We’re back again with the upcoming May 2020 release, the third Marketing Cloud release of 2020. So we have picked out some of the most interesting parts of the release, if you wish to review the full release article it can be found here.
Journey Builder Updates
Pause and Resume Journeys: With the ability to pause and resume journeys, one won’t need to stop running journeys to temporarily halt sending messages from Journey Builder for any foreseeable business reasons.
Single Send Push Notifications: For simpler Single Sends in Journey Builder, it now supports push notifications.
New Path Optimiser: The new activity in Flow Control allows the marketers to experiment with the marketing strategies based on email engagement metrics or other outcomes. The Path Optimiser acts like an A/B test within Journey Builder, however, provides up to 10 paths to trial your ideas with. The winning path receives the new contacts and losing paths will shut off during the testing.
Platform Enrichment
Fallback address in Sender Profiles: If you use dynamic sender profiles using AMPscript, you can provide a backup address if the dynamic send address isn’t verified in From Address Management and can’t be displayed.
Note: This functionality is also available with Domain verification REST and SOAP APIs.
SSH keys per SFTP Account: With the availability up to 3 SFTP Accounts per MID in the last release, you can now configure authentication per user using a password, SSH key only, or a combination of both.
New CloudPages Experience PREVIEW: We’ve all seen the same experience in classic CloudPages app since the dawn of time. Nonetheless, a new preview New CloudPages Experience PREVIEW will be made available in the Web Studio app switcher dropdown for the users to get familiar with the new features and enhancements like content and collection sorting and the ability to copy existing content.
API and Development
With the development and APIs being an integral part of the DevOps process, here are some technical updates:
Action Required – Update your MobilePush iOS auth key: If you have an iOS app integrated with MobilePush, you’ll need to migrate onto Apple’s new sending service as Marketing Cloud will remove support for MobilePush .p12 Certificates in July 2020, and instead use .p8 Auth Keys when sending iOS push notifications. To avoid the iOS message failure please follow steps here.
New MobilePush SDK version: The latest version of the Marketing Cloud MobilePush SDK includes improvements to performance, analytics processing, and privacy-mode handling. You get the latest version for iOS and Android post the release.
New Journey Builder API: Have you ever wanted to pause/resume journeys via API, well now with the introduction of the new endpoints, you can pause and resume journeys up to 14 days.
Note: This also means that the functionality to pause and resume will be available in the graphical interface within Journey Builder.
Force Inline Attachment: If you want to attach images and other documents, instead of including them inline, AttachFile() AMPscript now supports the enforcement to inline attachments using the new 8th boolean parameter force_attachment.
Einstein Refinement
Salesforce’s AI solutions “Einstein” has made remarkable progress in Marketing Cloud recently with a noticeable appearance in the platform. Some of the key advancements coming into this release include:
- Send Time Optimisation Recommendations: Finally, the app provides granular information about how the model works including scores for all hours and days in a week.
- New Send Time option Journey Builder: The new option in Einstein Send Time Optimisation activity in Journey Builder will allow the marketers to test whether to send emails to contacts at random times, at a single time or Einstein’s recommended times.
- New Performance Dashboards: The new dashboard is aimed to show live performance metrics for each Einstein product in your Marketing Cloud org.
Wait, there is more…
Apart from the above, there are some key honourable mentions:
Access Image URLs Faster: Users can now access the public image URLs directly from the drop-down menu instead of from the properties view.
New Marketing Cloud Trailheads: Salesforce has been promoting the users to learn about their products and services via Trailhead. And if you haven’t tried yet, the interactive tool has heaps of modules for marketer, admins and developers. Here are some new modules and trail mixes coming into the release:
- Marketing Cloud Account Optimisation: Review your account setup, risk factors, and data hygiene for peak sending performance.
- Interactive Email Forms: Gather customer data directly from your email using Interactive Email Forms.
Retirements and Migration
With every release, there are always some features being decommissioned and it is crucial to know those to ensure there is no obstruction in the development or BAU processes.
- Classic Builder retirement: It is time to move into the Content Builder if you’ve managed your campaigns via Classic Builder in Marketing Cloud. The retirement begins from June 2020 which will remove the creation of new emails and by January 2021, the ability to edit emails will be deprecated.
- MC Connect A/B Test retirement: As with the retirement of the Classic Email Builder, the ability to A/B test in Sales and Service Cloud retires January 2021.
- Deep Links retirement: If you access Marketing Cloud to create or edit emails directly using the deep links in Salesforce CRM, this functionality will retire coming October.
- Action Required – Cross-Cloud Authentication: If you have Sales and Service Cloud integration with Marketing Cloud, regardless of MC Connect or V5, both need to move to the Connected App authentication by July 31, 2020.