The Salesforce Winter ‘25 release notes have arrived. For the first time, I’ll be covering the highlights for Marketing Cloud Growth – the ‘new kid on the block’.
While I’m confident that the majority are clued up on the differences between the products under the Marketing Cloud ‘umbrella’, Marketing Cloud Growth is the first chapter of a Marketing Cloud product on the ‘core’ Salesforce platform (as opposed to a separate infrastructure), built on and leveraging Data Cloud.
The “laundry list” of updates, as described by a Salesforce executive close to Marketing Cloud Growth, shows no sign of slowing down. This release features personalization (in multiple ways), Einstein Copilot, and more. I’d be remiss to mention that the primary theme running through the Winter ‘25 release for Account Engagement (Pardot) is how Salesforce are enticing us to utilize Data Cloud as part of the Marketing Cloud Growth roll-out.
Depending on your Salesforce instance, Winter ‘25 will arrive for you either in early September or the first two weeks of October 2024. Check your own release dates here.
1. Marketing Email Personalization
- Dynamic email content: Display different variations of content according to the recipient viewing it. You can create variations for the subject line, preheader, and individual email components.
- Event-triggered content automation: A new campaign template option named ‘Event’ will enable you to trigger email or SMS messages when a significant interaction occurs, such as a purchase or submitting a key form.
- Merge fields: These are enhanced to ‘drop in’ related information (beyond the recipient’s data), such as information on products purchased.
2. Opportunity Influence
Yes, you read that right: Opportunity Influence. The description of Opportunity Influence mirrors the long-standing Campaign Influence, whereby you’re (in short) creating a bridge between the marketing activity (campaign) and the revenue generated (recorded on the opportunity record).
So, what’s the difference? Opportunity Influence does seem, at first glance, to be more streamlined. For instance, when a lead/contact clicks on an email, that’s automatically attributed to the opportunity minus the funky record association (lead/contact → campaign → opportunity) and date parameters that exist with Campaign Influence. That’s my assumption, anyway!
In terms of reporting, you’ll be able to select from first-touch or last-touch to visualize what’s most effective as top-of-funnel (awareness) and bottom-of-funnel (sprint to the close), respectively.
The other difference is that Opportunity Influence leverages Data Cloud to handle the association between all the objects that need to work in tandem. There’ll be some setup effort to create these objects in Data Cloud before enabling Opportunity Influence in Salesforce Setup.
I’m certainly looking forward to seeing images of this in action!
3. Einstein Copilot Generally Available
Einstein Copilot has made its way across the Salesforce platform for various teams to take advantage of. For marketers, the use cases are campaign briefs, messaging, and branded content.
The main takeaway is that Einstein Copilot (and Salesforce’s generative AI stance overall) doesn’t replace the human user; instead, the intention is to take out the leg work, while always keeping the ‘human in the loop’.
Plus, there’s the concept of ‘grounding’, which essentially means that the AI is trained within the boundaries of your own organization’s data. You may have heard about the Einstein Trust Layer, which protects your inputs and outputs from seeping into the public AI models, such as ChatGPT.
You can launch Einstein Copilot whenever you see the Einstein logo on the top navigation bar (as shown as number 1 in the image below).
4. Einstein Copilot Branding Fields
Set a brand identity as a foundation for Einstein Copilot to work with. This includes a blurb about your organization and a default tone (professional, casual, urgent, inquisitive).
The tone selected is not the be all, end all. When Einstein generates copy, you can ask it to change up the tone for a specific asset in another prompt, using natural language (i.e. the way humans talk to one another).
5. Data Prism
This is an interesting one, and something I had to re-read a few times before I could wrap my head around it!
When creating segments (which leverages Data Cloud in the background), Data Prism adds descriptions to your data models in Data Cloud. Assuming that these act like annotations in a book of text, they’ll help bridge the gap between what audiences marketers are seeking and how the Data Cloud admin is designing the data models – I might be wrong, but I’m looking forward to exploring this feature.
Note that the roll-out will start in September 2024, and you must have Einstein Segment Creation turned on.
6. Share Content Across Workspaces
Salesforce CMS is the platform-wide content repository, not only for marketers but also for other teams to ‘fetch’ from. This centralized place should be a good opportunity for marketers to step up as rulers of your organization’s brand by mandating which assets are available for use, and observing how assets are used.
7. Update Required Marketing Data Kits
Data kits are part of Data Cloud, typically, to package up and move components (data streams, data models, calculated insights) from one location to another. In this context, data kits bundle together what you’ll need for Marketing Cloud Growth to function with Data Cloud.
As the technology is changing rapidly, you’ll need to (in layman’s terms) ‘refresh’ the data kits that are installed. There will be two parts to this for admins to perform:
- For marketing data: Get the latest data kit update by navigating to Marketing Cloud setup assistant → Basic Settings → Marketing Data tab.
- For sales data: Reinstall the Sales data kit, then manually deploy the CRM data bundle for Sales.
Note: You’ll be able to install or update all the required Marketing Cloud Growth data kits with one click (as opposed to doing each individually).
Misc Updates
- Skip the Alt Text for Decorative Images: This will mean fewer distractions from descriptions for customers/prospects that use screen readers and other assistive technologies.
- MCGSetupUserPerm: Provides users with access to the Marketing Cloud Growth setup assistant. It could be a good permission to have to turn on/off admin access in times where you need to delegate access, for example, if you’re out of office. Note that if you cloned the standard Marketing Admin permission set to customize it, you’ll need to add this permission set manually.
- Interface Updates in Marketing Cloud Growth: At-a-glance data in campaign and activity widgets on the home page, content status badges for campaigns, a Replace option to quickly update an image, improved navigation for the attribute library, and Einstein Segment Creation attributes divided into suggested/additional categories.
Read More
- 10 Hottest Salesforce Winter ’25 Features For Admins
- 10 Salesforce Winter ’25 Features for Developers
- 10 New Flow Features in Salesforce Winter ’25
- Sales Cloud: Top Salesforce Winter ’25 Features
- Service Cloud: Top Salesforce Winter ’25 Features
- Account Engagement (Pardot) Winter ’25 Updates You Should Know
