The Salesforce Winter ‘25 release notes have arrived. As is tradition, I’ll be covering the highlights for Account Engagement (Pardot) admins and users. The primary theme running through this release is how Salesforce are enticing us to utilize Data Cloud as part of the Marketing Cloud Growth roll-out to Account Engagement customers. There’s also a nifty tool to proactively tackle duplicate prospect records, and minor productivity wins.
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. Duplicate Prospect Merge Tool
For those that have read my articles over the years, you’ll know that duplicates are my least favorite challenge to deal with. This deduplication aid for prospect records is another addition to Optimizer, the Account Engagement admin’s control panel (read an overview of Account Engagement Optimizer in our Summer ‘24 round-up).
Details on exactly how this tool will work are not yet disclosed, however, our assumption is that it’ll work similarly to Salesforce duplicate and matching rules, whereby probable duplicates will be flagged in Optimizer, with the option for the admin to merge or ignore.
Especially with AMPSEA, now a number of years old, duplicate lead/contact records in Salesforce can weasel their way into Account Engagement, respected as two separate prospect records. But why isn’t deduplication automated? There’s the concept of ‘deliberate’ duplicates, when there’s a reason why there are two separate records. The definition of what a duplicate record is differs from one organization to the next (and by object!).
Note that this is only available in Account Engagement Advanced and Premium editions (at the time of writing).
2. Copy Forms and Emails to a Salesforce CMS Workspace
This enhancement will mean that we can take forms and emails from the Account Engagement “files” section, and transfer them to Salesforce CMS, the platform-wide content repository.
Moving to Salesforce CMS has multiple benefits, especially if your organization is typical and is bumping up against their Account Engagement file storage limits. Plus, in a recent article, we noted that the ability to copy assets to Salesforce CMS is one way that we can start preparing to use Marketing Cloud Growth.
We already have the ability to copy image files to Salesforce CMS, and alongside forms and emails, migration now supports other file types, including .pdf, .mp4, and .zip.
3. Use Engagement Data in Data Cloud
Put your form, landing page, and tracked web page engagement data into action with Data Cloud. Instead of just relying on demographic data about your prospects, take their activities on assets in order to generate sophisticated segments to use in further campaigns.
This setup involves enabling the Account Engagement connector in Data Cloud and then creating a data stream with the engagement type. This is yet another incentive for Account Engagement users to take advantage of Data Cloud.
4. More Data Cloud Segments Per Business Unit
If the ability to get more mileage out of your engagement data isn’t enticing enough to step into Data Cloud, the number of segments you can create in Data Cloud has increased to 25 per business unit (from 5).
Segmentation in Data Cloud is more powerful than the methods in Account Engagement. By ingesting data from multiple sources into Data Cloud, you can perform identity resolution (to render a ‘golden record’ for an individual) and apply source priority in case data differs from one source to another.
Misc Updates
- Prospect Deletion Bulk Action: When looking to permanently delete prospect records for compliance, or general data hygiene reasons, you can pause, resume, or cancel the operation using the Table Action Manager (part of Optimizer). This control was previously only available via the API – now, you can do it from the UI too.
- Open System Email Links in the Lightning App: System emails are admin notifications, such as the Monthly Inactive Automations Report. Until now, these links would direct you to the ‘classic’ Pardot app (pi.pardot.com) and not the Lightning app.
- Account Engagement API: Manage tags, send list emails and one-to-one prospect emails, and read and query permanent prospect deletion requests activated from the UI.
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
- 7+ Marketing Cloud Growth Updates in the Salesforce Winter ’25 Release
