Delivering the right message at the right time has always been a fundamental goal for marketers, and real-time website personalization is a key strategy to achieve this. With the rise of AI, the ability to deliver highly personalized customer experiences is becoming more accessible and impactful.
Salesforce has introduced a new offering: Salesforce Personalization. This latest offering promises real-time personalized experiences, prompting questions about the future of Marketing Cloud Personalization in light of this development. In this post, we explain what Salesforce Personalization is and how it will impact all current users of Marketing Cloud Personalization.
How Evergage Became Marketing Cloud Personalization
Let’s begin by looking at the current landscape. Marketing Cloud Personalization began with Salesforce’s acquisition of Evergage in 2020, a leading platform for web orchestration and personalization at the time.
Salesforce quickly integrated Evergage into its Marketing Cloud platform, initially rebranding it as Interaction Studio and later as Marketing Cloud Personalization. This acquisition filled a gap in Salesforce’s suite, bringing robust personalization capabilities to Marketing Cloud.
However, despite significant progress in integrating Marketing Cloud Personalization with the broader Salesforce ecosystem, some friction points remain. While Marketing Cloud Personalization is marketed primarily as a tool for marketers, its setup, maintenance, and updates are technically demanding and often require specialized teams to complete (for example, encryption for data transfer). This complexity can distance the platform from marketing users.
What Is Salesforce Personalization?
Salesforce Personalization is an AI-driven decision engine that uses real-time customer data to deliver highly personalized experiences across every customer touchpoint at scale. This new solution aims to centralize real-time, cross-channel personalization across the entire Salesforce Platform.
Built on Salesforce’s core platform, Salesforce Personalization is designed to integrate seamlessly with Data Cloud, leveraging its data to power AI-driven personalized experiences.
Already generally available, you can use foundational Data Cloud elements like real-time data ingestion, identity resolution, calculated insights, and data graphs for Salesforce Personalization to deliver relevant, targeted, individualized content to customers at the right time.
Salesforce Personalization also gathers and displays metrics to provide insights into the usage and effectiveness of personalized decisions. This news was part of the Winter ‘25 release.
Salesforce Personalization vs. Marketing Cloud Personalization
Aside from being built on Salesforce’s core platform – and the benefits that come with Data Cloud and Agentforce – another key distinction between Salesforce Personalization and Marketing Cloud Personalization is the breadth of personalization it offers.
Salesforce Personalization extends beyond website personalization to the AI add-ons for Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud. For example, Commerce Cloud promises advanced features such as personalized recommendations, search results, and category sorting.
Salesforce Personalization is agnostic to the CMS you’re using, so you can easily integrate it to improve personalization. Its native integration with Data Cloud promises more streamlined data flow and easier platform connections.
This could significantly reduce the time and manual effort required to create personalized experiences and empower marketers to deliver campaigns without technical specialists.
What Should Marketing Cloud Personalization Users Think?
So the question is: should current Marketing Cloud Personalization users be concerned? Not necessarily.
Marketing Cloud Personalization remains a valuable tool, particularly if you use platforms other than Data Cloud in your tech stack.
Marketing Cloud Personalization’s versatility makes it a strong choice for personalizing customer experiences. However, for those seeking a more integrated, data-driven approach to personalization, Salesforce Personalization offers compelling advantages.
While details on successful implementations of Salesforce Personalization for websites are still emerging, it’s worth monitoring how this new solution evolves and how the two will be positioned next to each other in the future.
Why Should You Try It?
In the Salesforce Winter ‘25 release, we learned that the Salesforce Personalization capacity expands to other tooling like Marketing Cloud where using Salesforce Personalization targeting rules and personalization decisions will be natively integrated with Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced editions.
For example, in Marketing Cloud Growth, you can use targeting rules and personalization decisions to provide individualized, dynamically varied content in Marketing email communications. In Marketing Cloud Advanced orgs, you can set up path experimentation for segment-triggered flows to determine which path had the best outcome.
The power of Data Cloud and Salesforce Personalization will help to build personalized experiences that are user-friendly for marketers as they can leverage the point-and-click approach. This makes the process faster and gives the power back into the marketers’ hands. The promise of Salesforce Personalization goes beyond the marketing needs and can be useful for sales or service teams to leverage the users’ insights on the website to give the best customer service.
Summary
If you’re looking to make your customer experiences more personalized at scale, Salesforce Personalization is a compelling option, especially for those not already using Marketing Cloud Personalization.
As highlighted in the Winter ‘25 release, Salesforce Personalization integrates seamlessly with Salesforce’s Data Cloud to deliver AI-driven personalized experiences across multiple channels. Its collaboration with Agentforce is already live and made to ease the adoption while scaling your personalization efforts in a way humans can’t do alone. However, leveraging its full potential requires Data Cloud as a foundational component.
For businesses already using Marketing Cloud Personalization, the decision to transition or adopt Salesforce Personalization depends on how customer data is managed and your tech stack’s compatibility with Data Cloud.
While Marketing Cloud Personalization remains a strong choice for versatile website personalization, Salesforce Personalization offers a more streamlined, integrated, and marketer-friendly approach. Evaluating your data infrastructure will help determine which solution best suits your needs as AI-powered personalization continues to evolve.
