We recently talked to Cognizant about its Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities.

Within the Salesforce portfolio, Marketing Cloud, along with Commerce Cloud, is a high-potential product that will eventually outgrow the more mature Sales and Service Clouds. More than any other Salesforce product, Marketing Cloud has grown through M&A, notably ExactTarget (that came with B2B marketing ISV Pardot) and Datorama (analytics for marketers).

Cognizant primarily built its Marketing Cloud capabilities with its 2020 acquisition of Lev, with Cognizant transferring its Marketing Cloud practitioners to Lev. As Cognizant’s Marketing Cloud practice, Lev has now reached around 600 consultants globally and is one of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s largest service partners.

Lev’s preferred entry point with Marketing Cloud projects is consulting, with a maturity assessment of the client’s Marketing Cloud instance, followed by creating roadmaps for the transformation program to help the client exploit more Marketing Cloud features and functionality. Lev also offers organizational audits, process improvement, and license/subscription expense rationalization.

Addressing Marketing Cloud’s Large Portfolio

Lev’s capabilities span the full range of Marketing Cloud sub-products, ranging from the core Engagement sub-product (initially based on ExactTarget) to the emerging Customer Data Platform, Personalization (the former Interaction Studio), Intelligence (Datorama acquisition), and Account Engagement (Pardot acquisition).

Most of Lev’s work is around the Engagement sub-product, primarily Email Studio, Journey Builder, Mobile Studio, and Ad Studio. Lev works with clients to transform their email initiatives, automating email campaign management triggered across the customer journey. It uses Contact Builder to clean data and remove redundant accounts to improve data consistency.

Lev supports client scenarios such as organizations expanding multi-channel communications (e.g., expanding from email ISV to SMS and WhatsApp) and migration from legacy email service providers. In both scenarios, Lev will focus on migrating/transforming assets such as email templates, content areas, images, and documents to the Engagement sub-product.

Expansion in BPS

Lev has gone beyond IT services with Engagement and expanded to:

• Digital advertising agency activities such as campaign management BPS
• Creative services such as email visual design, copywriting, and content strategy and creation
• Paid ad management, helping clients define their campaign’s objectives, segment their audience, purchase the right advertising online, and monitor their effectiveness
• Translation and localization services for clients with multi-country campaign needs.

Lev sees campaign management and creative services as one of the entry points into an account.

Lev has developed two products that complement Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud:

• Campaign Studio, which helps organizations migrate marketing assets to Engagement and monitor campaigns at the enterprise level, and shorten time to create complex emails, audiences, and send schedules
• Abandoned Cart, which monitors abandoned carts on Commerce Cloud and can trigger email reminders.

Increased Joint Initiatives with Cognizant in Sales and Delivery

So, what next for Lev?

Lev continues to invest in emerging Marketing Cloud products:

• Personalization, formerly known as Interaction Studio, for tracking customer behavior, identifying customers to connect unknown and known customer profiles, and connecting with Sales Cloud to enrich customer profiles
• Intelligence, formerly known as Datorama, to offer a marketing reporting tool that can be used by marketing professionals and provide specific KPIs such as cost per lead or cost per click
• Salesforce Genie, formerly Customer Data Platform, for unifying the customer data profile, and enabling declarative segmentation and activation.

The emphasis is on helping organizations adopt enterprise-wide Marketing Cloud programs, focusing on marketing asset and data model standardization and application integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud and third-party applications. Lev believes that Cognizant’s capabilities around API and MuleSoft and overall data expertise will help while it specializes further in the marketing domain.

Lev is also looking to benefit from Cognizant’s scale and recruitment engine. It has now coordinated its sales and marketing activities with the larger Cognizant. Look to see some offerings verticalized, in conjunction with Cognizant’s sector units, other Salesforce practice units such as ATG, and of course, Salesforce’s vertical Clouds. Any such verticalization journey will require close internal and external coordination.