The Spring ’18 release notes are hot off the press – all 437 pages of them.
When it comes to new Spring ‘18 features for B2C Marketers, there are multiple themes running through: mobile marketing, content variation, and most importantly, the tightening relationship between Marketing Cloud and Community Cloud. In the words of Salesforce: “Communities get an even jauntier spring to its step with an abundance of cool features” – as both clouds can clearly leverage one another to become more powerful.
Recently, I published a post on the essentials for B2B Marketers, and realised that there were too many updates for one post. Plus, for B2C Marketers, the hefty release notes are not the only place you can find these new jewels. Marketing Cloud publishes their own release documents, the most recent in October, and luckily, I’ve gone through both, cherry-picking the main 6 for your benefit. These are:
- Distributed Marketing
- Community Cloud 1-to-1 Journeys
- Einstein Engagement Scoring
- Image Carousel Block (Content Builder)
- Mobile Rich Notifications (MobilePush)
- Salesforce Surveys
Distributed Marketing
Marketing Cloud & Community Cloud
Empower your partners without compromising your brand’s integrity. The most important part of distributed marketing is guidelines, template, and an easy to use deployment tool – which is what this new functionality offers. Marketing Cloud Journeys and their related assets are opened to Partner Community users, so they can localise their message where you will allow it. Then, it’s all sent through Marketing Cloud, retaining your view on campaign performance.
See: Create and Personalize Partner Campaigns with Distributed Marketing, pp. 267
Community Cloud 1-to-1 Journeys
Another new capability that will be delivered as part of the Marketing Cloud-Community Cloud collaboration. You can take your Marketing Cloud Journeys, and apply them to the lifecycle of your community members, such as onboarding and lead nurture. As Salesforce puts it, you can activate “rich customer journeys, boosting engagement and driving activity in the community”.
Supported only in Lightning Communities.
See: Market to Your Members with Journey Builder for Communities, pp. 244
Einstein Engagement Scoring
Bring AI into the segmentation process, and predict how subscribers will engage with your campaign before you send it. Not only will you improve ROI, but you are also promised insight into your subscriber lists, uncovering aspects of your target audiences you may never have known. The full term is: ‘predictive customer engagement behavior modeling’, and clearly can give your marketing an extra competitive edge.
See: Einstein Engagement Scoring, in Marketing Cloud Release.
Image Carousel Block (Content Builder)
This new and more engaging way to display content was showcased a number of times at Dreamforce ‘17. Get more content packed into your emails without overloading the recipient, with the Carousel. You can add 5 images that will rotate in the space of 1, including navigation arrows for your audience to browse through at their own pace.
See: Image Carousel Block, in Marketing Cloud Release.
Mobile Rich Notifications (MobilePush)
MobilePush opens up mobile push notifications to marketers, a part of Marketing Cloud. In addition to notification management – composing, sending, tracking – now, you are able to add rich media (images/video) in the notification body, to pull even more subscribers back to your offering.
See: MobilePush – Rich Notifications, in Marketing Cloud Release.
Salesforce Surveys
There are some surveys that are best done outside of the marketing automation tool. For these, you can leverage Salesforce Surveys at no additional cost or integration effort. Once your survey is built, you can embed it on Lightning Pages or in Communities, so that customers or the users themselves can input questionnaire data. You can then, of course, sync what’s relevant to Marketing Cloud. I see this having a valuable use case for trade shows, where you want to capture data, but don’t want to clog up your data extension tables with one-off information.
See: Gather Feedback with Salesforce Surveys, pp. 46
Summary
This post has run through 6 key updates for B2C marketers that we’ll be able to leverage in Spring ’18.
The benefits covered have been related to mobile marketing, content variation, and the tightening relationship between Marketing Cloud and Community Cloud. The general release will take place on February 13th (Preview Instances first on 5th/6th January).
Get the Spring ’18 Preview release notes here, and the Marketing Cloud October Release here.
Days until Spring ’18 General Release!
[wpdevart_countdown text_for_day=”Days” text_for_hour=”Hours” text_for_minut=”Minutes” text_for_second=”Seconds” countdown_end_type=”time” end_date=”17-01-2018 23:59″ start_time=”1516188273″ end_time=”27,5,0″ action_end_time=”hide” content_position=”center” top_ditance=”10″ bottom_distance=”10″ ]Spring ’18 has been released![/wpdevart_countdown]
