Over the past year, the Salesforce marketing product landscape has grown. Marketing Cloud Growth was announced almost a year ago, with Advanced edition being revealed at Dreamforce ‘24, and since then, these have quickly intrigued Salesforce Marketers – gradually growing in adoption.
The lines are increasingly becoming blurred between Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), Marketing Cloud Growth/Advanced (the new, “on core” offering, features to explore here), and Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly ExactTarget).
Sticking with tradition for these release round-ups, I hope I have ordered these points to highlight the biggest wins for marketers day-to-day. As Account Engagement users are being encouraged to move towards Marketing Cloud Growth (or Advanced), this round-up contextualizes what’s new within the “new” to relate it to the features that you have been used to.
As has always been the case, Marketing Cloud Engagement follows a different release timeline. To stay up to date on this product, bookmark this page.
Account Engagement (Pardot) Features
1. Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions – Who is Onboard?
Referencing the first point made in the introduction, Account Engagement customers have been encouraged to try out Marketing Cloud “on core”, i.e. Growth and Advanced editions (check your regional eligibility).
Now, there’s a welcome stepping stone. On the Account Engagement Optimizer page, you’ll find a notification “Enable Marketing Cloud”. While this may be a slightly confusing naming convention from Salesforce, what this is referring to is getting started with Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions. marketing functionality in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
2. Copying Assets with Salesforce CMS
We know by now that Salesforce CMS is the best way forward, to share files, and also the storage burden across all teams in your organization.
With Account Engagement business units being used by more organizations as time goes on, Salesforce have made accessing a consistent library of assets (via Salesforce CMS) smoother. You can copy Marketing Assets to Salesforce CMS via V5 API – including email, file, form, and landing pages – between business units. Also, for landing pages and forms, you can group the CSS code, to then use on other landing pages – another nod to reusability.
3. Email Send Issues
While you have always been able to see a “delivered” / ”not delivered” status, there are now going to be new insights available in the Account Engagement Optimizer, rather than relying on each individual List Email send report.
For a long time, marketers have puzzled over deliverability relating to the overall Account – as opposed to each email campaign sent. The additions to the Account Engagement Optimizer mean that anyone can gain a bird’s eye view of the email (Failed Email Sends lists the emails that failed with the prospect’s name, company, failure reason, and other related details).
4. Account Engagement with Data Cloud
A new data bundle includes three data streams and their field mappings (landing page, list email, and marketing form data streams) – so, mapping these is no longer a manual exercise.
5. Enhanced Email Experience Is Being Retired
The Enhanced Email Experience, which superseded the “classic” email builder that many of us had a love-hate relationship with, is now going to be phased out. The farewell is planned for the Summer ’25 release (estimated around May or June 2025).
Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Features
1. Reusable Email Personalization
Dynamic content displays a variation of email content to recipients, depending on which variation matches their profile (i.e. their demographic data). In this release, the concepts of personalization settings and personalization points is certainly interesting, and something that I (and others) pointed out last year.
Rather than creating dynamic content rules email by email (i.e. a 1:1 between the rules and the specific email you’re working on), we can now assign rules to blocks as a personalization point, and therefore, reuse those rules across multiple emails. If you need to change the personalization settings, you edit in one place, and those changes cascade down to any emails hooked up to those personalization settings. This will save marketers so much time.
Expressions are a similar concept. Another way to think about it is like a library of dynamic merge fields you can fetch while working on the email. Expressions are saved within Salesforce CMS, the content repository that the email builder references, and that spans beyond the marketing remit. There’s also the benefit of recency when instructing Marketing Cloud to fetch data – the example given is to identify the most recent Opportunity record on the Account and reference the data from that Opportunity record (a use case that I have had to hack together in the past!).
2. New Campaign and Content Agent Capabilities
One of the main motivators for releasing Growth and Advanced, was for marketers to tap into what’s been built on the Salesforce “core” platform – one of which is the AI features available, known collectively as Agentforce.
There’s no question that 2024 was the year of Agentforce – gaining a huge amount of limelight through the past few months. While there were marketing-related use cases showcased at events such as Dreamforce and the Agentforce World Tour, we’re now seeing these being put into the hands of marketing admins and users.
There will be an agent available for generating emails and landing pages. In the back end, admins can enable the campaign brief prompt in Prompt Builder – which essentially is a template prompt for marketers to generate a name, key message, audience description, and detailed campaign goals.
3. WhatsApp in Campaign Flows
As we know, WhatsApp is a highly popular messaging service around the globe. Judging by the reception we received on our article in 2023 announcing the connector for Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, there’s certainly an appetite for connecting WhatsApp to marketing campaigns.
WhatsApp is now going to become a channel available in Campaign Flows, the automation engine powering Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced. The Send WhatsApp Message element, plus other flow elements, will support two-way conversations, and the WhatsApp message builder experience will support audio, video, and document files. In terms of analytics, you’ll find metrics on the Marketing Performance dashboards.
What’s apparent is the emphasis on consent management. The setup involves connecting to your WhatsApp Business Account, and creating communication preferences for WhatsApp so that your organization stays compliant between the two channels – this means that users can utilize the default preference page for WhatsApp.
4. SMS and Brand Vetting
Sticking with the topic of communicating with your prospects/customers beyond email, there are some solid additions that could catch your attention:
- SMS to more countries: For those of you who are familiar with SMS marketing, SMS needs to involve a partnership with a local carrier (i.e. phone network for that country), so it’s not as simple as sending emails.
- Brand vetting: Just like setting up DKIM, SPF, etc. for better email deliverability, Salesforce are introducing Brand Vetting into the SMS channel setup process.
Note: Salesforce Message Credits – SMS add-on, is required.
5. Blockout Windows
A concept that’s already available in Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly ExactTarget), a blockout window means that you can set ‘no-go’ periods of time when it’s not possible to schedule or send messages.
Assuming that the same principle is applied here, there can be restrictions on the number of SMS (and WhatsApp) messages sent during a defined period of time, or determined by the time zone of the recipient.
This is my interpretation of the release note entry – I’m happy to be challenged in case I’ve misinterpreted it.
6. Opportunity Influence
Opportunity Influence is the more streamlined version of the long-standing Campaign Influence. This new feature mirrors Campaign Influence, whereby you’re (in short) creating a bridge between the marketing activity (campaign) and the revenue generated (recorded on the opportunity record). Whereas, Opportunity Influence leverages Data Cloud to handle the association between all the objects that need to work in tandem.
Once you’ve enabled Opportunity Influence (via Salesforce Setup), Opportunity Influence appears on the sidebar of Campaign records under Performance.
7. Campaign Stage and Flow Status
Simple, yet effective, additions that I’m sure most of us will see value in.
- Status of all flows in a Campaign: The Campaign Stage field can be added to page layouts (and set appropriate permissions), to give a snapshot of how your marketing automations are performing.
- Flow version occurrences: A section of a Flow’s related list. If a Flow fails, it shows why and how to fix it.
8. Embedded Forms
If you’re familiar with form handlers in Account Engagement, you can see the benefits that this update to the newer Marketing Cloud editions will bring. Embedded forms mean that you can connect an existing webform to your Marketing Cloud instance – someone submits the form, there’s a record of them having done so, plus the data they submitted. There seems to be some configuration to be completed, which you can find here.
9. Relate Website Traffic to a Campaign
This feature is again similar to one you may find in Account Engagement: visitor tracking. This involves relating a Salesforce Campaign to an external web tracking connector and then adding the produced tracking snippet to your website’s source code. Once the data starts pouring into Salesforce, it will be accessible on Marketing Performance Reports and Dashboards.
10. Quick Filters for Segmentation
A nifty addition to leverage during audience segmentation. As sales teams have been doing for many years, marketers can categorize Lead and Contact records into groups, such as “new leads”. These filters need to be created, which means that it’s flexible depending on what your organization defines as eligible for each. The main point, though? As a reusable segment, you won’t need to leave the Campaign interface to switch the segment builder.
Plus, you can preview which Leads/Contacts have been pulled into the segment (Segment Membership) before you hit send on an email. Speaking from experience, the definitions of who is considered what can fluctuate within a business, so having the ability to quickly sense check is key.
11. Account Scoring (“Ready-to-Purchase” Accounts)
While there’s minimal information on how this feature will work with your Account data, it promises to score Accounts based on engagement, fit, and intention to purchase – assuming that the scoring mechanism is reaching into multiple data points within your Salesforce org to draw a sophisticated conclusion (i.e. the account score). I’d love to see under the hood, and give this one a test drive, especially comparing the score versus outcome in the long term!
Misc. Updates
- Content Processing Status: When a landing page, form, or branding content type is in the process of publishing or unpublishing, the content status is “Processing”. Users can’t make changes while content is processing.
- Workspace Content: You can now make copies of a shared content record and save it to a folder in a shared workspace. Previously, users could only save the cloned content to the same folder where the cloned content was stored.
- Setup Enhancements: Track your progress, and improvements on updating data kits, authenticating domains, and identity resolution in Data Cloud.
- Consent Audit Trail in Data Explorer (Data Cloud): In relation to messaging (SMS, WhatsApp) review the source of a consent status change.
- Marketing Calendar: Using the Salesforce Calendar tab, you can represent your marketing activities for the sales team to be aware of. When configuring this for Growth/Advanced, see here, and an additional resource to look over – in case it helps breakdown how Salesforce calendars work!
- External Tracking Data Kit Updated: For anyone who has installed this data kit, it’s important to install the new version of the data kit, and also to follow the advice while doing so.
- Agentforce Campaign Designer (in Beta): There’s minimal information about this next-gen marketing agent, but worth mentioning to provide a glimpse into the future.
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