15 Summer ‘25 Updates Salesforce Marketers Need to Know

Over the past year, the Salesforce marketing product landscape has grown. Marketing Cloud Growth was announced over a year ago, with the Advanced Edition revealed at Dreamforce ‘24, and since then, these have quickly intrigued Salesforce Marketers – growing in adoption.

Sticking with tradition for these release round-ups, I hope I have selected the biggest wins for marketers’ day-to-day. In a nutshell, Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions see more AI capabilities (no surprises there!), plus we’re really starting to see flexibility, with options for marketers who want to DIY (do it yourself) rather than sticking to the defined quick-start options. There is also a handful of useful functionality for Account Engagement (Pardot).

Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Edition

Release updates for these two editions are found under “Marketing Cloud”. There is a long list of enhancements, so I have picked out the ones that I believe will be beneficial to the majority of marketers and admins. Note that some pages contain multiple enhancements, so it’s worth scanning through the release notes to see if anything is relevant to your organization specifically.

1. AI Capabilities

No surprise that we’re seeing additional AI capabilities being added. Being built on Data Cloud, Growth, and Advanced Editions can tap into the core infrastructure that hosts Salesforce’s AI engine.

• Create reports for Einstein Engagement Frequency and Einstein Engagement Scoring, using those Data Model Objects in Data Cloud.
• Automate Flows based on engagement predicted by Einstein Engagement Scoring and Einstein Engagement Frequency. An Einstein Decision element will split contacts down different paths in Flows, which are the term for automated campaign sequences. The result is smarter sequences that won’t overwhelm contacts with excessive messaging.
• Build data graphs for Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) to capture and apply send time data in future segments and campaigns.
• With an Agentforce prompt, find engagement scores quickly for records (leads, contacts, prospects) and for their related accounts, including the intent score. These are enabled via Agent Studio in Salesforce Setup.

2. Campaign Designer

The Campaign Designer is a quick start for putting together campaign briefs and their building blocks. As this is embedded within Salesforce, the Campaign Designer references your previous campaigns and engagement data, and you can even select an existing campaign to steer Campaign Designer with a specific context. This is currently in Beta for Summer ‘25.

3. Custom Campaigns

Build a campaign from the ground up without having to use one of the quick-start options. The user interface is still guided (see image below). You can switch from “Quick Start” to “Build Your Own” at any stage, and message elements can be added from either the campaign record or in Flow Builder.

Plus, for Flows with five or fewer elements, you will be able to add messages and wait elements from the campaign itself without switching screens.

4. Send to a Lead or Contact List

The Send Email action and the lead or contact list views in the Marketing App are handy additions that will cut down time hugely as the Campaign, Flow, and Audience segment is created in the background.

5. HTML Code View for Emails

For those marketers who want to get into the code, you can convert an existing email to HTML and make detailed edits to the structure or stylesheet to get your branding exactly how you want it.  

6. Repeater Components for Email

These building blocks for emails sound impressive. In the past, multiple clients came to me with the requirement to pull in related information – the use case mentioned, recent purchases, was tricky to configure with Account Engagement’s data model, which focused on the prospect and with restrictive relationships to other Salesforce objects.

Repeater components work using merge fields to show up-to-date related records in a card, list, or custom layout.

Plus, Salesforce Personalization recommendations can be connected to repeater components.

7. View and Manage Data Sources in Emails

The Data Sources tab now has more power. View all available data sources, including the default data graph or unified individual – and not just the option to only add event data sources within the content builder.

8. Collect Consent Flow Actions

Consent is a topic that every marketer has to take seriously, and in the past, it was one aspect that caused a lot of frustration. With Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions came a well-thought-out consent data model that can handle the granular information organizations need to collect.

• Before: Available only in Event-Triggered Flows with a form submission event trigger.
• Now: Available in Event-Triggered and Data-Cloud-Triggered Flows, which supports triggers such as link clicks.

Plus, Country Code is now supported for consent import files.

9. Performance Dashboard

A new ‘one-stop-shop’ view of audience engagement for email, SMS, WhatsApp, tracked links, and landing pages directly from the content records, including how dynamic content variations perform.

Other reporting enhancements include:

• Deliverability Dashboard – a new tab in Marketing Performance.
• Collect first-touch page view data from website visitors.
• Track link clicks from external websites back to a specific source.

10. Convert Prospects to Contacts

Contacts are the qualified prospects in your database and can be associated with a new or existing account. Convert prospects manually or by using Automated Flows.

I picked this one out because records in the correct object not only help to keep your customer lifecycle well-defined but also the data relationships open up more in terms of personalization, for example, referencing their account data.

Account Engagement (Pardot)

While it’s clear to see how much potential (and the clear investments Salesforce has made) in Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced, there is also a handful of useful functionality for Account Engagement (Pardot) – again, seeing the benefits that a closer relationship to Data Cloud has.

1. Custom URL Activities

Alongside demographic data (e.g. country, role, industry), you can utilize engagement data to create targeted audience segments that take people’s behavior into account. These can then be used as the basis for dynamic lists – that automatically update list members according to whether their record data matches/un-matches the list’s criteria. This is powered by Data Cloud, which can handle a broader range of criteria. You can now have 100 dynamic lists using Data Cloud segment members (up from 25).

2. WhatsApp Integration

There’s no sign of WhatsApp slowing down as an effective marketing channel, especially in an era of short, snappy messaging effective right where people are most likely to see it. I assume this will be an activity type in Engagement Studio.

3. Dismiss Configuration Issues in Optimizer

Optimizer is an admin’s cockpit, pinpointing what needs to be actioned across your whole Account Engagement account.

As this encompasses your whole account, there may be notifications that you know don’t need your attention, which can be annoying when they start to pile up. Now, you can dismiss – or hide – these notifications and restore if needed.

4. Failed Email Sends Report

This new report in Optimizer makes tracking failed emails much easier, as opposed to having to diagnose issues by individual email campaigns. The report includes failure reasons such as missing content, invalid email addresses or sender domains.

5. Bot-Like Visitor Records

Some prospect records rack up a suspicious amount of activity – likely bots – which not only skews your reporting but also slows down the speed your Account Engagement account can process. Aside from the existing ‘pause’ functionality, you can now:

• Automatically delete excessive visitor records from bot-like prospects before they get paused.
• Restore currently paused prospects by automatically deleting excessive visitor records.
• Manually delete visitors from a bot-like prospect for even more control.

Summary

Salesforce’s Summer ’25 updates provide a range of powerful tools and AI-driven capabilities to enhance efficiency and personalization for marketers. With AI enhancements leading the charge and greater customization options now available, it’s clear that Summer ’25 is setting marketers up for smarter, more streamlined campaigns.

As always, it’s worth diving deeper into the release notes to see which updates will deliver the biggest wins for your organization.

Read More

• 13 Hottest Salesforce Summer ‘25 Features For Admins
• 8 Salesforce Summer ‘25 Updates for Developers
• 10 New Salesforce Flow Features in Summer ‘25
• Service Cloud: Top Salesforce Summer ‘25 Features
• Sales Cloud: Top Salesforce Summer ‘25 Features