Welcome to the world of “Marketing Cloud on core”. Alignment between Salesforce’s disparate marketing products in their suite has been something that arguably has been overdue – but the wait was worth it with Salesforce demonstrating that they’ve thought deliberately about how marketing can leverage some of the core platform’s best capabilities, including Data Cloud and Flow.
Technically speaking, Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions are both built on top of Data Cloud, which has become the new underpinning across the Salesforce platform (essentially, what gets the data flowing between various Salesforce ‘clouds’).
With Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition only recently being unveiled at Dreamforce ‘24, we thought that it would be a good idea to highlight what’s on offer – and what you can gain if you have more budget to spend.
Before we begin, I feel that it’s important to again emphasize how Data Cloud underpinning these editions is key for scalability and connectivity to other Salesforce products. This is the key differentiator that makes these editions a serious contender for marketing needs now and in the future.
Advanced and Growth Editions: Understanding the Features
There are key differences between the features offered in Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Edition, with each being designed to cater to different levels of business needs and marketing sophistication.
Growth Edition supports companies looking to scale their marketing efforts with powerful data tools and content management features. On the other hand, Advanced Edition offers everything in Growth, plus add-ons focused on deeper insights and more sophisticated customer engagement strategies.
Both editions offer powerful tools, but Advanced Edition focuses more on experimentation and in-depth engagement optimization, while Growth Edition emphasizes scalability and content management with a focus on data-driven insights.
“Reimagined” Campaign Object
The springboard to launching a marketing activity is to create a campaign record. For years, Salesforce has been advocating the campaign record as the cockpit for creating, monitoring, and reporting on marketing success.
With this new interface, you can get up and running fast. Once you insert a name for your campaign, you’ll be presented with a selection of next steps, including options to take a DIY approach (single email, message series), or co-create with Einstein.
The back-in guidance, in the form of a checklist-style layout, ensures you’re adding all of the elements that’ll bring the campaign together nicely.
Einstein Campaign Briefs
As you saw with the campaign interface, you can choose to co-create with Einstein. Your very own sidekick can draft a campaign brief based on your goals, generate KPIs to track, and suggest campaign components to add (such as emails, forms, and even a best-suited segment based on your database i.e. audience to target).
Salesforce has always emphasized the ‘human in the loop’ approach, whereby you’ll be able to approve/refine your requests to Einstein as you go. Plus, with the Einstein Trust Layer, your data remains yours and yours alone – in other words, your business and customer data is protected and not shared beyond the boundaries of your Salesforce org.
There’s more to explore with regard to this feature, so we suggest checking out the documentation below:
Campaign Flows (aka Non-Admin Flows)
We know Flow as Salesforce’s automation engine. Flow (Campaign Flows) also power the automation behind Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Edition too.
When creating a campaign, a flow is automatically coupled with it, as the engine for your marketing automation.
Campaign Flows are the first appearance of what have been termed “non-admin flows” – a condensed-down interface to instruct Flow what to do without having to deal with all the nodes and elements.
Data Cloud Segments
Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions are built on Data Cloud, which is the powerful foundation that underpins the Salesforce core platform. This takes care of multiple data processes in order to make sense of your data as modern-day data demands place new challenges on organizations.
The key points from a marketer’s perspective are that Data Cloud can ingest data from multiple sources, which are crafted into a data model. A data model makes the data ‘understandable’, i.e. functional when coming to building segments. Filters (using clicks, not code) can be used (as shown in the image below).
To give you a helping hand, Einstein can co-create segments using conversational prompts.
Data Prism is another ‘string to the bow’. Add descriptions to your data models in Data Cloud like annotations in a book of text. This, presumably, helps bridge the gap between what audiences marketers are seeking and how the Data Cloud admin is designing the data models. In short, more context for Einstein to base its decisions on.
Scoring Rules
Scoring contacts is a core aspect of marketing automation. You’ll want to assign a number that ranks contacts, showing the difference between those highly engaged and those less engaged. This is to promote different campaigns/messaging or to base your handover to the sales team upon a threshold in score the contact must reach.
The scoring rules feature is rules-based in nature – in other words, configured by you in line with what your organization thinks the score should be. The engagement scoring rule builder (e.g. if recipient clicks on an email, increase their score by a certain number of points) is a clean interface that gives you control. Keep or customize the default scoring rules according to the level of engagement you’d expect from who your organization considers a ‘hot’ prospect/ideal customer.
Consent Management Tools
In the increasingly tense landscape of customer privacy and data regulations, consent management is something which you need the peace of mind it’s being taken care of by the technologies you use, and also, to the granularity you’d expect – all without the custom configuration overhead.
Luckily, Salesforce has ensured that tracking consent is baked in – including at both the marketing channel and communication subscription levels. The example they use is email (i.e. the channel) and weekly newsletters (i.e. the communication subscription). This also applies to SMS.
Create preference pages that cater to this granularity so contacts can update their preferences (always a preference to them opting out entirely!) and bulk update functionality is also at your disposal as a marketer.
Salesforce CMS Content Hosting
Salesforce CMS is a repository for assets, like images, that are shared across any products in the Salesforce product suite that your organization utilizes.
Any files that you’d use for marketing assets (e.g. emails) leverage Salesforce CMS as the repository. This means that you can store and organize files in one central location to be used anywhere on the Salesforce platform. This in turn gives marketers more control. If an asset (e.g. an image) is updated, you have one location URL per image.
There’s also the brand center (in beta at the time of writing) to mandate consistent styling across content types.
Email and Form Builder
Another interface that Salesforce has put plenty of thought into, again, to speed up the end-to-end campaign creation process. The builders work on a guided setup process, such as defining your audience, creating/generating your message content (for email), defining which preference the recipient must be a part of, choosing a sending schedule, and deciding whether to track email opens/clicks.
This user interface mirrors the Account Engagement ‘Lightning’ builders – in other words, adopting a consistent look and feel to other interfaces on the Salesforce platform (e.g. the Lightning App Builder). Build onto a canvas, adding components in a drag-and-drop way. Then, publish/send easily with a few clicks.
Einstein Send Time Optimization
Send Time Optimization taps into AI to determine when emails should be sent based on past engagement data from your database. The idea behind it is that by optimizing the time the email is sent, your audience is most likely to open and click.
The guide below explains how this works in Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) but the same concept applies to Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions.
Einstein Metrics Guard
Perhaps it’s my assumption that some people have not been aware of an infrastructure running behind the scenes to protect your email performance metrics from being skewed by activity that’s not recipient-initiated.
Already in Account Engagement, Metrics Guard is a service that monitors email clicks and opens to identify patterns that are clearly bot-based, thereby preventing skews in reporting.
Just like bots guard the recipient inbox against troublesome emails, Metrics Guard protects your account against questionable activity.
Einstein Metrics Guard does need to be enabled. You can find instructions on how to do this here.
Engagement Metrics (Analytics)
Analytics are always key. A collection of out-of-the-box dashboards share insights on emails and SMS messages, backed up by the powerhouse that is Data Cloud.
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.
Rules-Based Dynamic Content
Dynamic content displays a variation of email content to recipients depending on which variation matches their profile (i.e. their demographic data). You can define the rules for variations directly in the email builder. A side panel provides the intuitive interface as you build variations for subject lines, preheaders, and content blocks.
Path Experiment
Available for Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition only.
This is the answer to the burning question “how do I test?”, giving you the ability to split your campaign flow into two paths in order to test out different variations of content, channels, and duration between marketing communication.
When creating a path, controls appear to set weightings for how many audience members going down each path are at your disposal, for example, a 60/40% randomized split. You’ll also find analytics on:
- Embedded dashboards on the campaign level showing how content has performed, therefore bringing to life the audience engagement data.
- Flow canvas metrics, which will be specific to flow runs, so more operational in nature.
Unified Conversations for SMS
Available for Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition only.
While SMS is an available channel in Marketing Cloud Growth, Advanced Edition takes it a step further. Rather than being solely reply-based (listen for replies, determine the follow-up action), Conversational SMS opens up a two-way dialogue between the customer/prospect and your internal teams.
Leveraging the functionality already available in Service Cloud*, AI-powered chatbots, working based on keyword triggers, can handle the bulk of conversations until a human is required to intervene. This gives a seamless experience, whereby the hand-off happens between service and marketing use cases without appearing disjointed to the customer/prospect.
*Note: Requires a Digital Engagement license.
Einstein Engagement Frequency
Available for Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition only.
This evaluates your contacts and subscribers, and assigns a label to each individual based on their previous engagement (“Undersaturated”, “On Target”, “Saturated”), indicating the optimal number of email messages to send in a given time period, thereby helping you to plan your email marketing cadences.
Use the Engagement Frequency field for segmenting contacts into different paths as a decision step in the flow. Einstein does the heavy lifting, crunching the masses of engagement data behind the scenes; as the definitions of these values are not configurable within your org, definitions of engagement are consistent for all internal users. 
Einstein Engagement Scoring
Available for Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition only.
This brings the predictive element to scoring contacts. The scoring rules feature (mentioned earlier) is more rules-based in nature – in other words, configured by you in line with what your organization thinks the score should be.
Einstein Engagement Scoring, on the other hand, enables you to discover what customers will do next based on patterns of engagement data – including their likelihood to open, click, stay subscribed to email, and to convert. Put this insight into action to create audiences, segments, split paths in Flow, and personalize content. Using this in conjunction with scoring rules is a smart choice, unearthing what may not be visible to the ‘human eye’.
Final Thoughts
While putting together this guide, I had a suspicion that I would have missed mentioning some features and functionality that matter to marketers. With everything changing so fast (launch of Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, Winter ‘25 release), I hope that I’ve been able to highlight not only what makes these editions shine now but also in the future.
I can explain my process: first, using our launch articles (MCG, MCA), the Winter ‘25 release notes, then also Salesforce’s implementation guide. You too can use these resources to dig further into what interests you. As always, we welcome feedback in the comments.