build Customer Profiles in SFMC

1. Gathering Data

The first step in building a customer profile is gathering as much data as possible from every available touchpoint. SFMC is a powerful data hub, allowing you to pull in information from email interactions, website visits, social media engagements, purchase history, and even offline data such as in-store purchases or customer service interactions.

In Contact Builder, you can create Data Extensions that house this information. Whether you’re working with demographic data (e.g., age, gender), behavioral data (e.g., email opens, website visits), or transactional data (e.g., purchase history), SFMC allows you to consolidate this data into a single view for each customer.

You might recall from Day 16: Introduction to Data Management in SFMC that managing customer data effectively is crucial for successful marketing campaigns. Here, it’s about using that data to build meaningful profiles.

2. Analyzing and Segmenting Data

Once you’ve gathered the data, the next step is to analyze it and start segmenting your audience. Segmentation is an essential part of customer profiling because it allows you to group customers based on shared characteristics or behaviors.

In Audience Builder, you can create segments based on:

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, income, etc.
• Behavior: How frequently a customer interacts with your brand, what channels they prefer, etc.
• Transactional Data: Purchase history, average order value, last purchase date, etc.
• Engagement Data: How often they open your emails, click on links, engage with social media ads, etc.

This is where you can combine static data (like demographics) with dynamic data (like behavior) to create more nuanced profiles. For example, two customers might both be in the same age group, but their engagement levels might be very different. One may be an active buyer who engages with your brand regularly, while the other is a dormant customer who hasn’t made a purchase in months. These two customers require very different approaches, which is why customer profiling is so important.

3. Creating Customer Personas

Once you’ve segmented your audience, it’s time to create personas—fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data. A persona might look something like this:

Persona 1: Active Emily

• Age: 28
• Location: Urban
• Purchase History: 3-4 purchases per month, with an average order value of $75
• Channel Preference: Primarily mobile, opens 90% of emails on her phone
• Behavior: Frequently engages with product recommendations and discounts
• Preferred Content: Loves seeing personalized recommendations based on past purchases

Persona 2: Dormant Dave

• Age: 35
• Location: Suburban
• Purchase History: One purchase six months ago
• Channel Preference: Prefers email but opens less than 20% of them
• Behavior: Occasionally browses your website but doesn’t add items to cart
• Preferred Content: Needs re-engagement strategies, such as personalized offers to motivate a purchase

These personas help you humanize your data and better understand who your customers are, which in turn helps you craft more tailored and effective messaging.

How to Leverage Customer Profiles in SFMC

1. Personalizing Email Campaigns

Once you’ve built your customer profiles, the next step is to leverage them for more effective email campaigns. In SFMC’s Email Studio, you can use Dynamic Content (covered in Day 59: Using Dynamic Content in SFMC Emails) to tailor the content of your emails based on a customer’s profile.

For instance, if a customer’s profile shows that they’ve purchased a particular product category, you can automatically feature similar products in future emails. You can also use AMPscript to insert personalized recommendations or offers, as we discussed in Day 74: Writing Basic AMPscript for Dynamic Content.

By using customer profiles to inform your email content, you ensure that every email feels relevant and timely to the recipient.

2. Optimizing Multi-Channel Journeys

Customer profiles are also invaluable when it comes to creating multi-channel journeys in Journey Builder. As we explored in Day 65: Multi-Channel Personalization—How to Do It Right, personalization doesn’t end with email. By leveraging customer profiles, you can ensure that your messaging remains consistent across email, mobile, social, and even web channels.

For example, if a customer shows high engagement with your emails but hasn’t made a purchase in a while, you can create a journey that sends them a personalized email followed by a push notification if they don’t engage with the email. If they still don’t convert, you might then retarget them with a personalized social media ad. All of these touchpoints are informed by the customer’s profile, ensuring that the messaging is consistent and relevant.

3. Using Predictive Insights

With customer profiling, you’re not limited to understanding what customers have done in the past—you can also use predictive analytics to anticipate what they might do in the future. SFMC’s Einstein AI can analyze customer behavior and provide insights into things like predictive engagement and purchase likelihood, as discussed in Day 61: Using Einstein Recommendations in SFMC.

By integrating Einstein’s predictive insights into your customer profiles, you can further refine your targeting and personalization efforts. For instance, if Einstein predicts that a customer is likely to make a purchase within the next week, you might prioritize sending them personalized offers or recommendations to increase the chances of conversion.

Conclusion: Customer Profiling as the Foundation of Personalization

In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, customer profiling is the foundation upon which all personalization efforts are built. By gathering, analyzing, and segmenting data, you can create detailed profiles that inform every aspect of your marketing strategy—from email personalization to multi-channel journeys and predictive insights.

As we’ve seen in previous articles, like Day 58: Introduction to Personalization in SFMC and Day 21: Segmentation Strategies in SFMC, customer profiling enables you to deliver the right message, at the right time, to the right customer—ultimately driving engagement, loyalty, and revenue.

So, as you continue to refine your SFMC strategy, remember that the more detailed and accurate your customer profiles are, the more personalized and effective your marketing efforts will be.

For more strategies and insights, continue following the #SalesforcewithSumit series, and let's keep building your expertise in Salesforce Marketing Cloud!