Salesforce winter 23 release notes best free features

Salesforce winter 23 release notes best free features for users just like you. We’re covering

Marketing Cloud
Account Engagement (Pardot)
Salesforce Sales & Service Cloud (core).

1. Salesforce Winter 23 release notes free features for Marketing Cloud

The introduction dates of the Marketing Cloud New Release features have traditionally been a bit different to the rest of Salesforce. This year, they’re in the middle of October – ie. now – which is why we are publishing the Salesforce Winter 23 today.

There are few ‘new and improved’ highlights for Marketing Cloud that are free and useful to all our marketing cloud clients. In fact, the most important official announcement is a sunset of Social Studio.

Among Marketing Cloud’s many builders and studios, Social Studio was a middle-child. Perhaps not as well understood as could be, and therefore under-marketed. That prodigy, Einstein, overshadowed. 🙂

As a full-stack marketing cloud consultancy, the CloudAnalysts consultants are certified in Social Studio and experienced in working with this tool. Now we would be mourning the loss of this Studio, if there wasn’t a great alternative. There is:

**Intelligence* Sprout** Social Connector

Connect all organic and paid social media data

Ingest all social data from Sprout Social and combine with web analytics, sales, and more into Intelligence

Uncover omni-channel insights in one platform

Analyze performance with cross-channel, interactive dashboards and reports

Optimize social performance

Gain insight into social data, alongside the rest of your marketing data, for spend and revenue optimisation.

(*Intelligence is a Datorama, a paid Salesforce product)

A new partnership

With every door closing, another one opens:

We’re proud to announce that CloudAnalysts is an official partner with Sprout, the alternative for Social Studio. We would be delighted to help you migrate from SFMC Social Studio to Sprout Social. Never had Social Studio? Start with Sprout now.

To learn the benefits of Sprout, migrate or get started:

Book an Intro Call

Digital Command Center

Another Marketing Cloud feature we love in the Salesforce Winter 23 Release Notes is the Digital Command Center for Slack. It lets you proactively monitor all of your marketing and commerce cloud solutions for issues.

Salesforce Winter 23 Release Notes Features for Marketing Cloud

E-commerce Marketing Insights App in Intelligence (formerly: Datorama)

This app is one of the many new eCommerce features in Intelligence. It allows marketing and commerce teams to share: loyalty and transaction experiences. This apps includes Google Analytics data. Learn revenue trends and promote or adjust campaigns to build performance.

Self-Service Custom Domain Registration

This is a good upgrade, as it saves you having to wait for 4 weeks to have this done for you.

You can find details of these features plus others in the marketing cloud winter 23 new release vids: https://salesforce.vidyard.com/watch/Xo4DUCY7vyTsQJPsVBJzWN? (bookmark the link, but don’t leave just yet, as this is just the beginning of this article)

2. Our Top Salesforce Winter 23 Release Notes free features for Pardot

Opt-out Status Simplified

One thing all companies should pay attention to is email consent. Winter 23 gives you 1 place to check for a record’s opt-out status by forcing you to choose a designated system-of-record for the the prospect ‘Opted Out’- field: It’s Pardot (now called: Account Engagement) OR Salesforce. (Previously, the Opted Out field inherited the value from the most recently updated record.)

Now that we ate our bitter green vegetables – so to speak, let’s see what’s on our plate re. Salesforce Winter 23 new release features for Pardot that are really exciting:

Ability to take action on prospects in 3rd party apps via Engagement Studio

The greatest new feature allows you to automate tasks and work with prospects outside of Pardot. This is SUPER-powerful. Think: automatically registering prospects for a webinar, sending them an SMS text, creating a new lead in Salesforce, a.o.
How does it all work? External actions are built on what are called “invocable actions“, in Salesforce Apex – i.e. a bit of code that will actually take the action. Then, you’ll need to create a Marketing App Extension for each of your third-party platforms you want to interact with prospects. And then you will also need to work with the Pardot API. In other words: you will need a Salesforce consultant / developer to help you set this up — not a DIY.
But, because it is developed in Salesforce, marketing managers can make some great gains. Because it’s in Salesforce and its ‘heavy-duty’ in terms of code, it means that you can really customise these actions to fit your business needs.
Lots of options as you can use external actions independently, or in combination with external activities to close automation gaps across platforms.
Use cases, please!! What would YOU want to automate?

Pardot – SF Sync

You can now run a full sync on your prospect database. Get the sync when you want and need it, no need to fudge a field change.

Keep tabs on prospects w/ problematic levels of activity, i.e. bots

No bots allowed! Pardot can now pause activity tracking for prospects with an excessive amount of activity.
When a prospect’s activity tracking is paused, an icon appears on the prospect list view and an error appears on the prospect record. A prospect’s activity tracking is paused only if it impacts Account Engagement’s performance. Paused prospects who are opted in can still receive marketing emails.

A new Pardot access license

You can now grant a user access to ‘most’ of Pardot marketing tools available with a new permission set; but not full access to Salesforce campaigns. Last year, we had Salesforce Identity licenses to satisfy Pardot-only users. This is a notch up from that.

Pardot API upgrades

For Developers, Winter 23 gives you a few goodies for Pardot Account Engagement API v5:

2 new objects : You can now read and query Lifecycle History: offering info about the prospect’s sales journey and current stage; and your Account (BU).
Plus, support for prospect queries based on email address and CRM FID, i.e. their lead/contact ID.

Also, Pardot Classic App retired last week, so that everyone now uses the Account Engagement Lightning app (formerly Pardot Lightning app.

And that’s it for Marketing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement aka Pardot.

(* disclaimer: some of these features might not be free to you, dependent on your tech stack)

3. Our Top Winter 23 release notes – free features for Sales & Service Cloud

At CloudAnalysts we’re all about customer engagement. So let’s start with some seemingly simple, but very helpful and free new features.

1. More From-address Options in List Emails

Salesforce winter 2023 release notes best free features

You can now choose to have a list email appear to come from a group email or a user. This is great for ‘team sales’ who work as a team, Account-based marketing, and other such options. To use this feature, the user must be able to use org-wide email addresses, or have multiple connected accounts via Inbox, or Einstein Activity Capture. Great.

Associated with this, is another email feature, which further enables email automations in Salesforce:

2. Access the Email Composer from Custom Components

Developers can now invoke the send email action from a custom component in Lightning Experience. The fields can be left blank, or use predefined values. Previously, you could access the email composer only from the UI, either through the Global Action menu, or via the Send Email tab on a record’s detail page. Standard quick actions can be invoked using the navigation service and page reference from any custom component.

3. To- do – lists

For a particular record owner, it will scape all of the to-dos for a particular owner and put all that together: all upcoming tasks, from multiple records, and not just for today, but for future dates as well. This new to-do list functionality makes it each to track all upcoming tasks. It’s “my events for today” on steroids.

4. Dynamic forms

On contact, opportunity and account records, display only the fields that are right for a particular type of them. So simple to set up: add the field and the condition to the page layouts, e.g. show phone numbers only if the leads/contacts have a certain title. Hide/show fields based on that field value and/or other field values. Very powerful.

Basically, this cleans up the pages for you and gives you and other users more control over their pages and its sections. (Sounds familiar? This was only available for custom objects in the past, but now for standard objects as well.)

5. Dynamic related lists

Same principles apply to dynamic forms. This works through filters. E.g. you can create a filter for cases with high and medium priority, you can now do that in just 1 rather than 2 searches.

6. Broadcast Communications

This feature is to help your team share updates with your customers at scale during an incident, set up Broadcast Communications. Great for Service case management and Experience Clouds. You can sent alerts or progress reports only to affected customers – to complement your current case management setup. Alternatively you can display a broadcast site- banner to alert customers in your portal.

Marketers, please do not limit yourself to ‘crisis only’ – use of this feature. What a great way to alert a certain group of customers to get their paperwork in, for their next period of doing business with you. Or use it to introduce new service features to a particular group of people who created a case because it wasn’t there before.

Note: For broadcast emails with a contact list created from related cases, you can send broadcast emails for a maximum of 10,000 related cases. To send emails to more than 10,000 related cases, create a custom contact list view.

You can even use this feature to introduce a new set of coupon codes.

7. New Forecasting Features

Custom opportunity fields in forecasts: i.e. only show the data that’s of interest, such as deals that are of a sufficiently large size. Create a forecast type, create a filter, activate the forecast type, and voila. You get the results you’re after: focused information you can action.

Other new features of note:

Custom calculated columns – use up to 5 per forecast type – get the right metrics
View territory-based forecast types in Salesforce Mobile – know your figures in transit
Increased forecast adjust note length to 255 char – so you can leave meaningful info.

8. Flow Enhancements

Flow is THE CHOSEN tool for Salesforce automation, and as of Winter 23, you can now

Use a Formula builder, with a syntax checker to check your code as you build. Makes life easier. Use formula builder in Flow Resources and Collection Filter elements.
Cut & paste flow elements.
Use a data table, such as a list of contacts or accounts in your flow. Say you’re building a screen-flow. Drag a screen that is a data table onto the canvas, name it, give a source collection, and save.
Use record triggered flows to update related records, i.e. any records that are related to the triggering record.
Launch screen flows with lightning web components. This allows for some custom styling.
Do a multi-select look-up within a screenflow.

Note that new Workflow Rules can no longer be created. Workflow rules is a sunsetting functionality that must be addressed. Salesforce wants you to use flows, as flow can use all Salesforce functionality from Workflows and process builders. The future is all about F.L.O.W, so stop using process builder and workflow rules and go with (the) flow.

9. Custom address fields

Take note! Seemingly a ‘not exciting’ update, this feature, in fact makes all the difference for one of my clients! Say you want to record and work with warehouse addresses as well as billing and shipping addresses. Simply enable this feature in setup and then you can use your custom fields to have the same sort of behaviour as Salesforce addresses.

10. Field-level security for Permission sets (BETA).

Permission sets allow admins to set the visibility of data and functionality. This feature takes permission granularity to a whole new level. Again, must be enabled in user management settings to become visible so you can configure this, right when you create the field.

11. DevOps Center

This is in beta, but Salesforce is realising that more of us are going to be needing development and we must make Dev as fast and easy as possible. The DevOps Center has both low-code and pro-code routes and paths. It uses Github for source code control. And it has a dev pipeline interface, so that managers, users and developers alike can easily see where things are at in a single screen.

Got plans? Questions?

Excited to discuss and implement some of these awesome new features? Call us. We’ll be glad to assist you. We love to talk about your needs and Salesforce Winter 23 Release Notes and updates: