New Features Archives - Page 6 of 17

Getting Started, New Features, Setup & Admin, Strategy
February 20, 2024

Announcing Marketing Cloud Growth Edition

Erin Duncan

Product Note: Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced are editions of Marketing Cloud Next and have also been referred to as Agentforce Marketing.

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.

New Features, Release Notes
January 24, 2024

Salesforce Spring ’24 Release: Platform Highlights

Heather Rinke

Wow, where did the time go? The Salesforce Spring ‘24 Release notes are out and some cool new features are right around the corner! Here are the key Salesforce platform features marketers and Salesforce admins should know about. You can also get a closer look at the features from an Account Engagement admin’s perspective in this blog post.

Salesforce Spring ’24 User Interface (UI) Updates

Add Fields from Related Objects to Dynamic Forms-Enabled Pages

Salesforce continues to build on Dynamic form capabilities by extending the functionality to access fields from related objects. I’m very excited to see this in place, as this is a common ask that previously would have to be delivered using less-than-simple methods. This Idea has been around since 2006 and has logged more than 35,000 points!

Customization Updates for mobile:

This release also includes features that will bring more design flexibility by device, and making the user experience more relevant based on how they are working:

Confirmation Message When You Select the Multi-Select Picklist Field Type

You can say Multi-Select picklists are sort of like raisins much like tags in Account Engagement. For some they are useful for their use case, and for others, they are a no-go because of their limitations (if you’ve tried to use them in reporting or automation you know what I mean 😉)

Now, when you create a new field and select the Mutli-Select picklist data type, you will be presented with this pop-up highlighting the limitations to make sure this is the right approach before creating.

Reporting & Dashboard Updates

Easily Update Fields in Lightning Report Filters

This little update will probably save admins a lot of headaches. No more having to completely remove a filter to update it. Now you can update the field being used in the filter. If you realize after building a report that you used the wrong date filter, all you have to do is swap the data field. The criteria remain intact.

Transfer Lightning Dashboard Ownership (Generally Available)

When someone leaves your organization, it’s now easier to transfer ownership of the dashboard to another user. In the past this had to be achieved by cloning or recreating the dashboard.

In the Lightning Dashboard view, you can transfer ownership one dashboard at a time

If you’re using the new Analytics tab, you can select multiple dashboards and change the owner for all selected at once.

Add Images, Rich Text, and Widgets to Dashboards in All Editions

Now you can add images or rich text widgets to make your dashboards more engaging with logos, contextual images, titles and descriptions. This feature previously available only in Unlimited and Premium editions is now available for all editions!

Five dashboard Filters now in All Editions

When creating dashboards you now can use up to five filters to give users even more ways to slice and dice the way they want and get the key information they need.

Automation Updates

Create Multiple Instances of a Set of Fields with the New Repeater Component (Beta)

I was very excited to see this feature, which lets users create multiple records in a single screen element. This will be ideal in situations like adding project members to a project team, or even providing a quick custom Create Contact flow. Users just populate the info for one record, then hit Add Item and new form appears allowing them to create the next one!

Supported fields include: Text, Number, Checkbox, Date, DateTime, Currency,Choices (except Choice Lookup), Display Text, Long Text Area

More Awesome Reactivity in Screen Flows

Screen flows have been getting a lot of reactivity love over the last few releases, and Spring ‘24 is no exception. Here’s a summary of features from this release:

Identify Flows Containing Email Alerts

On the Email Alerts page, you can now see what flows are using that alert, and whether the flow is active. This can be great if you’re looking to update your emails and want to understand what processes will be impacted by the change.

Other Notable Spring ’24 Release Updates

Marketing App is being Renamed

If you typically use the out-of-the-box Marketing App to access your Campaigns, Leads or Contacts, you’ll notice that the all has been renamed to ‘Marketing CRM Classic’. There doesn’t seem to be any change to the features available beyond the name change, though.

Get Help Understanding Salesforce Spring ’24 Release Enhancements

Contact the team at Sercante to get help implementing these enhancements in your Salesforce org. And leave us a comment below to let us know what you think about the Spring ’24 Release.

New Features, Release Notes
January 12, 2024

Account Engagement Spring ’24 Release Features

Erin Duncan

Salesforce Spring ‘24 release notes are out! Here are the most important features coming to Account Engagement that marketers should know about.

Einstein Assistant

More AI functionality is coming to Account Engagement! With the Spring ‘24 release, Account Engagement Advanced and Premium editions can now utilize generative AI to create Landing Pages, Forms, and List Emails. When creating or editing assets, Einstein Assistant will prompt you to describe what you’re building to auto-generate copy or details for each asset type.

Landing Pages: Einstein Assistant will suggest a name, tags, title, and description.
Forms: Einstein Assistant will suggest a name, tags, “look and feel” tab description, headlines, and paragraphs.
List Emails: Einstein Assistant will suggest subject line, header, and body copy content.

Once this feature is available, Einstein Assistant will need to be enabled per Account Engagement Business Unit.

Interested in what else Einstein for Account Engagement can do? Check out our previous blog posts!

Updated Lightning Email Builder

The Lightning Email Builder is getting an update! Details are sparse on what additional features this new builder will bring to the table, but I am excited to see the Lightning Builders continue to grow. What we know for now is that users will be able to choose between the new builder and the existing builder when creating or editing Email Content. This feature won’t be out until after the Spring ‘24 release, so keep an eye out for more info once the updated builder is released.

Check out our blog post, Everything to Know About the Pardot Lightning Email Builder, for more on the existing features and functionality.

Account Engagement + Data Cloud

The connection between Account Engagement and Data Cloud continues to grow stronger, allowing you to better personalize your marketing efforts. With the Spring ‘24 release, you can import your email engagement data into Data Cloud and create an email engagement data stream. Ensure you’ve connected your Account Engagement Business Units to Data Cloud with the new connector that was released as part of Summer ‘23.

2024 Email Platform Changes

Gmail and Yahoo recently announced changes to their spam prevention methods that create new requirements for bulk senders. These changes have three main impacts for Account Engagement users:

Ensure your Account Engagement sending domain is verified with DKIM.
- DKIM essentially tells email platforms that Account Engagement is authorized to send emails on the domain’s behalf. More info on setting up DKIM Authentication is available here.
Provide a one-click unsubscribe that is processed within a two-day timeframe.
- Account Engagement users are already covered with native functionality. All Account Engagement emails automatically contain a list-unsubscribe header and an email preference center and/or unsubscribe link is required on all emails. Account Engagement processes unsubscribes immediately, so no need to worry about the two-day window.
Keep Spam Rates below 0.3%
- Account Engagement requires users to keep Spam Rates below 0.1%, so users are again covered with native functionality.

Other Updates

The Twitter Connector is officially retired as of October 31st, 2023

Last August, Twitter, or “X”, changed its API terms, which in turn broke the Account Engagement to Twitter connector. Without this connector, users will no longer be able to use Social Posting for Twitter and can no longer ingest engagement statistics for existing Twitter posts.

API Updates

Version 5 of the Account Engagement API now supports creating and managing forms and returns start and stop fields for Engagement Studio Programs. Version 5 has also been updated to provide better error reporting when using the Bulk Asset Copy Flow.

Get Help Understanding Salesforce Spring ’24 Release Enhancements

Contact the team at Sercante to get help implementing these enhancements in your Salesforce org. And leave us a comment below to let us know what you think about the Spring ’24 Release.

API & Integration, Marketing Cloud, Pro Tips
November 22, 2023

Must-Have Salesforce Marketing Cloud Extensions, Apps, and Add-Ons

Ralph Green

Marketing Cloud Engagement is a great tool and it offers a wide range of functionality and various capabilities. But, as with all software, there are always limitations that leave you wanting more. That’s where Marketing Cloud extensions become essential.

Thanks to the strong Salesforce ecosystem, the openness of the platform, and the love it receives from its customers, users, and enthusiasts, there are so many extensions, apps, and add-ons that can help enhance your Marketing Cloud experience.

Listed below are some of my favorites from my seven years of working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC).

Top Marketing Cloud Extensions

SFMC Companion

This Chrome Extension is a fond favorite of mine and it is particularly useful for those “busy” Marketing Cloud accounts and for anyone who spends hours down rabbit holes trying to understand whether a particular Data Extension is still being used, or is even still relevant.

SFMC Companion offers a useful search functionality that allows you to look for any asset or object using a free-text search field. Furthermore, whilst on any SFMC asset or object, the ‘Inspect’ tool will show all components referencing or using that particular asset or object.

Thanks to SFMC Companion there is no longer a need to have several tabs open simultaneously just to understand whether a Data Extension can be deleted.

Evergage Launcher

This might technically be cheating as it’s practically a necessity for implementing Marketing Cloud Personalization but I’ve always enjoyed using it.

This extension helps identify whether the Marketing Cloud Personalization (MCP) SDK has been added to the website, so you no longer need to pester your IT team, and it is also where you can launch the Visual Editor.

The Visual Editor is by far the easiest way to build your JS Sitemap, which is a huge part of any MCP implementation. Users also have the ability to see their work whilst on the page – this comes in handy when creating personalization campaigns, another feature accessible via the Evergage Launcher.

Salesforce Inspector

Whilst this is not specifically related to SFMC, it is worth installing. Most SFMC accounts use Salesforce CRM data (it’s very rare not to have Marketing Cloud Connect).

Therefore, with such a reliance on Core Salesforce data, this extension can save you a lot of time. If you quickly need to check the API field names or the field type, or even example values, Salesforce Inspector is your tool.

Furthermore, Salesforce Inspector lets you easily import and export data which is incredibly useful if you need to prepare test data for UAT.

Top Marketing Cloud Apps

It’s worth mentioning that for the following section, I’ve loosely used the term “Apps” as it covers everything from App Exchange products to Mobile Apps.

Query Studio

Perhaps one of Marketing Cloud’s best-kept secrets, but Query Studio is an incredibly useful app to add to your SFMC instance. If you’ve ever wanted to test your SQL skills without having to create an automation, then this might be for you.

Query Studio allows you to quickly build queries in the Marketing Cloud without needing to create and configure an automation. Once you’re happy with your selection, Query Studio can use your query to create Data Extensions automatically.

Marketing Cloud Mobile App

Ever needed to quickly track email performance or to check that you definitely paused that Journey, but you don’t have access to your laptop? The Marketing Cloud Mobile App might just be able to help.

However, whilst it’s useful to have instant access to your SFMC account with just your phone, it is worth pointing out that there are some SFMC features that are not available in the mobile App, so don’t throw away the laptop just yet.

You can find the app in both the Google Play Store and Apple Store.

SiteCore

Technically two for the price of one as there is both a Web CMS app and a DAM app but they’ll both help bolster your SFMC instance with the world-leading CMS. Although, it is probably worth pointing out that these apps are far from cheap.

If, however, you’re lucky enough to have one of these licenses, you can drag-and-drop approved SiteCore assets directly from the SFMC Email Editor. Alternatively, you can send contact data and behavior back to your Sitecore Experience Database to close the loop on asset performance.

DESelect Segment

Full disclosure, I’ve never had the pleasure of working with this particular app but I had to include it as it solves, what I think, is one of the biggest issues SFMC clients face when procuring SFMC… segmentation. DESelect brings drag-and-drop segmentation to Marketing Cloud and reduces the need for marketing teams to have SQL knowledge.

Again, it’s worth pointing out that whilst there is a free version available you will have to pay to increase usage, users and features (i.e., saturation control and deduplication). However, depending on your team’s skillset this app could well be worth considering.

Bonus Content

If the technical skills aren’t your team’s forte and AMPscript is constantly causing you trouble, check out ampscript.io, a useful tool that helps validate AMPscript code and highlights any AMPscript that may result in potential syntax errors.

Get more details about AMPscript in this blog post from Kayla Border.

Top Marketing Cloud Add-Ons

SalesWings

Ever needed Lead Scoring in SFMC? Say hello to SalesWings! This add-on is easy to install and is a highly cost-effective way of plugging the SFMC Lead Scoring hole.

SalesWings tracks website activity and couples it with data from CRM before scoring and grading customers using a flexible scoring model. SalesWings data can be shared with Salesforce CRM as well as used in future SFMC segmentation.

Litmus

If you’re lucky enough to have both a Litmus and SFMC account, then you should definitely consider integrating the two. Yes, SFMC allows you to preview emails, but with an integrated Litmus account, you get so much more.

With an integrated account you can sync emails from the Litmus builder to SFMC or build in SFMC and test as you go. You can test dynamic content and individual personalization with the integrated email previews and, perhaps most impressively, share email performance with Litmus to create a single view of performance.

Use Marketing Cloud extensions to make the most of the platform

Going back to my previous comment, all software products have their limitations, but it is Salesforce’s ecosystem that has encouraged enthusiasts to build upon its offerings which, as shown above, has led to some innovative solutions that could give your SFMC instance that much-needed capability boost.

So if you’ve been contemplating if the grass is greener on the other side it could be worth exploring the depths of the Salesforce Community — chances are there is already a solution to your problem out there.

Analytics & Reporting, Data Management, Pro Tips
October 12, 2023

Fix Your Reports! How to Backdate Campaign “Member First Associated Date”

Erin Duncan

A Campaign Member’s First Associated Date records the date a Lead/Contact became a member of a Salesforce Campaign, and it’s a great metric to use in your reporting. First Associated Date can be used to show how many Leads/Contacts a Campaign touched in a given time period, how long the Lead/Contact was in the campaign before they moved to a “Responded” status, or how long the Lead/Contact was in the campaign before an associated Opportunity was opened. However, sometimes the Campaign Member’s first associated date gets skewed.

Common causes of this are:

Lead/Contact should have been added to the campaign on September 15th, but was stuck in the Account Engagement sync queue until October 1st
New Leads from an event we’re not uploaded into Salesforce until a few weeks after the event
Campaign Members were brought over from another Salesforce org during a migration
Sales didn’t enter a new Lead they were working with until after the Opportunity was created

If you are relying on Campaign Member First Associated Date for your reporting, any of the above causes can really throw off your data and make a Campaign, or a time period, look less successful than it actually was. Luckily, you can backdate this field with a few system permissions and the help of Data Loader!

You can insert, but not update!

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to do this, it’s important to note that you can’t update the Campaign Member First Associated Date of existing Campaign members. You can only insert new Campaign Members with a backdated first associated date. However, you can use Data Loader to export Campaign Members, their Campaign Status, their dates, etc. from a Campaign, delete the Campaign Members, then re-add them to the Campaign with new dates.

Permissions needed

The first step to updating First Associated Date is enabling “Set Audit Fields Upon Record Creation”.

Navigate to Setup > User Interface

Ensure the “Enable “Set Audit Fields upon Record Creation” and “Update Records with Inactive Owners” User Permissions” option is selected

Select Save

Next, create a Permission Set for “Set Audit Fields Upon Record Creation” and assign this Permission Set to the user(s) who will handle the Data Loader imports.

Navigate to Setup > Permission Sets
Select New
Name your Permission Set “Set Audit Fields Upon Creation”
Select Save
Within your new permission set, type “Set Audit” into the “Find Settings” box
Select Set Audit Fields Upon Creation

Select Edit on the resulting page and select the Set Audit Fields Upon Creation checkbox
Select Save
Select Manage Assignments
Select Add Assignments
Select any users who will be handling the Data Loader imports of Campaign Members, then select Next and Assign

Import your data

Finally, get your Data ready for import! At a minimum, you’ll want to make sure your file includes:

Campaign ID
Lead ID and/or Contact ID
- If you are importing both Leads and Contacts into the Campaign, I recommend splitting the import into 2 files.
Campaign Member Status (if different from the Campaign’s default Status)
Campaign Member first associated date
- Ensure the column is formatted using one of the options below, otherwise you will get an error.
  - MM/DD/YYYY (example: 04/23/2012)
  - DD/MM/YYYY (example: 23/04/2012)
  - YYYY-MM-DD (example: 2012-03-25)

To import the data

Open Data Loader and login
- Note: Updating Campaign Member First Associated Date is not possible with the Data Import Wizard, only Data Loader.
Select Insert
- Note: The ability to map to Campaign Member First Associated Date will not be available if you select Update or Upsert.
Check the Show all Salesforce Objects checkbox and search for CampaignMember

Select your CSV file and click Next
Select Create or Edit a Map and map your fields
- CreatedDate is the field you’ll need to map to the Member First Associated Date column

Select OK > Next > Finish

And Voila, beautiful, accurate Campaign Member data!

Marketing Cloud, New Features, Release Notes
September 18, 2023

Dreamforce Session Recap: Winter ’24 Marketing Cloud Release Highlights

Heather Rinke

Dreamforce 2023 has come and gone, and wow, it did not disappoint. Not only was this my first Dreamforce, I had the honor of co-presenting the Marketing Cloud Release Highlights session with two amazing members of Salesforce product team: Ruth Bolster, product marketing manager, and Whitni Freeman, lead solution engineer.

In this session, we covered key Winter ’24 release highlights across each of the Marketing Cloud products:

Data Cloud
Intelligence
Engagement
Account Engagement
Personalization

Here’s a recap of the Marketing Cloud Winter ‘24 release features covered…

Highlight #1: Segment Intelligence (Data Cloud)

A new Data Cloud for Marketing feature, Segment Intelligence connects and harmonizes customer and marketing performance data — like revenue data, first party data, as well as paid media data — so you can understand how your segments are interacting with your marketing.

Using out of the box dashboards, you can see how segments are performing across channels, and gives you an executive understanding of how segments are performing across channels.

Plus, you can use Einstein to optimize existing segments, or create new ones based on performance data.

With all that data in one place this allows marketers to have a more holistic view of how segments are doing, without being bogged down by time consuming data management and reconciliation. And having those insights to optimize channel performance by segment – that level of visibility and adaptability means more impactful and relevant marketing campaigns, which leads to better marketing ROI.

And the built in dashboards and connections means that marketers can get started right away!

This feature will be available for select customers starting in October, and will be available to all customers later this winter.

Highlight #2: AI-Powered Segment Creation (Data Cloud)

Another Winter ‘24 feature for Data Cloud for Marketing is Segment Creation. Powered by Einstein, this allows marketers to build complex segments using a descriptive prompt.

So, for example, I can just tell Einstein “Big spenders in North America who made a purchase in the last 3 months and love hiking”, and it will generate the segment for me, showing what that segment looks like, and the attributes used.

This means that marketers can build their segments without having to be a data scientist to do it. Being able to pull data based on specific criteria has often required technical knowledge of the data model to know where to look, and SQL skills to query the data to know how to access it. This feature will allow marketers to be more self-sufficient to get the data they need when they need it.

This will be Generally Available in October for Data Cloud Customers.

Highlight #3: Intelligence GA4 Connector (Intelligence)

As of Winter ‘24, Marketing Cloud Intelligence will have a built-in GA4 connector and pre-defined data sets available to ingest GA4 data. Marketing data is the foundation of Marketing Cloud Intelligence. Its data models, dashboards and guidance are built for marketers. There are already more than 100 native connectors available, and now with GA4 data connector this is a natural addition to the platform to have relevant marketing data in one place.

How this will work: When setting up data streams, GA4 properties will appear under the ‘Website’ dropdown. These new properties will be supported in API connectors as well as Marketplace apps.

Marketplace apps will replace previous UA 360 websites and support the new GA4 web properties, dimensions, and other fields for data retrieval.

One thing to keep in mind: Due to the differences between GA4 and UA properties, the new connector will pull different, yet very similar, datasets into the platform when the GA4 property is selected, so your visualization may need to be tweaked when setting up the data stream for the first time. Marketplace will discontinue support of UA360 properties after the GA4 support begins.

Highlight #4: Trigger Action on GA4 Data (Engagement)

Marketing Cloud Engagement has some goodies in the Winter ‘24 Release as well. The first is Google Analytics 4 Integration, which lets marketers activate journeys based on Google Analytics 4 segments and events.

This new integration will include two key features in one:

Visual dashboards embedded within Engagement reporting so that marketers can see real time impact on revenue, AOV, and conversion metrics.
Audience activation, which allows marketers to create engagement and re-engagement campaigns based on customer interactions using that GA4 data.
- So for example, if you had a customer that viewed your product pages for backpacks and hiking boots, then abandon the session, you can use audience activation to trigger an abandoned browse journey. This also allows you to get cross-channel insights across mobile, web, and email.

There is a fully paid version which includes both Reporting and Audience Activation. There is also a free version that will feature the Reporting feature only.

Highlight #5: AI-Powered Email Content Creation (Engagement)

AI is coming to Marketing Cloud Engagement with Email Content Creation, including Typeface partnership!

Marketers can set up and specify personalities with brand voice and tone, and using natural language prompts can get draft ideas on subject, body copy and images. With the ability to give feedback on what works and what doesn’t this lets the model learn and improve over time.

Marketers can consider this a tool to help them get a first draft in place. They still have control over the content throughout. They’re given choices based on their prompts, which they can use, like or dislike.

That human element and judgment is a crucial part of the whole process.

Content Creation will be available in Marketing Cloud Engagement this October, and it is currently scheduled to be in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement next February

Highlight #6: Transfer Assets from Sandbox to Production (Account Engagement)

Speaking of Account Engagement… With the Summer ‘23 Release we saw the ability to move assets between business units, which is fantastic! But that still left a gap with sandboxes. Anyone that has used Salesforce sandboxes has been used to building and promoting configurations, and unfortunately that hasn’t been possible with Account Engagement sandboxes, which has been painful to work around. Any assets built in a sandbox had to be built again in production, which is of course time-consuming and also prone to error if something is missed.

In the Winter ’24 release, marketers can now copy assets from sandbox to production using Salesforce Flow. After installing the flow on your campaign, all you need to do is select your sandbox environment and your production environment, select your assets, and then copy it over. And this supports 8 asset types, including email templates, dynamic content, form handlers, custom redirects, custom fields, landing pages, and more.

This allows for a more useful Account Engagement sandbox, to perform all asset testing and avoid conflicts – and all that test data – when trying to build in production. Not to mention saving time because you won’t have to build assets multiple times. You can even use this to set up a QA process, giving a subset of users access to build in the Sandbox only and then have another subset of users review the assets and push them to production when approved.

This was first mentioned in Erin Duncan’s post on Winter ‘23 Highlights for Account Engagement.

Highlight #7: Real-Time Event Stream (Personalization)

With Winter ‘24 Release, Personalization will now include Real Time Customer Event Stream, a Lightning component that can be added to record pages, giving users a real-time view of the marketing assets that a lead or contact has interacted with.

This gives sales and service teams better insight into the types of content their customers have been engaging with. They can then have more relevant and informed conversations with them about their current needs and interests, and provide a better overall customer experience.

Learn more about the Marketing Cloud release highlights

If you want to learn more about the Marketing Cloud release features covered, here are a few resources:

Dreamforce ‘23 Marketing Keynote
Winter ‘24 Release Feature Demos
State of Marketing Report
Marketing Cloud Release Notes – Winter ‘24 Release Notes are expected to drop September 25th.

What do you think about these Marketing Cloud release highlights? Let us know in the comments.