Salesforce Commerce Cloud customers have access to one of the most user-friendly and powerful eCommerce solutions on the market. According to Forrester, Salesforce’s suite of tools provides the “best fit for retailers looking for a strong, highly scalable, cloud-based commerce platform.”
We agree. But is it enough on its own?
Don’t get us wrong: We love Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Yet even the best solutions can only do so much on their own. Market forces are evolving. Customers increasingly expect content-rich shopping experiences that are personalized, engaging, relevant, and consistent across all channels and devices.
The trick to meeting this demand? Combine all of your separate customer-facing solutions (including CRM, analytics, CMS, DAM, marketing automation, etc.) into an efficient and user-friendly machine for creating content-rich retail experiences. And that’s where CoreMedia can help.
Here are five ways the CoreMedia Content Cloud can supercharge your Salesforce online store.
#1 Access all content from a single user interface
Great shopping experiences can’t be isolated from other customer-facing systems, such as marketing and customer support. To entice a customer to make a purchase – and eventually convert them into a brand advocate – you need to be able to have access to and orchestrate content from all of these systems. And to automate and optimize these experiences, you need access to real-time customer and performance data. If this content is stored in separate silos, each with its own unique user interface and location, combining it together is going to be difficult, slow, and expensive.
CoreMedia solves this problem by providing a pre-built integration for Salesforce Commerce Cloud, as well as a simple integration framework for plugging in your favorite tools and repositories. With CoreMedia, all the content you need to create, deliver, and optimize next-gen shopping experiences is right at your fingertips.
Screenshot Studio
#2 Create shoppable experiences with advanced experience composition tools
So now you can access all your content. Not just product and pricing info, but brand assets, marketing campaigns, customer support data, user-generated content, social media, and customer data. But what can you do with it?
Most traditional eCommerce and web content management systems have tools for publishing, of course. But many of these tools have rigid rules and templates that limit what you can do. And this is why so many brand sites and web stores look identical. These siloed publishing models lead to separate brand and shopping sites as well as cookie-cutter online stores with the same boring product grids interspersed with static promotional content.
But CoreMedia turns this concept on its head by treating each piece of content as a reusable asset that can be combined in endless combinations – even content from other systems and repositories. We call this process “experience composition” and it’s the key to making shopping experiences frictionless. In addition, CoreMedia provides a wide range of pre-configured shoppable media models for things like image maps, videos, 360 spinners, image zoom, and more.
Screenshot Studio
#3 Preview the entire experience for any visitor in any context
The ability to repurpose and combine assets from multiple sources is useless, however, if you can't see how these multi-faceted experiences are actually going to look to your customers. That’s why you also need the ability to preview every element of the experience in every potential customer context so business users can be confident that what they’ve created is what the customer will experience.
Relevant content and product elements are displayed together in the same preview pane. And since all the data is aggregated in real-time, everything is automatically current. You can be certain your shoppers we see only the latest prices and inventory, as well as the most current product imagery and specifications.
And you’re not limited to a single channel or time frame. CoreMedia’s configurable preview pane will show you will the same content will look like on any device, for any customer segment, and within any time frame (i.e. now or in the future).
Screenshot Studio
#4 Grow at your own pace
Integrating these solutions to deliver content-rich customer experiences on every channel might seem overwhelming. It’s true, many vendors require you to jump through hoops to get to a system capable of delivering these kinds of experiences.
Companies that insist on all-in-one, product suite approaches to digital experiences will force you to make some sacrifices. You may have to get rid of familiar tools you’ve been using for years, scrap your current online store, rebuild your business logic from scratch, and buy software you rarely use. And it may take months or even years to deploy.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
CoreMedia can be deployed incrementally and is designed to adapt to your existing tools and processes. You can start by augmenting a few sections of your current commerce site and gradually expanding this to include the entire store. The next step could be to launch a new hybrid site that seamlessly blends your brand pages and online store. Finally, you can do what some of our more advanced enterprise customers do and manage the entire commerce and content system as a headless repository – one that delivers content in an "agnostic" format to an ever-evolving array of sophisticated multichannel front-end apps and global sites.
And to make sure you can get started even faster, we've developed productized, validated integrations with some of the industry’s leading marketing and eCommerce platforms including all of the major Salesforce solutions.
#5 Work with the team that cares
This last tip has less to do with the technology and more to do people. Because who you work with makes a difference. You deserve to work with a technology vendor that puts your interests first.
CoreMedia has a stellar track record of successful projects along with a 95% customer retention rate.
We also have a history – 20 years – of working in demanding industries including media, telecommunications, and luxury brands where businesses live or die based on the content they deliver and their ability to deliver it at scale.
With CoreMedia, you’ll not only work with a team of dedicated, out-of-the-box thinkers, you’ll also benefit from decades of industry experience.
