What Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization? (Interaction Studio)

Customers today don’t just prefer tailored interactions; they want their experiences to exceed their expectations, something out of the blue. If your marketing journey feels generic, your target audience may disengage, ignore your messages, and turn to competitors. This is where Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio), a leading personalization software comes in. It’s a powerful product within Marketing Cloud, helping businesses move beyond one-size-fits-all marketing by using real-time data and AI to deliver experiences that feel custom-made for each individual.

Salesforce’s MCP is a platform that lets businesses create customized experiences for customers and prospects across digital touchpoints such as websites, emails and mobile apps. It gathers real-time signals (from past purchases and browsing behavior to in-app and email engagement), then tracks, visualizes and orchestrates customer journeys that adapt dynamically to each individual’s preferences and intent.

Let us shed some more light on how it works, and what its use cases are. Let’s explore how it works and where it can deliver the most impact.

Key Takeaways

• How Salesforce MCP gathers and uses real-time customer data
• Core features that drive hyper-personalized marketing
• A step-by-step setup guide, from prerequisites to best practices
• Practical use cases for boosting conversions and engagement
• Overview of pricing tiers and best practices for successful implementation.

How Does Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP) work? 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization works by leveraging data and AI to deliver tailored experiences to each customer. Here’s an explanation of how it functions:

1. Collects Data

MCP uses the capabilities of CPDs to collect the data from various customer touchpoints and unifies it into a particular customer profile. This helps classify the customers based on their behavioral data (preferences), external data (like location), and transactional data (previous purchases).

2. AI and Personalization Layer

It leverages AI-driven predictive analytics to analyze data and enable behavioral targeting, helping brands anticipate customer preferences and behaviors. This helps in making instant decisions based on live data to deliver relevant content and offers. There is a term “affinity,” which means a customer’s preference for a particular category that resonates with a particular company. 

In the personalization layer, the identification of customer affinities and interests takes place with the help of AI. 

For example, with the help of Einstein Personalization Decisions and Einstein Personalization Recipes, it can determine which promotions will be included in customer interactions and identify the most effective types of algorithmic recommendations to send to each customer. It can even personalize email content at the moment of opening, a key part of dynamic content delivery.

Pro tip: Many people tend to get confused between customization and personalization. Here’s what both words signify: when you let customers pick, choose, and modify themes or layouts for enhancing experiences, that is considered customization. However, when you use data to determine and predict customer preferences, that is called personalization. 

3. Omnichannel Personalization

It syncs personalized experiences across web, email, mobile apps, social, and in-store, integrating with Journey Builder for complete customer journey orchestration.

Key Features of Salesforce MCP

Here’s a brief about some of the key features of MCP:

1. Real-Time Tracking

By tracking every click, view, and interaction (like pages visited or items added to cart) across various touchpoints, and creating a customer profile separately for known or anonymous users. This gives customers the impression that the brand understands them and their requirements, and eventually boosts conversations and customer engagement.

2. Report Generation 

MCP provides real-time analytics and reports that can be used as key performance indicators to analyze the campaign performance and customer response. The reports can be generated based on the requirements and parameters, such as individual customers or a particular section, to get a granular or holistic view accordingly. 

3. Unified Customer Profiling and Segmentation

The solution enables a unified customer profile that is based on the data collected from various sources and actions that can help in user segmentation based on whether they are new or recurring customers, their preferences (color, demographics, size, product category). This eventually helps in marking and managing product catalog, recommendations, and campaign content accordingly.

4. Journey Orchestration 

MCP helps marketers create and automate strategies through triggered messaging across different digital channels like email, SMS, websites, and mobile apps. The solution uses real-time data and smart decision-making (powered by AI) to send relevant messages and exclusive offers. The journeys differ from customer to customer and dynamically change based on customer behavior, providing a smooth and connected experience.

5. Interaction with Salesforce Ecosystem

It connects with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and other Salesforce products to share real-time customer data. This enables sales reps or service agents to see recent interactions (e.g., a customer’s last viewed product), powering smarter AI-driven marketing and close deals faster.

6. Content Co-ordination

It adjusts website layouts, banners, pop-ups, or email content in milliseconds to match an individual’s preferences. This benefits in boosting the click-through rates and effectively reducing the bounce rates.

7.Testing Capabilities  

It allows the testing and analysis of the performance of a personalized campaign by providing a detailed analytics report with the help of tools like Tableau and Marketing Cloud Intelligence. This can help you prepare for upcoming campaigns, figure out what works for you, and understand how you can maximize your ROI next time. 

Now that we’ve explored the core features, here’s how you can set up Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization for your business

How to Set Up Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization

Pre-requisites:

• Must have a valid Marketing Cloud license
• Must have a live, secure website, or you can use your cloud page as a website and use it for personalization.
• Have the key stakeholders involved in the decision-making process
• Develop KPI for measuring performance metrics.

 The Set-up:

Step 1: Log in to Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Step 2: After that, a dashboard will appear. 

• There you find the “Personalization” tab and click on it.
• A new dashboard will appear.

Step 3: Then create “Datasets”

• The dataset represents an instance of Marketing Cloud Personalization for use in personalization.  For example, if Adidas has a website for the USA and another for Canada, with different products and pricing as well as they want to keep their user interaction separate from each other they can have two datasets i.e. Adidas-US and Adidas-CA.

•  Go to the Engage tab

• Then click on Manage Datasets

•   In the Managed Datasets, click on Datasets (2) will show you a popup to create a new dataset.

• After clicking on manage datasets, you are redirected to the all dataset list, and now you have to click on the Dataset icon to create a new dataset

• Give a required unique name in the ID, and the Name of the Dataset. Select the environment and then click OK.

Step 4: Connect the website with Personalization

• To integrate the website and personalization, we need to deploy a JavaScript Beacon on the website. 
• Configure the following steps in the Personalization:

• On the dashboard of the selected dataset, go to “Web”
• Select the JavaScript Integration (SDK), select the synchronous tab, and copy the JavaScript integration beacon script to deploy on the website.

Step 5: Need to configure the website configuration in the web tab.

• In Website configuration, we have to put our domain name to enable Salesforce Interactions SDK Launcher.

• Install the Salesforce Interactions SDK Launcher on your browser. Get Salesforce Interactions SDK Launcher

• After enabling this extension, click on the Visual Editor to get the content zones, sitemap, and web campaigns

Note: When you click on the visual editor so you have to log into your Marketing Cloud on the same browser, so this extension shows all the functionality properly.

Best Practices for Successful Setup: 

• It is best to create two separate datasets so that rigorous testing can be done before the dataset goes live.
• Make sure to check whether the or not the connection between your website and MCP is secure. You can also use extensions such as Salesforce Interactions SDK Launcher to verify this.
• Get in touch with expert Salesforce developers from a reputed Salesforce partner like Cyntexa, who have years of experience and offer specialized implementation services. This will ensure that your MCP implementation goes smoothly without any hurdles. 

Salesforce Interaction Studio (MCP) Use Cases

Here are some of the use cases of Marketing Cloud Personalization:

1. Battling with Cart Abandonment:

Using predictive analytics, MCP can identify when a customer adds items to their cart but doesn’t complete the purchase, triggering personalized follow-up actions. For example, a fashion retailer can send a push notification with a discount code for the abandoned items or display a pop-up on the website encouraging the customer to complete the purchase. 

2. Seamless Cross-Channel Journey:  

The product can create a customer’s cross-channel journey quite seamlessly. By tactfully utilizing and assessing the triggers such as behaviour (if a customer has abandoned the cart then based on that sending follow-up emails), predictive triggers (if a customer has purchased product “X” then based on product affinity sending similar product recommendations via texts, ads and emails ), triggers based on time (usually creating a FOMO situation for the customer to think the clock is ticking and they should buy before its too late).   

For example, a financial institution can utilize the capabilities of MCP and create a proper journey for the potential customer who could be researching for say, retirement plans. Thus, a suggestive website feed could be created, with relevant blogs or plans, and when the customer leaves the website, follow-up emails could be sent. 

3. Tailored Onboarding Experiences: 

Based on the segmentation capabilities of MCP, a separate list of new and existing users can be curated. Thus, based on the list’s contextual onboarding and navigational steps can be presented to the users in the form of a pop-up. Plus, if the user skips the tutorial, that data can be registered and not show the same tutorials to them the next time they interact with the app or website.

Marketing Cloud Personalization Pricing 

Salesforce offers three main pricing tiers for its Marketing Cloud Personalization services, each designed to cater to different business needs. Here’s a breakdown of these tiers:

1. Growth Tier

Price: $108,000 USD (Billed annually) 

Features:

• Web and email personalization
• Product & Content Recommendations
• Experimentation capabilities (A/B testing)

2. Premium Tier

Price: $300,000 USD (Billed annually)

Features:

• All features from the Growth tier
• Mobile app personalization
• Enhanced AI real-time recommendations across web, mobile, and email

3. Salesforce Personalization Tier

Price: Request a Quote (Pricing is customized based on business needs)

Features:

• 1:1 cross-channel personalization
• Autonomous, real-time decision-making
• Unified customer profile management
• Agentforce personalization decisioning
• AI objective-based recommendations

End Note 

We can conclude that Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization removes the guesswork. Also, with the optimal usage of AI, the right kind of content reaches the right audience in a fraction of a second. Thus, without a doubt, implementing MCP should be on your to-do list. As the solution doesn’t just provide you with better ways to connect with your customers, but also helps your marketing efforts stand out. 

However, the setup and implementation would require you to have the support and assistance from an experienced and reliable Salesforce implementation partner like Cyntexa. With our team of seasoned Salesforce professionals, the implementation process is carried out with utmost precision and diligence from beginning to end. Plus, even after the process is complete, our team proactively checks the status of the implementation and suggests any new advancements or changes that need to be made as per the client’s business needs. 

Uncover your business’s personalization potential! Get in touch with our experts today! 

AUTHOR

Vishwajeet Srivastava

Salesforce Data Cloud, AI Products, ServiceNow, Product Engineering

Co-founder and CTO at Cyntexa also known as “VJ”. With 10+ years of experience and 22+ Salesforce certifications, he’s a seasoned expert in Salesforce Data Cloud & AI Products, Product Engineering, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, ServiceNow, and Managed Services. Known for blending strategic thinking with hands-on expertise, VJ is passionate about building scalable solutions that drive innovation, operational efficiency, and enterprise-wide transformation.