Salesforce have announced Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, the first glimpse of what a marketing app built in alignment with Salesforce’s core platform looks like – and the potential for this to develop further in the future. This is the first iteration of Marketing Cloud on the ‘core’ Salesforce platform (known as the Einstein 1 platform).
Built on Data Cloud, this edition comes with new builders (built on Salesforce CMS), a data model that taps both into the same Salesforce objects that other teams use, and a whole arsenal of data management capabilities through Data Cloud and Einstein’s generative tools.
What’s important to note, is that Salesforce expressed multiple times that they will still be continuing to bring innovations to the existing Marketing Cloud products. Instead, this is entirely new functionality.
Why Marketing Cloud Growth Edition?
Two years ago, Salesforce made the decision to rename a number of their Marketing Cloud offerings. Marketing Cloud’s most popular modules for messaging and journeys go by Marketing Cloud Engagement. On the other side of the matter, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), caters to more B2B use cases. So which product is Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: Marketing Cloud Engagement or Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?
Being targeted at B2B, SMB (small-medium) organizations, you may be asking if this is the beginning of the end for Account Engagement. In short, this is not only a new edition, it’s a whole new world…
Marketing Cloud ‘On Core’ (Einstein 1)
As mentioned, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is built on Data Cloud – in essence, this is the first iteration of Marketing Cloud on the ‘core’ Salesforce platform (known as the Einstein 1 platform).
Einstein 1 was unveiled at Dreamforce ‘23 as the re-engineered core Salesforce platform to handle generative-AI with speed. During the same event, we were teased with a roadmap that outlined many AI-powered features for Marketing Cloud to be built on Data Cloud.
Support from Data Cloud’s technology is something that Salesforce have been focusing on to add more power to their marketing products. Being a set of acquired technologies over the past decade plus, the idea is to bring the ‘juicy’ new technologies of Data Cloud and AI to the Marketing Cloud tech stack.
Target Audience
Targeted at B2B, SMB (small-medium) organizations based on the functionality that will be available, now, at its launch. This includes lead capture, sending leads on journeys with email and SMS, automating notifications to sales and service teams, engagement scoring*, and reporting for engagement on assets (such as emails, SMS, landing pages and forms).
*A new type of scoring that combines what we have known as scoring (behavioral) and grading (demographic).
What struck me is the flexibility of the design, which has the potential to be used for B2C marketing use cases, too – that’s the advanced personalization, sending a large volume of customers through personalized cross-channel journeys, and reporting on these results.
It will be interesting to watch how the positioning of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition evolves over time.
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: Architecture Overview
To explain why Marketing Cloud Growth Edition indicates a significant move for Marketing Cloud, I attempted to map out how the parts involved with Marketing Cloud Growth Edition work in relation to the rest of the Einstein 1 (core) platform.
Email Builder (+ Sending and Tracking)
The email builder is built on top of Salesforce CMS, a shared service across other parts of the platform, so you have a single repository for assets.
This builder works on a guided setup process, some of which you can see in the image below:
- Define your audience.
- Create/generate your message content.
- Define the ‘from’ name and which preference the recipient must be a part of.
- Schedule for a specific date and time, or use Einstein Send Time Optimization to select an optimal send time based on the best performing emails in the past.
- Decide whether to track email opens/clicks. The on/off toggle means you have the choice not to track metrics for transactional emails.
In summary, let CMS do what it does best, and allow Flow to do what it does best.
Apparently, Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) customers will start to see some of this reimagined building experience in the first half of 2024.
Note: This builder doesn’t currently support dynamic content, but it is being worked on behind the scenes.
Form Builder
Like the email builder, the form builder is built on top of Salesforce CMS. Aside from email and forms, landing pages are also a new content type that’s being introduced.
Now, this form building experience is much more slick than what currently exists in Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) or Marketing Cloud’s Content Builder. By selecting a target object, such as leads, the panel brings up the fields available on that object in your org. It’s as smooth as dragging and dropping fields onto the canvas. Can we finally ditch web-to-lead?
Note: Forms created with the CMS builder are not currently compatible with Account Engagement. An estimated delivery date is yet to be decided.
Flow: What’s the Big Deal?
We’ve known Flow to be Salesforce’s automation engine, bringing incredible power to non-coder that they historically didn’t have.
Flow will power the automation behind Marketing Cloud Growth Edition too – including email sending. What’s more, this is 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. I say ‘the first’ because no other product on the Salesforce platform has this. Essentially, marketers are tapping into Flow.
A couple of notable points to make here:
- Multi-Step: Flow is powering an interface that allows you to introduce email content, actions to apply to records when an event (such as an interaction) happens, and more. This is verging on a like-for-like comparison between Engagement Studio in Account Engagement, or Journey Builder in Marketing Cloud. Whether functionality such as Journey Builder’s goals, exit criteria, etc. has not had a timeline disclosed.
- Flexibility: Flow can wait in shorter increments, such as minutes, which has been long-sought after functionality when stitching together marketing journeys.
While the Flows that marketers will interact with when building campaigns are condensed-down, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition can be looped into more complex Flows.
Einstein AI
As a result of being on the Einstein 1 (‘core’) platform, any AI-powered features marketers choose to use will be accessible and more powerful.
As mentioned, Einstein Send Time Optimization is included, which will advise the most optimal time to send an email, based on the best performing emails for that audience in the past.
Also, you’ll find Einstein Co-Create for campaign brief and message generation, and likely more that we’re yet to encounter.
Analytics
When it comes to reporting on marketing on the Salesforce platform, you have many options. B2B Marketing Analytics (B2BMA) is an add-on to Account Engagement, where customers gain access to a pre-built CRM Analytics app that contains dashboards for use cases such as pipeline, engagement, account-based marketing, and other. Will there be access to something similar?
For Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, at the time of launch there will instead be a set of reports and dashboards, built on Data Cloud. Details are currently sparse, but this is very promising.
Pricing and Limits
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition pricing will be set at $18,000 /org/year. With this, you will gain access to everything covered in this guide, plus an engagement scoring rule builder (e.g. if recipient clicks on an email, increase their score by a certain number of points) and Einstein-powered features, such as Send-Time Optimization.
Limits are clearly a hot topic. With Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, you will gain the following:
- 180k email sends /org/year (add on email sends at an additional cost).
- 10k unified profiles, unified via Data Cloud.
- 10k activation and segmentation credits, to use with Data Cloud.
- (Add on) SMS priced at $10 /1000 sends.
To be clear, you will be able to easily purchase additional credits for any of the above, according to your needs.
Getting Started
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition will be available now for customers in North America, with a provisional availability date in the second half of 2024 for Europe/Middle East (EMEA).
Here’s what resources will be available if you’re wondering how you can get hands-on with Marketing Cloud Growth Edition:
- Learning resources: If you work for a Salesforce partner (ISV or consulting partner), Andrew Kazmierczak will be posting enablement content to the partner channels (Partner Learning Camp). Trailhead modules will be following soon after (expected in the first half of the year).
- Setup: You may have already gone through a new-style guided setup, you will know that Salesforce have drilled down the number of clicks required. Everyone on the Salesforce side involved with the project has been through the setup multiple times, which can be launched in minutes.
- Sandboxes: Currently, there are no sandboxes or developer editions for Marketing Cloud Growth Edition yet.
More Thoughts About Marketing Cloud on the Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform
Let’s be honest, the idea of Marketing Cloud ‘on core’ has been a long-term goal. If Marketing Cloud were to be on the core platform, it could leverage all the ‘shared’ services that the other Salesforce ‘cloud’ products currently benefit from. But let’s be realistic – let’s be patient.
For those of you who have worked with Marketing Cloud (formerly ExactTarget), you will understand that this would never be easy. So, to set the expectation as the Salesforce product team keep our best interests in mind (alongside the network of dependencies with each decision and development they make!) this is not the end of the Marketing Cloud nor Account Engagement products. Salesforce have not given an indication on the timelines for a full migration of all Marketing Cloud functionality onto the core platform.
See Marketing Cloud Growth Edition In Action
Watch the launch video, produced by Salesforce, to see how this all comes together on the core Salesforce platform.
Summary
With Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, Salesforce is showing us what a marketing app built in alignment with Salesforce’s core platform (on Einstein 1) will look like. The new builders (built on Salesforce CMS), data model, and data management capabilities are geared towards B2B SMBs, with potential for B2C use cases also.
This edition also boasts power from Data Cloud for profile unification, Flow for automation, and Einstein for generative insights – enabling users to get more from their marketing platform.
We look forward to seeing how this platform develops and are excited by the possibilities…
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