Contentful + Salesforce: Maximize Personalization

Joining two platforms together can be a powerful way to elevate the customer journey, provide enhanced personalization, and create a meaningful user experience every step of the way. Today, we’re exploring the benefits of combining Salesforce with Contentful, a headless CMS, to distribute relevant, personalized content to users. 

What is Salesforce?

After developing on the Salesforce ecosystem since 2012, we can confidently say that Salesforce offers one of the best customer relationship management (CRM) platforms available. It provides organizations with a powerful platform to collect and build a “360-degree” view of their customers.

What is Contentful?

Most brands traditionally use a content management system (CMS) to build websites. This traditional architecture is designed to store and present content elements, including text, images, and videos on a webpage. With Contentful, a headless content management system (CMS), brands can use a different approach. Contentful stores content separately from the code in a content hub, providing organizations with a flexible, custom, and adaptable experience.  

How do Salesforce and Contentful Work Together?

We typically see companies combine Salesforce and Contentful when they are hoping to create a personalized content experience on their website, portal, or mobile app. To help illustrate this, think of Netflix. When you log in to Netflix, you are presented with content recommended for you. Every customer sees a different set of content when logging in. This is what we mean by a “personalized content experience”.

To deliver a personalized content experience, you need two key ingredients:

1. Information about the customer, such as demographic information, preferences, role, native language, etc, (think Salesforce)
2. Repository of tagged content such as articles, videos, webinars, etc. (think Contentful)

By combining your customer data in Salesforce with your content data in Contentful, you are able to curate the most relevant content to your customer.

Why Choose a Headless CMS with a CRM? 

If your ultimate goal is to provide personalized content to your users based on information in your CRM, pairing a headless CMS like Contentful with Salesforce is the perfect option. 

We typically recommend this pairing for a few particular use cases: 

• Membership Portals: A membership portal provides an authenticated user with specific content based on their membership level, interests, location, and more. 
• Knowledge Hubs: Based on particular details about a user pulled from a CRM—like their role, location, and more—a knowledge hub can serve useful, impactful content to meet a user’s needs. 
• Dynamic, Personalized Websites: The future of the web is dynamic, personalized content. If you have a site that relies on authenticated users, you can pair Contentful and Salesforce to surface the most relevant content.
• Websites with Content Upgrades: If your brand offers exclusive content for certain levels of membership, this combination makes it seamless to “tag” different tiers of content and provide the right information to the right users.
• E-Learning: Take users through a personalized, dynamic e-learning journey—complete with all the relevant, helpful information they need.  
• Internationalization: When you have a user’s native language information defined in a CRM, Contentful makes it possible to pull this data, showing the right language for the user. 

If you’re curious to learn more about the capabilities of a headless CMS, you can learn more about Contentful here. 

What Are the Benefits of These Technologies Together?  

We see the Contentful and Salesforce integration as a crucial one. In today’s world, the best content experience isn’t a static one—instead, it’s a personalized, dynamic, and customized journey based on your data. It bridges together your brand’s content with data from your CRM and can truly add unparalleled value to your clients. 

See It In Action 

We recently rebuilt one of our clients’ websites, Francis Lofts & Bunks, on Contentful. After relying heavily on engineers to make changes to the previous version of the website, Contentful enables Francis Lofts & Bunks’ marketing team to easily make changes, add new sections, or highlight promotions with just a few clicks.

“The best product we have is the website we’ve built using Contentful,” shares Michael Garrity, the Director of Marketing at Francis Lofts & Bunks. “More than anything, I attribute Contentful to the significant growth we’ve seen in the past two years. It’s smart, simple, and seamless.” 

Ready to Learn More? 

If you’re looking for a partner to elevate your digital experience or explore exciting software combinations, LaunchPad Lab is here to help. Book your free discovery call with us to get started! 

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