Every year, the Salesforce space is full of new updates to delight marketers. And with so much going on, it’s nice to sit back and reflect.
With Marketing Cloud, Account Engagement (Pardot), and Data Cloud updates, alongside bonuses like the GA4 migration and all things AI, here are the key updates Salesforce Marketers should remember from 2023.
2023: The Year of ‘GPT’
It has a nice rhyme to it, doesn’t it?
It’s interesting to think that ChatGPT’s explosive growth was just shy of one year ago (having taken the world by storm when it was launched in November 2022). There were rumors circulating that Salesforce had something in the works, teased by Benioff over Twitter/X at the start of the year.
Einstein GPT was announced at TDX ‘23 (March) which showcased how users from all corners of the organization could get the power of generative AI in their hands. Note that Einstein GPT has since been renamed Einstein 1.
Marketing GPT (“Phase 1”)
During TDX, there was a demo of GPT use cases for marketers, with an unspecified technology. This was to spur on our imagination.
Then, when the Connections event came around a few months later, we received more solid information.
With Marketing GPT (now Marketing for Einstein 1), Salesforce aims to give marketers an AI-connected user interface that augments campaign brief conception, audience/segment discovery, and content creation.
Marketing GPT (“Phase 2”)
A few months later, at Dreamforce ‘23, Einstein 1 was announced – the relaunch of the Salesforce platform to create a trusted AI platform that Salesforce customers can use with confidence.
Also announced were 26 generative AI capabilities on the roadmap for Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud – with an additional 25+ set to arrive by the end of 2024. These will be built on Data Cloud (i.e. the core Salesforce platform). With too many to name, you can check out the summary slide below, and the guide that breaks down each capability:
The Marketing Keynote at Dreamforce ‘23, titled “Marketing in Generation AI”, was full of new innovations that the Marketing Cloud engineering teams have been working hard on shipping, wrapped together by awesome demos.
The session started with context on prompt engineering – the art of writing prompts to get the most optimal answer. It’s a skill that barely existed 6-12 months ago, but is one that we need to all acquire in order to use AI effectively.
Other highlights included Campaign Recommendations (with Einstein able to drum up a suggested campaign which you can opt to start executing in Marketing Cloud), data-driven Campaign Briefs and Preview, Segment Intelligence for Data Cloud, and much more.
Commerce GPT
With Commerce GPT (now Commerce for Einstein 1), Salesforce aims to deliver an AI-connected user interface that accelerates new storefront creation and guidance towards goals for merchandisers, and conversational commerce for shoppers.
Announced at Connections ‘23, Goals-Based Commerce (which empowers businesses to set targets and goals, and then provides actionable insights and proactive recommendations on how to meet them), Dynamic Product Descriptions, and Commerce Concierge were showcased.
Account Engagement (Pardot)
Although Salesforce has three releases per year (which includes Account Engagement), if you look at the calendar year, it may feel like four releases. This is due to the ‘Spring’ release notes for the following year typically dropping in late December (so keep an eye out for our updates around that time!).
To recap, below I will include the key points, plus a line of commentary (or two) about the gravity of the release.
Spring ‘23 for Account Engagement
This release was more of a light dusting to delight us, with a focus on monitoring account health. Plus, you’ll find other updates that hint at packed future releases.
- Monitor External Action Usage and Errors: Admins will be able to monitor and troubleshoot these low-code integrations using the External Actions Usage table (to review all third-party app usage) and the External Action Errors table (to identify issues with External Action automations, steps, and actions).
- Sending domain validation: Began to require proof of ownership via a new record called the validation key (with DKIM). Previous verification was off the DomainKey record.
Summer ‘23 for Account Engagement
This release was all about making improvements to the functionality that we already have. From enhancing external action usage, to Account Engagement Optimizer, lists, and the infamous opted-out field – there was plenty for us to read and absorb.
- Account Engagement Optimizer: View/manage a list of suggested actions in a table (and prioritize accordingly), pause/cancel jobs (preventing org processing overload), and gain an ‘at a glance’ understanding with the overall account health score gauge chart. (This became generally available after its beta launch in Spring ‘23). The prospect change monitor was a new jewel, used to understand which features result in the most prospect changes (and eat up your processing power).
- Completion Actions + External Actions: Previously, external actions could be triggered via Engagement Studio. But with Summer ‘23 you could trigger external actions with completion actions. Say a prospect completes a form, you can register them immediately for a webinar that’s hosted on a third-party platform, like Zoom.
- Account Engagement Connector in Data Cloud: Improve personalization based on all interactions a customer has with your organization by connecting Account Engagement with Data Cloud.
- Control Opted-Out Field Sync Behavior: How much one field impacted the community was a sight to be seen. Salesforce (once again) allowed the “most recently updated record” field value as the source of truth when the connector syncs.
Winter ‘24 for Account Engagement
This release features a desired capability in Engagement Studio, and improvements to the API that enable us to develop solutions for Account Engagement and promote these through the typical sandbox → production workflow.
- Engagement Studio Wait Times (Hours): Prospects can now wait (be held) in an Engagement Studio Program step from 2 to 8 hours. This is a balance between the two options available previously – either wait for X days, or go through immediately. A long-awaited functionality.
- API Version 5 for Flow: Using this, you’re now able to promote changes between Account Engagement sandboxes to your production instance – plus, copy marketing assets between business units using the same mechanism.
Marketing Cloud
As contributed by Greg Gifford (Salesforce Marketing Cloud expert, Marketing Champion, and MVP).
“To pull highlights from each release over 2023 was quite a difficult task, being a big year for Marketing Cloud. Especially towards the tail end, there were new Gen AI offerings becoming generally available (GA), plus great UI-related optimizations. This section features my favorite overall picks.”
Greg’s top highlights for 2023:
- Recycle Bin for Content Builder and Contact Builder
- WhatsApp Integration
- Typeface in Content Builder
- BuildRowsetFromJSON()
Spring ‘23 for Marketing Cloud
“There were a few decent releases and helpful additions/changes, but these two made a large splash for me.” – Greg Gifford
- Collapsible Paths in Journey Builder: A huge win for anyone that wants to leverage complex journeys. Being able to collapse parts you do not need while building, to better view the ones you do, is a huge time saver. Note that this was then further enhanced in the Summer release, to what we see today.
- WhatsApp Messaging Experiences: WhatsApp is popular globally, with some regions having a very high adoption percentage (80+%) like APAC, Africa, and South America. The US is third largest in total users as well, meaning although the market share is not as high, it is still a strong capability to have integrated with your Marketing Cloud.
Summer ‘23 for Marketing Cloud
“There were continued improvements from the previous Spring release (including those mentioned above). However, the three highlights below were the ones I saw that caused the most discussion.” – Greg Gifford
- Data Extensions (DE) Storage Details Report: Allowing you to view the storage size your data extensions take up on the server, you now have insight into total usage (which is the next step Salesforce are taking – as in, to enforce a GB limit on Marketing Cloud customer contracts). Take this as a warning that soon customers will be held accountable to this contractual limit, and exceeding it will cost extra.
- Content Builder Recycle Bin: This provided users a way to restore deleted assets and objects into Content Builder, if needed. It is a great boon for those ‘oh no’ moments when you delete something, realize a recurring email send still uses it, and now it’s crashing. With a couple clicks, you can restore this as if you never deleted it. A much needed solution!
- BuildRowsetFromJSON(): This is huge not only because it’s a new AMPscript function, but it also helps bring AMPscript in line with some modern data storage standards. JSON is far more efficient and effective than XML, and has become more normalized as the standard. This function removes the need to try and utilize SSJS or GTL to handle JSON content, allowing it all to remain in AMPscript.
Winter ‘24 for Marketing Cloud
“This was the release everyone was chomping at the bit for. Marking the GA release of Gen AI capabilities in Marketing Cloud, there was plenty that was notable in this release.” – Greg Gifford
- Einstein Gen AI Subject Line and Body Copy: You can now natively use the GenAI that Salesforce has built via Einstein. While more a novelty than a true powerhouse tool, still, it’s a great sign of future innovations to come.
- Typeface Gen AI in Content Builder: Integrated into Marketing Cloud Engagement, use Typeface to generate unique and on-brand content, such as images. Marketer users will interact with GPT by using natural language – conversational prompts that continually refine results until the marketer is satisfied with the information. This is another that is more novelty currently, but opens the door to huge possibilities in the future.
- Journey Builder Multi-Contact Entry in a Single Event: Throughput has always been an issue with Journey Builder. One of the major complaints has been that there is no bulk entry option – but now, there is (to some degree)! This allows multiple contacts to enter into a journey, all at the same time, instead of one-by-one.
- Contact Builder Recycle Bin: This provided users a way to restore deleted data extensions into Contact Builder, if needed. Have you ever deleted a data extension, and then realize you were referencing it in a critical report or email send? Oh no, better call support and pray, right? Not anymore! You have control, and peace of mind.
Bonus: Audience Builder Alternatives
Marketing Cloud Audience Builder has allowed marketers to create granular segmented audiences based on behavioral and demographic data.
However, around two years ago, Salesforce announced that Audience Builder will be retired. This means that Salesforce no longer sells Audience Builder to new customers, and are working towards retiring the tool for existing customers. A hard date for when it’s finally being decommissioned has not been communicated.
We explored what to expect when migrating away from Audience Builder, and some alternative tools, so you can future-proof your instance.
Data Cloud
Data Cloud is the fastest growing organically built product in Salesforce’s history (i.e. Salesforce built it themselves, not via acquisitions). It is the foundation that speeds up the connectivity between different ‘clouds’ across the platform.
There were a staggering number of notable announcements for Data Cloud this year. Here are the key highlights:
Data Cloud Free(mium)
At Dreamforce ‘23, Salesforce announced that Data Cloud is available for free (up to 10,000 unified profiles), which spurred interest.
With people getting their hands on this previously mysterious Salesforce product, inevitably, questions started circulating. How do we enable Data Cloud? Who can use it? Just because you can use it, should you? And also, how can we keep our expectations in line?
Data Cloud Consultant Certification
To support the proliferation of Data Cloud among Salesforce customers, Salesforce released the Data Cloud Consultant Certification (which was previously an accreditation, exclusively for Salesforce partners). Now, the opportunity to prove you have Data Cloud knowledge is open to any Salesforce professional.
Data Graphs
The announcement of Einstein 1 at Dreamforce ‘23 combines Data Cloud with the new Einstein Copilot. But, how can you ensure that you have the correct data, at the time of writing a prompt, that’s required to generate an optimal and accurate output?
Enter Data Graphs, part of Data Cloud, that enable you to visualize the relationships between data model objects (DMOs), even going several layers deep. Similar to the Schema Builder, you can trace the related fields and rearrange the relationships in a drag-and-drop manner, to ensure that the correct field data will be included in an AI application.
Bring Your Own Data Lake (BYOL)
In order to be trained effectively, large language models (LLMs) require large amounts of data. Organizations with large repositories of data will use a data lake.
With a Bring Your Own Lake (BYOL) solution, you can combine customer data from Salesforce with external data stored in Snowflake. A highly popular data lake, Snowflake, made headlines at Dreamforce ‘23, where their zero-copy architecture between Salesforce became a major differentiator (meaning that Data Cloud can directly access data stored in Snowflake, and vice-versa, without moving or duplicating data).
Google Cloud Partnership
The new partnership with Google Cloud allows organizations to bring data and large language models (LLMs) from Google, to support what happens within Salesforce Data Cloud.
The purpose is twofold – reduce the complexity of moving data between platforms with zero-copy ETL between BigQuery and Data Cloud, and ‘bring your own’ AI model from Vertex AI. Both of these connections reduce the cost, risk, and complexity of syncing data across platforms.
With so much buzz around Data Cloud, here are more guides you be be interested in to ground all the big announcements that have been happening:
- Salesforce Data Cloud (CDP): Which Skills Do You Need on Your Team?
- Are You Ready to Invest in Salesforce Data Cloud?
- The History and Future of Salesforce Data Cloud
Bonus Updates
GA4 Migration
Google’s Universal Analytics (GA3) stopped processing new data in the summer of 2023 (for us, it was mid-August). A key tool for most marketers, planning the migration to GA4 was enough work – however, ensuring that everything matches up with the rest of your tech stack made for a rollercoaster ride.
Looking on the brighter side, the migration was an opportunity to evaluate how we are connecting Google Analytics with our Salesforce stack – especially to Sales Cloud for monitoring lead conversion and other important conversion points in the customer lifecycle.
Social Media + AI
Social data is a significant source of business intelligence – underutilize social insights, and you could say that you only have a 270 degree view of the customer. Constraints that hinder the effective use of social data include a lack of time, a lack of integration between systems, and a lack of resources.
The role of AI in social media management ranges from social content creation, determining optimal send times, identifying target customer segments, predicting customer behaviors, and optimizing pricing and product listings.
Since the sunsetting of Social Studio, Sprout Social has become Salesforce’s recommended partner for social media management, having developed a platform that overcomes most of the challenges, and now, are exploring AI-enabled social media marketing.
Summary
What a jam-packed year! What was your favorite update from 2023? Let us know in the comments.
For now, we are just eagerly waiting to see what 2024 will bring…