If you’ve ever built a marketing campaign, you know the drill: after agreeing on your brief, you still need to draft emails, nail the design, run approvals, and put it all into motion. That process often takes weeks, or even longer. And while you and your team have your heads down in the mechanics, there’s less bandwidth for the personalization and creative thinking that truly builds connection with your audience and drives growth. Which is why leaning into your tech stack and using the latest solutions, such as Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced, to streamline the campaign creation process, so your team can be freed up to focus more on the human element, is critical to continue to scale and grow in this modern age.
Product experts and Marketing Champions, Erin Duncan and Heather Rinke led a webinar, Elevating Your Campaigns with Next Gen Marketing Cloud, to walk you through how to use Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced to streamline your campaign creation process. In their session, they dive into the platform and take you through step by step from prompt to flow to email creation and Path Experiment configuration. Watch the full webinar on-demand and get the highlights to start exploring how you can lean into the latest tech to scale your marketing efforts and create personalized, seamless cross-channel experiences that build deeper relationships with your audience.
What is Next Gen Marketing Cloud?
Let’s take a step back and level set on what we mean by Next Gen Marketing Cloud. “Next Gen Marketing Cloud” refers to the latest Marketing Cloud platform, Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced. However, at Connections 2025, you may have also heard the term “Marketing Cloud Next”, this is an umbrella term for all of the latest Marketing Cloud offerings and refers to the combined functionality of features from Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced, Marketing Intelligence, Loyalty, and Salesforce Personalization.
Other terms that have been used are Marketing Cloud+ and Account Engagement+. This refers to using the combined features of Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced (Marketing Cloud+) and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced (Account Engagement+).
Marketing Cloud Next is “a strategic reframe of marketing itself”. Its vision is to end “no-reply marketing” and help companies provide a better overall experience for their audience. The Venn diagram below illustrates how these product features work in conjunction with each other and the different product names that may be used when these products are used together.
Using AI to streamline campaign creation in Next Gen Marketing Cloud
Campaigns can take weeks for a marketing team to plan and launch. According to Email Vendor Selection, 35% of marketing teams take up to two weeks just for their email production process and 5% take over a month. Meaning the more that marketers can find ways to help streamline and fast-track the process, the better, which is where the AI features of Next Gen Marketing Cloud can help.
By folding AI into the campaign workflow—from brief to email draft to segmentation—it dramatically shortens campaign turnaround time. That means your team can spend more of that precious time dialing in personalization, tweaking messaging, and creating marketing that feels human—not just efficient.
Starting with a strong campaign prompt
To use the AI features in Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced, start by drafting your campaign. First select Draft with AI, then Create a Brief and provide your prompt, AI will draft your campaign brief in seconds.
The campaign brief will include your campaign title, description, key messaging, and the target audience. Your campaign brief will only be as good as your prompt, which is why it’s important to make sure you include all the right details.
Best practices for prompts:
- Be specific about audience, channel, timing, and tone.
- Use clear, conversational language without unnecessary jargon.
- Include parameters such as word count, required inclusions/exclusions, and target personas.
Example prompt:
“Create an email campaign inviting marketers who have engaged in the last 12 months to our ‘Elevate Your Campaigns with Next Gen Marketing Cloud’ webinar on July 10th at 1 PM ET. Highlight how attendees will learn to apply AI at each stage of campaign creation.”
Therefore, before you create your prompt, make sure you and your team are aligned on the overall strategy for the campaign so that you can provide a clear detailed prompt.
Watch the full Agentforce for Marketing demo
Editing your campaign emails in Next Gen Marketing Cloud
After you review and edit your campaign brief, click Next to view the emails and SMS messages that have been created based on your prompt and campaign brief.
You can click into each message and edit the subject line, pre-header text, and the body paragraphs to ensure the messaging is exactly the way you want it. You can also provide feedback with a thumbs-up or thumbs down so the system can learn and grow each time it generates content. Again, depending on how well you specified your audience, tone, and channels in the prompt will determine how much editing and tweaking you’ll have to do.
Using Einstein Engagement Frequency to manage audience saturation
After fine-tuning your messages, configure your audience segment. An important piece of creating experiences that build meaningful connections with your audience is not over saturating them, which is where Einstein Engagement Frequency can help.
Einstein Engagement Frequency helps ensure contacts receive the right amount of communication by analyzing their engagement to generate a personalized engagement frequency score and then classifying their engagement. The classifications are as follows
- Saturated
- Almost Saturated
- On Target
- Under Saturated
Excluding Saturated contacts helps to ensure that you’re not emailing or messaging your audience too much, and this Einstein feature makes sure the evaluation is done automatically, so you don’t have to spend time tracking this manually.
Testing with Path Experiment
Another way to elevate the campaign experience for your audience is to test different journey options and lean into what is resonating and driving the most engagement.
Path Experiment is available for Marketing Cloud Advanced and expands on traditional A/B testing by allowing up to 10 different paths within a single experiment. You can test variations in content, channels, or cadence to see what produces the strongest engagement.
For example, you could create two paths consisting of an email followed by a wait period and then an SMS message. In the second path, you can add as many variations as you would like, such as adding a testimonial quote to the email, making the wait period longer, or adding a discount code to the SMS message, and then see which path performs the best.
Engaging your audience with SMS
Next Gen Marketing Cloud supports multiple SMS approaches:
- Long Code SMS – cost-effective, supports international, suited for smaller sends.
- Short Code SMS – faster sends for large audiences, higher provisioning cost, and longer provisioning time.
- Conversational SMS – enables two-way communication using Flow automation or chatbots. Conversational SMS is available for Advanced Edition with the Digital Engagement add on.
This flexibility allows you to select the right SMS format for your organization depending on your needs and strategy. For further guidance on setup, read Erin Duncan’s article on SMS provisioning and Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced, it takes you through all the steps and considerations for success.
The path to start using Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced features
The platform you have now will determine what your next steps might look like to start diving into Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced.
Announced at Connections 2025, Marketing Cloud Engagement customers will get access to Marketing Cloud Growth/Advanced around Dreamforce (October 2025), more details around how and when customers can start diving in further with the platform is coming. Here are the requirements:
- Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition or higher
- Data Cloud
- Credits to fuel Next Gen Marketing Cloud
- Credits are available with Salesforce Foundations
The best action to take now is to learn and build your strategy for how your team will start taking advantage of Next Gen Marketing Cloud features once you get access. To help navigate your way through this, our experts are leading a webinar, Understanding the Marketing Cloud Convergence Path. Register Here.
The announcement for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement customers getting access to Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced features came back in October 2024. Our experts led a session, Unlocking Next-Gen Marketing: How to Activate New Features Available for Account Engagement Customers, on all the capabilities that marketing teams can start tapping into with Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced. Watch On Demand.
Here are the requirements to keep in mind:
- Salesforce Enterprise Edition or higher
- Current edition of Account Engagement
- Data Cloud
- Credits to fuel Marketing Cloud on Core
- Some credits are available with Salesforce Foundations
Elevate your campaigns with Next Gen Marketing Cloud
The AI capabilities in Next Gen Marketing Cloud offer significant efficiency gains for campaign creation. By starting with a clear prompt, using audience saturation data to manage send frequency, testing multiple engagement paths, and incorporating multi-channel outreach, marketers can deliver more relevant, timely, and effective campaigns. Giving your audience personalized, seamless experiences that build deeper connections and ultimately drive growth for your business.
This technology is at our fingertips. It’s up to us to educate ourselves, know what it can do, and start exploring and using it to help us all do what we do best more efficiently and give our customers the engagements they’re expecting. But the path to navigating all of this can be challenging, so if you would like an expert guide to achieve success, reach out to the Sercante team.
