Most of us know that Marketing Cloud Growth Edition made a splash earlier this year, which we dubbed as “the first iteration of Marketing Cloud on core”. Technically speaking, it’s a Marketing Cloud product 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’).
Just announced is Marketing Cloud Advanced, the ‘big sister’ to Marketing Cloud Growth. With Growth’s capabilities making it a good fit for SMB and B2B marketing organizations, we can see that Salesforce are moving ‘up-market’ with Advanced Edition, offering more features. This includes Path Experiment for testing different content across channels, Unified Conversations with SMS for two-way conversations, Einstein Engagement Frequency, Einstein Engagement Scoring, and Rules-based Dynamic Content. We’ll also cover Opportunity Influence, the ‘smarter’ version of the classic Campaign Influence.
Marketing Cloud: Quick Comparison
To ensure we’re all on the same page when it comes to Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud offerings, the diagram below sets out the differences between Marketing Cloud (originally ExactTarget), Account Engagement (originally Pardot), and Marketing Cloud ‘on core’.
Note: Marketing Cloud Growth/Advanced both require Salesforce Enterprise Edition (Sales/Service), or above.
1. Path Experiment
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.
As the first appearance of experimentation in a Marketing Cloud ‘on core’ edition, it’s quite impressive. The controls to set weightings for how many audience members go down each path are at your disposal, for example, a 60/40% randomized split. You’ll also find analytics:
- 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.
Currently, this feature works based on randomized split, and not on the concept of “winner selection” that you’ll be familiar with in Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Engagement. This is slated for a future release, as well as the potential to have AI recommendations guide you as you build out your experimentations.
2. Unified Conversations for SMS
SMS is currently available in Marketing Cloud Growth, and Advanced edition takes SMS 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: A Digital Engagement license is required if you would like to hand off to chatbots (otherwise, two-way messaging will be based on keywords).
3. Einstein Engagement Frequency
You may be familiar with Einstein Engagement Frequency in Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement, which evaluates your contacts and subscribers, and assigns a label to each individual based on their previous engagement (“Undersaturated”, “On Target”, “Saturated”). This indicates the optimal number of email messages to send in a given time period, helping to plan your email marketing cadences.
In Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, 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.
4. Einstein Engagement Scoring
This brings the predictive element to scoring contacts. The existing scoring rules feature 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’.
Note: Engagement Scoring will also be available in Marketing Cloud Growth as part of the Winter ‘25 release.
5. 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). If you’ve used dynamic content in Account Engagement, where dynamic content is built in a separate section away from the email builder, then you’ll appreciate the fact that 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.
And…consider how sharp these rules can become when tapping into your Data Cloud instance – data from multiple sources bought together, painting a more holistic picture for that individual – your imagination for this personalization has the potential to go quite granular.
This currently works at the individual email level (i.e. the rule is available for the email that it’s been built for), however, a searchable library to reuse dynamic content across multiple emails is on the product roadmap.
Note: Rules-Based Dynamic Content will be available in both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions.
6. 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.
Note: Opportunity Influence will be available in both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions.
Bonus: Event-Triggered Campaign Flows
When building campaign flows, you have a couple of options – segment-based, where you start with an audience who make their way through the flow, and event-triggered, where some action happens that triggers actions within the flow.
Over time, we’ll see more options available when building flows appearing within the campaign flow builder. For example, event triggers from Commerce Cloud can be dropped into the flow to enable rapid follow-up actions.
The campaign flow builder will also get a glow-up, with nice additions such as a debug window and analytics for how your flow has performed.
What’s Next: “Migrating” to Marketing Cloud Growth/Advanced
As most of us are aware, there’s been a regional roll-out of Marketing Cloud Growth/Advanced, available for AMER (US and Canada) customers, and with the arrival in the UK and Switzerland confirmed by the end of 2024. Plus, Account Engagement customers (formerly Pardot) gain access to Marketing Cloud Growth Edition features – for free. This is to get Account Engagement customers using, and advocating for, Marketing Cloud Growth.
Salesforce are discouraging people from using the term “migration”, and instead, are phrasing this movement as a “conversion” or “transformation”. The reason I’m highlighting this is that no existing Marketing Cloud (ExactTarget) or Account Engagement functionality will be ‘switched off’ – this is Salesforce’s approach to lay out a path to utilize Marketing Cloud ‘on core’, with the ability to switch between this and Account Engagement.
Summary
Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition builds on the solid foundation laid by the Growth Edition, offering a range of features to increase the capabilities of larger marketing teams. From more advanced testing with Path Experimenter to deeper engagement insights through tools like Einstein Engagement Scoring, this new iteration demonstrates Salesforce’s ongoing commitment to innovation and flexibility.
The seamless integration of conversational SMS and event-triggered campaign flows highlights the platform’s growing focus on tailored, data-driven marketing plans. As Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition launches worldwide, companies will find they have tools to create more meaningful, measurable interactions with their audiences.