It’s happening this week, August 7- August 14, 2021: the Salesforce Marketing Cloud August Release is about to land into your org. Be ready…
In this release, what’s been retired will impact more customers than what’s added, but all will give you a general sense of where Salesforce Marketing Cloud is heading in the years to come, and perhaps inspire you to invest more in Salesforce and add another studio or even cloud to your tech stack.
Release Highlights of New Features in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
- Wait Until Push Engagement – Journey Builder Activity. We love this little feature, that everyone with Mobile Push can benefit from. It will allow you to react in real time based on whether a contact opens a push notification within a certain time frame. The Wait Until Push Engagement activity listens for engagement from a corresponding Push Message activity. Keep contacts in a wait step in the journey until the specified engagement with a MobilePush message occurs. If engagement doesn’t occur within the predefined time frame, you can send the contact down an alternate path. See the video below to learn what it’s all about and get your creative juices going on how you might be able to use it for your own business.
- Datorama Upgrades: Insights for Slack; and Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud Enhancements; and Scenario Planning for Media Planning Center.
- Interaction Studio, now integrates with Experience Cloud. This is very exciting but for high end customers only as this comes with a serious price tag
- For customers who have Distributed Marketing: you can now add Custom Personalisation Interaction– tabs for more complex use cases, such as cc-ing or using an alternate ‘From’- email address.
- You can now Sync Marketing Cloud contact data to Sitecore with new Journey Builder activity. If you have Sitecore, than this is really good news.
‘Wait Until’ – Push Engagement in Marketing Cloud Journey Builder Explained
video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zb_nzcR3RQ
This new feature means that you no longer need to set up a query and a decision split to determine if a subscriber has opened a Push Notification. You can now make this part of your journey without further ado, and immediately follow up with those who did not open it, to keep the conversation going and either deliver your service or guide a browsing buyer towards the final buying stage. GA mid-September.
By setting a defined time period, marketers also create a firm notion of when action is meant to have happen, and most importantly, allow marketers to better prepare and deliver their ‘next step’ if not opened. Brilliant!
This is what the block looks like in journey builder:
Retired Features in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud August Release
Also to be aware of are some important retiring features that have been transitioning for a while :
- Email Studio Classic web tools are being retired. In association with this, Email Studio Legacy UI customers are being upgraded to the latest UI. You can now delete the queue for triggered sends associated with Journey Builder in Email Studio Interactions.
- Legacy CloudPages is removed from navigation, however, your legacy content will still accessible in CloudPages.
- Next up: Contact Deletes default suppression window will be changing from 14 days to 2 days in the October release.
Implementing New Features? Get Insights from the Professionals
Contact us to help you prepare for the release, and take advantage of all that you’ve already paid for in Salesforce and Marketing Cloud. We have 2 goals: make clients happy and help them get ROI from their Salesforce investment, while improving their Customer Engagement. Mostly with Marketing Cloud, but the features today in Pardot, Communities and Service Cloud are nothing to sneeze at and within most company’s budgets.
New to Marketing Cloud, and this is all a bit ‘over your head’? Get a basic understanding of what Marketing Cloud is and have the builders and studios explained to you here, in What does Salesforce Marketing Cloud Do.
Update: Pardot is renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement as of April 5, 2022.
