Interaction Studio
Interaction Studio was the Salesforce Marketing Cloud product for real-time personalization, anonymous visitor tracking, and 1-to-1 cross-channel orchestration.
Definition
Interaction Studio was the Salesforce Marketing Cloud product for real-time personalization, anonymous visitor tracking, and 1-to-1 cross-channel orchestration. Rebranded as Marketing Cloud Personalization in 2022, the product captures every interaction a customer or anonymous visitor has across web, mobile app, email, call center, and physical store, builds a unified profile, and lets marketers personalize the next interaction in real time. It originated from Salesforce''s acquisition of Evergage in 2020.
Marketing Cloud Personalization (the modern name) competes with Adobe Target, Optimizely, and other real-time personalization platforms. Inside the Salesforce stack, it sits alongside Marketing Cloud Engagement (the traditional email and journey product) and Data Cloud (the customer-data-platform layer that increasingly underpins both). Salesforce''s strategic direction is for Data Cloud to be the unified profile layer, with Marketing Cloud Personalization providing the activation layer that decides what each visitor sees next on the website, in the app, or in the next email.
How Interaction Studio (now Marketing Cloud Personalization) works
The Evergage acquisition and rebrand
Salesforce acquired Evergage in 2020, brought it under the Marketing Cloud brand as Interaction Studio, and rebranded again in 2022 as Marketing Cloud Personalization. The underlying product remained the same: real-time visitor tracking, machine-learning-driven personalization, and cross-channel orchestration. Existing customers see both names in documentation depending on the release year.
The unified visitor profile
Marketing Cloud Personalization builds a unified visitor profile that combines anonymous web behavior, known-user activity, and integrated CRM data. The profile captures every page view, every product viewed, every email click, every email open. When the visitor logs in, the anonymous profile merges with their known-user profile, preserving the pre-login behavior. The profile is the foundation that every personalization decision draws on.
Real-time personalization on web and app
The product''s flagship use case is real-time personalization. A visitor lands on the website; a JavaScript tag fires; the platform looks up the visitor''s profile; an ML model recommends the next best content (product to feature, banner to show, navigation order); the page renders with the chosen variant. The decision happens in milliseconds. Mobile apps use the same model via the iOS and Android SDKs.
Cross-channel orchestration
Beyond on-site personalization, the product orchestrates next-best-action across channels. A visitor abandons a cart on web; the platform decides whether to send an email reminder, a push notification, or surface the cart in the next on-site visit. The orchestration logic uses ML-driven likelihood scoring rather than fixed rules.
Einstein integration
Einstein Recommendations and Einstein Engagement Scoring integrate with Marketing Cloud Personalization. Einstein supplies the ML models; Personalization supplies the activation layer. The two together provide a recommendations engine that learns from organization-wide behavior and personalizes per visitor.
Data Cloud and the unified profile
Salesforce Data Cloud (formerly Customer Data Platform, formerly Customer 360 Audiences) is the strategic profile layer across the entire Salesforce stack. Marketing Cloud Personalization increasingly sources profile data from Data Cloud rather than maintaining its own profile silo. Customers planning new Personalization deployments evaluate the Data Cloud integration as the long-term direction.
Pricing and licensing
Marketing Cloud Personalization is licensed per monthly active profile, with tiered pricing based on profile volume. Enterprise deployments typically run in the seven-figure annual range. The licensing is separate from Marketing Cloud Engagement and from Data Cloud, though bundled pricing is available for customers committing to the full stack.
Roll out Marketing Cloud Personalization
Personalization rollouts are multi-month projects. The technical setup is a few weeks; the campaign and personalization design takes longer.
- Provision the dataset
Coordinate with the Salesforce account team to provision a Marketing Cloud Personalization dataset (formerly known as a Mass account in Interaction Studio).
- Deploy the JavaScript tag
Add the Personalization JavaScript tag to every page on the website. The tag captures page views, click events, and form submissions automatically.
- Integrate mobile SDKs
Add the iOS and Android SDKs to the mobile app. The SDKs send the same event stream as the web tag.
- Connect to CRM and Marketing Cloud
Configure the Salesforce connector to sync known-user identity from Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud Engagement. Configure Data Cloud integration if used.
- Design personalization campaigns
Build campaigns that decide what each visitor sees. Start with simple use cases (recommended products, content rotation) before complex orchestration.
- Pilot, measure, expand
Launch one campaign at a time. Measure lift via A/B testing. Expand to more campaigns once a baseline is established.
- The Interaction Studio name persists in older documentation. The modern product is Marketing Cloud Personalization; treat both names as the same product.
- Visitor profile volume drives licensing cost. High-traffic sites can blow through the licensed volume; size the contract with realistic forecasts.
- JavaScript tag deployment requires coordination with the web team. Mis-deployed tags miss events, producing under-personalized experiences.
- Data Cloud integration is the strategic direction. New deployments should evaluate the Data Cloud-first architecture rather than the legacy standalone Personalization model.
Trust & references
This term has been renamed to Marketing Cloud Personalization.
View current pageCross-checked against the following references.
- Marketing Cloud PersonalizationSalesforce Help
- Marketing Cloud PersonalizationSalesforce
Straight from the source - Salesforce's reference material on Interaction Studio.
- Marketing Cloud OverviewSalesforce Help
About the Author
Dipojjal Chakrabarti is a B2C Solution Architect with 29 Salesforce certifications and over 13 years in the Salesforce ecosystem. He runs salesforcedictionary.com to help admins, developers, architects, and cert/interview candidates sharpen their fundamentals. More about Dipojjal.
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