Earlier today, Salesforce announced the release of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. This innovative new product is another option for marketing automation built natively on the Salesforce platform and comes with Einstein Generative AI and Data Cloud out of the box.
You might be wondering: What is this new product, really? What does this mean for the future of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Engagement? Well, we have answers to help you understand the ins and outs of the platform, what to expect, and what to consider for the near future. Let’s get started!
What is Marketing Cloud Growth Edition?
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is the culmination of years of Salesforce working to bring marketing automation into the Salesforce platform (also known as “Einstein 1”). This new marketing automation platform allows you to build multi-channel campaigns with the unified customer data of Data Cloud, build personalized marketing assets with the power of Experience Cloud, and automate customer journeys with Salesforce Flow.
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition also includes Generative AI and content approval processes out of the box to help streamline your Marketing efforts.
What does this mean for the future of Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement?
If you’re an Engagement or Account Engagement customer, you may be thinking “But what does this mean for the future of my product?”
This is what we’re most excited about. Because Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is built on Einstein 1, existing customers of Engagement and Account Engagement will eventually get access to features and functionality introduced to this new product. In addition, Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement continue to have a robust product roadmap.
Said differently: Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is another option for organizations that want to bring their marketing operations into Salesforce. If you’re a current Engagement or Account Engagement user, you’ll eventually have the option to use Growth alongside your current platform. So, think of it more as an additional set of features that are available to you.
Who is Marketing Cloud Growth Edition meant for?
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is a logical option for small and medium-sized businesses that are new to the Salesforce platform but aren’t currently using marketing automation tools.
If you’re already using Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement, then you don’t have to take any action right now. However, watch for future announcements to see when you’ll get access to Marketing Cloud Growth features to use along with your existing tools.
What marketing functionality is included?
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is feature-rich when it comes to building assets, and the builders provide a flexible and intuitive user experience.
Growth has a campaign-centric workflow and guides users through the process of setting up a new campaign with five pre-set options:
Let’s go through each of these options and what they provide.
- Single Email with Einstein: Build your email campaign using Einstein’s generative AI. With this option, you are prompted to describe your email objective (the more detail the better), and Einstein will generate a campaign brief and campaign assets. With all of the content Einstein provides, you can choose to edit, regenerate, and/or upvote and downvote to help the AI learn how to produce better results.
- Single Email Template: Begin with a responsive Salesforce email template that you can customize for your campaign.
- Blank Email Campaign: Start completely from scratch. With this option, you’ll need to add/create your email and segment. A Flow with an empty send email element will also be created to help when you’re ready to send your email.
- Message Template Series: Begin with two responsive Salesforce email templates that you can customize for your campaign. This option also provides a flow with a 1-day wait step between emails, but you can customize the flow further to fit your email journey.
- Single Form Template: Begin your campaign with a responsive Landing Page template, form, and a flow to create Leads when the form is filled out.
Building marketing assets with Marketing Cloud Growth
Marketing Cloud Growth’s assets are built with Experience Cloud, enabling users to easily build responsive assets with a drag-and-drop builder. We’ll do a deep dive into each builder in future blog posts, but, for now, here are some highlights to get excited about:
- Landing Page SEO capabilities: Landing page public page titles, descriptions, URLs, and even favicons can be customized to improve SEO.
- Form flexibility: The form builder is intuitive and flexible, allowing users to easily add text, new sections, dividers, placeholder text, and images to forms.
- View required form fields: The form builder also allows users to easily view which fields are required for new Lead/Contact creation to ensure any new records can be created successfully.
- Salesforce Flow automation: All assets are automated with Salesforce Flow, allowing marketers to get granular and customize the next steps and follow-up activities for every asset.
- Wait step flexibility: Users can set Salesforce Flow wait steps to wait minutes, hours, days, months, or to resume at a specific time.
- Asset approval workflow: All marketing assets have an optional approval workflow that you can integrate into your marketing team’s existing approval process flow.
(As I mentioned above, we’ll be doing a deep dive on the builders in subsequent posts — so if you have a question on a specific feature, let me know in the comments!)
Marketing Cloud Growth AI capabilities
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition includes AI out of the box so you can take your marketing initiatives to the next level.
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition AI features include:
- Einstein Co-Create: Easily build campaign briefs, email assets, and Data Cloud segments with the power of Einstein generative AI.
- Einstein Send Time Optimization: Ensure prospects receive marketing messages on the day and time they are most likely to engage.
- Einstein Metrics Guard: Protects your email activity data by filtering out email security scanner clicks and opens.
- Einstein Segment Creation: Assists marketers with creating specific audience segments in Data Cloud.
Get ready for Marketing Cloud Growth
I’m excited about the announcement of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition and for the vision of “Marketing Cloud on Einstein 1.” Remember, it will not replace Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement. If you’re part of a team that’s on the Salesforce platform but not using Salesforce tools for marketing automation, then you may want to explore if this new tool is the right option for you.
Be sure to return to The Spot for more posts about Marketing Cloud Growth. We’ll share all our learnings, tips, and tricks here to help all of you to be successful.
Want to know more about Marketing Cloud Growth, like, today? Then reach out to the team at Sercante to start a conversation.
