12 Winter ’26 Updates Salesforce Marketers Need to Know

The Winter ‘26 release notes have arrived. Sticking to tradition for these release round-ups, I have selected the biggest wins for marketers’ day-to-day. 

With so much movement in the Salesforce marketing product space in the past few years – mainly rebranding and new edition launches – it felt right to include updates for all products under the Marketing Cloud ‘umbrella’. First, we’ll start with the hefty one – Marketing Cloud Next. Then we’ll touch on Marketing Cloud Engagement+, and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot). 

Marketing Cloud Next 

Marketing Cloud Next was announced at Connections ‘25 – a combination of multiple agentic features that Salesforce has been developing, coming together into one ‘launch pad’ interface. This has been years in the making – a culmination of features, acquired products, and agents, to reach the single platform vision.  

Aside from the new features and enhancements, you’ll be pleased to know that Salesforce has also been fixing several bugs to enhance the overall user experience.

1. Content Builder Agent 

Much like the previous iterations of AI-powered content creation tools, the Content Builder Agent works alongside human users to draft, revise, and optimize content. Examples include subject lines, SMS messages, and body copy. This agent is faster and more accurate with your brand voice than before, and I’m sure there’s lots more that’s happened “under the hood”. 

The new Content Builder Agent template is available in the Agent Builder, where you configure the defined role and guidance for the agent.  

It’s worth noting that there are other changes in terms of email marketing management: streamlined domain configuration, added support for DNS entry file upload, improved branded link management, and expanded support for multiple subdomains and display names.

2. Reusable Content Blocks

Reusable content blocks can be text, images, links, and buttons. These are stored in a marketing workspace. Examples of where this will be effective are banners, footers, terms and conditions. 

Plus, the ability to create organization-wide, standardized email templates means more consistency over your branding. 

3. Deliverability Dashboard Filters

There are new filters for the domain type and message type in the redesigned deliverability dashboard. 

• Domain type: Visualize failure reasons specific to email domains such as Gmail, Hotmail, and others. 
• Message type: Shows whether the emails were promotional or transactional.

4. Campaigns and Agentforce

• Customizable flows: These contain the actions for drafting a brief and creating a multichannel campaign. Admins can modify the underlying flow that powers the campaign actions in Flow Builder. For example, to integrate with other systems, assign a campaign owner, send notifications to other teams, or add business logic like approval steps.  
• Analyze Campaigns with Agentforce: The Generate Campaign Insights action gets performance data such as message opens, clicks, or unsubscribes, and then generates a summary of key insights. 

These two enhancements close the loop in the campaign creation process, as they both can be used together in a cycle.

5. Landing Pages

• Hidden Fields and Default Values: These make the user experience more pleasant, saving extra clicks when populating web forms. Hidden fields also benefit the marketer, as information such as the source of that submission/conversion (i.e. the location they came from) can be captured. Below, you can see the back-end options for hiding a field, setting a URL parameter, and entering a default value for a form field.

• Connect External Forms with Form Handlers: To capture leads, cases, and other records from your website, map fields from any web form directly to Salesforce objects – without writing any code. Send follow-up emails or create tasks by triggering a flow in Salesforce. 
• Merge Fields: Use these to include a prospect’s name or organization or to highlight a product or service for a particular page visitor. 
• Templates and HTML Tags: Admins can manage landing page templates, and then marketers can select them in the landing page builder. Additional HTML tags and elements are supported for creating landing pages.

6. Push Notifications

• Interactive push notifications: There are two types available:
  • The Basic push type (can have one media attachment, tap actions, Android-specific icons, and interactive buttons).
  • The Carousel push type (supports up to 6 swipeable cards).
• Push notifications with the Unified Marketing Cloud SDK: Send push notifications to your app users. If you’ve used this SDK in Marketing Cloud Engagement, then it will be familiar to you. 

And, of course, analytics. See mobile app messaging metrics (message sends, deliveries, views, and interactions) for individual messages or entire campaigns.

7. WhatsApp Messaging

New WhatsApp metrics (click rate and open rate) are available on the Insights dashboard. 

Plus, use interactive messaging with WhatsApp flows, location sharing, and call-to-action buttons. One example is carousel messages to showcase multiple products by integrating your product catalog for up-to-date pricing and availability. 

8. Advanced Insights Dashboard

New visualizations for Marketing Performance are found on the Engagement Insights dashboard. Identify top-performing user segments, and track activity trends over time across various channels.

View the Metrics Formulas for Marketing Cloud Next here.

9. Test Marketing Cloud Next in a Sandbox Org

One feature that marketers have been clamoring for years – sandboxes! Test out Marketing Cloud Next features away from your production (live) environment. These changes can be promoted to a production environment from the sandbox.

Note that sandboxes can consume credits for Data Cloud, messaging, and Salesforce Personalization.

Marketing Cloud Engagement+

This is where Marketing Cloud Engagement customers will be able to get their hands on some Marketing Cloud Next functionality, including Agentforce, reporting capabilities, and automation tools. Check this page after September 15, 2025. 

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement 

Formerly known as Pardot.

10. Manage Prospects From Anywhere: Already available, six new Agentforce actions allow you to update prospects or manage nurture campaigns from anywhere in Salesforce. 
11. Dynamic Lists + Data Cloud One: Connect multiple orgs to a central Data Cloud home org via a companion connection. Then, data can be passed from the home org to other orgs to become dynamic lists. 
12. Engagement data stream for form handlers.

Summary

There has been a lot movement in the Salesforce marketing product space in the past few years, and the release notes are a good indication of what the focus will be in the future.

Which update are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments…

Read More:

• Top 10 Salesforce Winter ’26 Features for Admins
• Top 8 Salesforce Winter ’26 Features for Developers
• 10 New Salesforce Flow Features in Winter ‘26
• Sales Cloud: Top Salesforce Winter ’26 Features
• Service Cloud: Top 10 Salesforce Winter ’26 Features