Category: SFMC

The June release of Salesforce Marketing Cloud rolls out from 5 – 12 June. We’ve put together a highlight reel of our most anticipated features below, with a full list of the release notes available here.

Bower’s Top Picks

Targeted Advertising on Snapchat with First-Party Data

Snapchat joins the growing list of social media channels that marketers can now use their first-party data within for targeted advertising, including to create lookalike audiences. Just segment an audience and push it through via Advertising Studio.

Optimise Send Time to Specific Data Extensions

You can now determine the optimal time to send to a particular audience data extension before you even send. Previously only available by Enterprise or Business Unit level, the June release makes this feature far more insightful for marketers that deeply segment their audiences. Now Einstein can tell you when he would send, saving you hours on manually analysing past send tracking.

Marketing Cloud Package Manager Enhancements

Building upon the initial release of Package Manager in April, support has been added for more objects and activities. These include API events, transactional email, and automation-based data extract, transfer and import activities. Another step forward for rapid deployment or transfer to new Marketing Cloud instances.

AI Powered Insights on your Content Performance

Einstein Content Tagging and Selection features now enable you to determine aspects of your content library that are attracting higher engagement. Using AI, automatically tag prominent features such as a mountain, a beach or a dog which in turn can be used to assess trends in performance when including these prominent features in your campaigns.

 

Additional features in this release

Gain Visibility Over Failed Leads in Advertising Studio

You can now have visibility over not only when, but more importantly why a lead fails through a new Lead Capture Error Details view. This new error handling feedback feature will dramatically improve the time taken troubleshooting an error, thus increasing overall lead volume.

Predict the Optimal Number of Push Notifications

The new Einstein Engagement Frequency for MobilePush enables you to predict the optimal number of push notifications for every contact. This is based on each individual recipient’s notification engagement behaviour, aiming to position the frequency between a goal of increasing open rates without reaching a point of message fatigue.

Predict Performance of Subject Lines

Use Einstein’s AI capabilities to predict how your subject line is likely to perform. This new performance tester analyses a range of open rates based on historical sends to help you select a subject line for the best open rate.

 

Important platform updates & feature retirements

Retirement of Marketing Cloud Connector V2

This retirement, originally slated for March 31, is taking place on June 9. Those still using V2 will need to choose one of the upgrade options here.

Default suppression period of Contact Delete

The default suppression period for contact deletion is changing from 14 days to 2 days in the upcoming October 2021 release. This is in line with how most customers adjust this setting, and is closer to the best practice recommendation of 0 days. Find out more here.

Retirement of CloudPages Legacy Experience

The default CloudPages Experience has been renamed to ‘CloudPages’, with the previous CloudPages renamed ‘CloudPages Legacy Experience’. CloudPages Legacy Experience will be gradually phased out in upcoming releases. If you’re still using the Legacy Experience, see the actions you’ll need to take here.

The next release for Salesforce Marketing Cloud is rolling out from April 10 – April 17.  Watch out for some interesting and exciting new features! We’ve highlighted some of these below, and the full release notes can be found here.

Release Highlights

 

Event-Based Wait Until Activity Arrives to Journey Builder

Introducing the first event-based activity to Journey Builder!  You can place a hold on a customer mid-journey to allow an external event to trigger.  Depending on the event outcome, you can use configurable filter criteria to guide the customer through a customised experience.

Available to all customers using Marketing Cloud Journey Builder.

View Recent Contact History for Any Activity In Journey Builder

The contact count below non-wait journey activities has undergone a major makeover; it is now clickable and shows a summary of contacts processed for the past 30 days.  From this summary view, you can drill down into the details and gain valuable insights into customer success or error trends, which speeds up troubleshooting and problem resolution.

Marketing Cloud Package Manager

You can use the new Marketing Cloud Package Manager to export and import fully configured automations, content, data models and journeys from one Marketing Cloud instance to another.  This is a clear win for faster scalability, as this can accelerate onboarding of new business units or geographies.

Available from April 19, 2021 for Marketing Cloud customers.  Access will be limited to administrators only, but more permissions are planned for a future release.

Send Product Data Using Streaming Updates API Via HTTP POST

This is an important change for security reasons: while Marketing Cloud can send product data using streaming updates, it does so using the Collect Tracking Code JavaScript library.  Because this is an open API, this could theoretically allow unauthorized changes to recommendation data.  The change to using HTTP POST avoids this scenario, bolstering the reliability of the recommendations data.

Note that streaming updates using the Collect Tracking Code JavaScript library will continue to work, but there are future plans to deprecate streaming updates using the Collect Tracking Code JavaScript library.

 

Additional Features on this Release

 

Clickjacking Protection is Automatically Enabled

Clickjacking protection is now automatically enabled for all Marketing Cloud accounts.  In prior releases, a security option had to be toggled to gain this protection.  With this release, malicious pages will no longer be able to load in the background of trusted Marketing Cloud pages.

Can Now Import Amazon S3 Data

You can now specify an Amazon S3 bucket as a file location source to import data into Marketing Cloud.  This feature is included in all Marketing Cloud editions. 

Contact Delete Default Suppression Period Change

The default suppression period for contact deletion is changing from 14 days to 2 days.  This is in line with how most customers adjust this setting, and is closer to the best practice recommendation of 0 days.

Journey Builder will not send WhatsApp messages to opted-out contacts

In the January 2021 release, the ability to create and send WhatsApp messages was introduced to Journey Builder.  However, contacts who may have opted out of receiving WhatsApp messages who were injected into a journey continued to receive messages out of turn.  The new release addresses this, so that Journey Builder automatically removes them from the audience source and doesn’t send a message to them.

Important Information

Retirement of the Marketing Cloud Connector V2

The retirement of V2 Marketing Cloud Connect takes effect from March 31, 2021.  Customers who are still using V2 need to make use of the upgrade options to continue using Marketing Cloud Email Studio from Salesforce.  These options are described here.

 

The next release for Salesforce Marketing Cloud is rolling out from January 30  – February 6, with some interesting updates slated for this release. We’ve highlighted some of the updates below and the full release notes can be found here.  

Release Highlights

 

AMP for Email

A big win for email marketers in the advancement of interactive emails, AMP for email is now able to be enabled in your account, providing a new open-source email framework that allows you to add interactivity inside your email messages. This framework unlocks a large variety of interactive and real-time content to further increase the personalised experience within email.

Available within Pro, Corporate and Enterprise Editions.

Chat Messaging for WhatsApp

This new messaging feature will now let you chat with your customers within WhatsApp. Once provisioned, you can start configuring your messages and templates in Content Builder and Journey Builder, and push your content into the installed Journey Builder WhatsApp activities. Use Contact Builder to create new WhatsApp audiences to further segment and target your customers from journeys.

Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud

Datorama reports in Marketing Cloud with replace the current Discover reporting tool that is being retired in April 2022. With Datorama reports, you’ll have access to a new format to generate and share your email and journey analytics, with a new Datorama Dashboard to collate and pivot your reporting requirements from

Available on Corporate and Enterprise editions, as well as Pro editions with Discover enabled.

Customer 360 Audiences Enhancements

Customer 360 Audiences continues to expand with new features that allow you to more clearly define your data, stitch your customers with improved Identity Resolution matching. New streams are also available to connect from both Mobile and Web devices, allowing you to activate on this within your email data sources.

Datorama: Email to Web Conversion App

Within Datorama, create new visualisations of the impact of your email campaigns between your marketing channels and your web analytics. Connecting your email and web data unlocks insights and key factors to the performance of the full customer funnel

Additional Features on this Release

 

View Enhanced Contact Error Details in Journey Builder

Improved error messaging and tracking on individual contacts within a journey, allowing you to see details of an error that caused them to exit a journey.

Protect Your Social Studio Accounts with Multi-Factor Authentication

Continuing with the increased login and account security, MFA can now be enabled for Social Studio. MFA adds a level of protection to provide users with confidence in the security of their accounts. Super Users and Administrators will be able to enable this on your account. 

Look Inside Einstein’s Asset Selection

Within Einstein Content Selection understand why a particular asset was selected for a particular subscriber, as well as why some assets weren’t selected, allowing you to fine-tune selection rules.

A key summary of all October 17th 2020 releases and edits.

Customer 360 Audiences

Customer 360 Audiences, our enterprise-wide customer data platform solution, enables marketers to capture, unify, segment and activate all their customer data. It provides marketers a single source of truth of their customer and makes that data available for creating personalised experiences across every touchpoint.

New Pardot Email Experience

Send emails created in Lightning Content Builder through a new list send experience in the Pardot Lightning App. View how emails are performing at the send level, and also see aggregated metrics across multiple sends at the email content level.

Available with All; Growth, Plus, Advanced, Premium; Salesforce Lightning is required.

Interaction Studio: Triggers for Journey Builder

Interaction Studio: Triggers for Journey Builder allows our customers to create segments in real time based on the actions their customers/visitors take on a website, with an email, on the mobile app, and more. These segments are activated in Journey Builder to present real time, 1-to-1 content based on affinities.

Sandbox for Datorama

Ensure data governance best practice with a dedicated testing environment.Sandbox for Datorama gives admins the ability to test setup configuration and data changes in an isolated development environment that is always in sync with Production.

Datorama Media Planning Center

Optimise your media budget allocations with advanced planning tools. With the Media Planning Center, you can create, manage, and analyse media plans; identify media plan optimisation opportunities; and use Einstein AI to model your media mix and test scenarios.

Available in all editions.

Einstein for Marketing Cloud Enhancements

The new version of Einstein Engagement Frequency uses a personalised contact-level model, to maximise open rates. EEF is also directly integrated with Journey Builder using the new EEF split activity that can be used on the JB canvas. The Einstein Enhancements continue with Send Time Optimisation support for single send journeys and Einstein Engagement Scoring for Mobile Push.

Included in Corporate and Enterprise Editions.

Advertising Studio: LinkedIn Company Matching  

With LinkedIn Matched Audiences, customers now have access to unique targeting capabilities that give you the ability to combine LinkedIn’s powerful professional data with your own first-party data.

Available for all Advertising Studio customers who have a LinkedIn ad account

Full release FAQ can be found here – October release FAQ

October 17th Release Edits – What’s changing? 

Marketing Cloud App and Setup October 2020 Release Notes

Learn about enhancements to SSL certificates, Audit Trail, and Alert Manager.

Marketing Cloud Cross-Cloud Integrations October 2020 Release Notes

We’re retiring the A/B test feature in Marketing Cloud Connect in January 2021. V2 of Marketing Cloud Connect is scheduled to retire in March 2021. Distributed Marketing updates include image block enhancements, campaign send enhancements, and the ability to send bulk quick send messages from a list view.

Marketing Cloud Journeys and Messages October 2020 Release Notes

If you’re a MobilePush customer who uses beacons and geofences, check out the latest iOS 14 updates. MobilePush is retiring the user interface for .p12 certificates. Campaigns functionality is removed from Email Studio. Standard Content Builder blocks now output accessible HTML and the Email Form block is enhanced. Google Chrome blocks mixed content.

Marketing Cloud Data Management October 2020 Release Notes

Synchronised Data Extensions is limited to 250 fields.

Marketing Cloud Einstein October 2020 Release Notes

Get the power of Einstein Engagement Frequency for push messages, use two Einstein split activities in Journey Builder, and understand yours send time data quality.

Marketing Cloud Social October 2020 Release Notes

You can target LinkedIn posts by region in Social Studio. And you can improve accessibility for your LinkedIn posts by adding image alt text.

Marketing Cloud Developers October 2020 Release Notes

Review the following topics to learn about changes or updates that relate to Marketing Cloud APIs or developer topics.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud July 2020 release will be rolled out between July 25 through to August 1, 2020. The team 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.

Re-Engaging Online Shoppers

Abandoned Browse and Abandoned Wishlist triggers enable you to send personalised emails to subscribers who have dropped off your site and encourage them to return. Utilising your abandoned cart messages in content builder, the behavioural triggers content block can dynamically add and display a subscriber’s abandoned items into the email. These behavioural triggers are available in Journey Builder and you should use the behavioural trigger data extensions as the entry source to your journey.

Push Notification Send Time Optimisation

The Einstein STO activity in journey builder will, based on your users past engagement patterns with MobilePush determine the best day or time of day they are most likely to open a push notification.

Transactional Send Email Journeys

The transactional API can now be configured through the journey builder interface, which include the same features as multi-step and single-send journeys are available. Great way to expand the reporting available via GA360 and adding additional touch points to transactional emails.

Pre-populate Interactive Email forms

Making a form quicker and easier to fill in is always a bonus. So in order to gather new information as painlessly as possible, you can now pre-populate inputs in the Interactive Email form with known subscriber data.

New Cloud Pages Experience

This is a customer preview of the upcoming new CloudPages app and in the July release you will now be able to update your SSL selection after a page has been published and view the page URL in the editor. Both CloudPages versions utilise the same content so you can toggle between the two and keep in mind that the new experience will be replacing the current CloudPages experience later this year.

Multi-Factor Authentication

As of August 2020 Marketing Cloud will be rolling out support for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). It is highly recommended that in order to ensure both confidentiality and integrity of your data that all customers implement MFA . If you are already using Single Sign-On to handle logins you can still enable MFA as an additional safety measure

Error notifications with Alert Manager

Located at Marketing Cloud Setup > Settings > Company Settings, Alert manager can be used to send emails to recipients relevant to any critical system alerts. This first release is specific to email send and triggered send errors. Previous to this release, the send would be attempted up to three times. If the last attempt failed, the send would be cancelled and support would contact the account administrator.

Goodbye IE11

As any developer will tell you, the bane of their existence will always have been trying to support Internet Explorer! Salesforce have announced that on December 31 2020, that access to Marketing Cloud using IE11 will cease. Customers are advised to use one of the other supported browsers for access moving forward

Marketing Cloud Connect A/B Test Feature Is Retiring January 2021. 

Marketing Cloud Connect A/B test email sends rely on email studio classic content which is being retired in January 2021 and this it will no longer be available. It is recommended that you use sycnchronised data sources to bring your data into Marketing Cloud and use A/B testing in Email Studio.

Daily Automation Enhancement in Audience Builder

Audience Builder will now exclude any data loaders you are not using from the daily automation to improve performance. It will inform you when you are using an out-dated or inactive dimension. You will need to save or publish an audience in order to turn the data loaded back on. Your data for the new dimension will then be available the next day (after the automation runs again)

MobilePush Auth Key for iOS Update Extended to September

As part of updates and improvements to security Apple is removing support for current .p12 APNs certificates and requires all customers to use .p8 Auth keys for their apps. The original date for this update was set as July 2020 but to allow more time for the changes, this has been extended to September 14, 2020.

The March 2020 Release provides ability to get delivery receipts for individual SMS sends using the _SMSMessageTracking data view.

Full detail on the data view can be obtained here:

 

If you want to filter your query results to a particular send you need to get the MessageID.

To get the MessageID, we need to click on the message name and look at the last part of the page URL. The last characters preceding the last forward slash is your Base64 encoded text version of the MessageID.

Copy the Base64 encoded text and use an online Base64 decoder to decode the Base64 encoded text.

The Base64 Decoded result appears in this format: 157:78:0. Based on this result, the MessageID for this message is 157.

Lastly, create a Query to get the necessary information:

SELECT SubscriberKey, Mobile, MessageID, Name, Sent, Delivered, Undelivered, SMSStandardStatusCodeId,
Description CreateDateTime, ModifiedDateTime, ActionDateTime, MessageText
FROM _SMSMessageTracking
WHERE MessageID = 157 /* we could instead use [Name] column too */
AND Undelivered = 1

Did you know?

There is an SMSMessageTracking data extension template for quick DE creation.

SMS Status Codes

If you need help with Track Delivery in SMS Data Views please reach out.

Deliverability is a way to measure the success at which an email marketer gets a campaign into subscribers’ inboxes. It is impacted by things like ISPs (internet service providers), MTAs (mail transfer agents), throttling, spam, bounces and bulking. In this post, I want to touch on bounces.

A subscriber is marked as “bounced” when their receiving email server rejects an email that you send. This rejection can mean that the email address is invalid or their inbox is inaccessible at the time of send.

ISPs send messages back to Salesforce Marketing Cloud reflecting the response provided by the recipient’s server explaining why they cannot deliver your email. Interpreting these bounce responses helps you understand why your message bounced and how to fix the problem.

Breaking Down Bounce Rates

• Bounce Rate: The percentage of total emails sent that could not be delivered to the recipient’s inbox. There are two types of bounces — a hard bounce and a soft bounce. The main differentiator between the two is that hard bounces are permanent and emailing to them should not be attempted again, whereas soft bounces are temporary and can be re-tried.
• Soft Bounce: result of a temporary problem with a valid email address, such as a full inbox or a problem with the recipient’s server. The recipient’s server may hold these emails for delivery once the problem clears up, or you may try re-sending your email message. Generally speaking, bounces that begin with a 4xx explanation are considered soft or transient delivery failures. This means they can be reattempted for delivery and may still have a chance of being accepted by the receiving domain…at a later time.
• Hard Bounce: result of an invalid, closed or non-existent email address. These emails will never be successfully delivered. You should immediately remove hard bounce addresses from your list because ISPs use bounce rates as a key factor to determine sender reputation. Having too many hard bounces can make your company look like a spammer in the eyes of an ISP. If a bounce begins with a 5xx code and message pertaining to a permanent failure, then it is considered a hard bounce. Reattempting delivery of these bounces is not likely to succeed and may in fact do further damage to a sender’s reputation.

Data View: Bounce

The bounce data view can be queried in Automation Studio to retrieve detailed information surrounding all bounces from Marketing Cloud sends.

There are a number of fields in this data view that can be difficult to interpret. For example, what exactly is an SMTP Reply Code? How is it different to an Enhanced Status Code? How should I filter my queries to isolate certain types of bounces?

What is an SMTP Response Code?

When you send an email, the receiving mail server returns a code indicating the status of the message delivery. This is known as an “SMTP response code” and is part of the normal email sending process. A bounce is logged by interpreting the specific response code that relates to unsuccessful message delivery.

Each SMTP call you make returns a response. Generally, 200 and 300 response codes are normal response codes that do not indicate an error. 400 responses are usually soft bounces. 500responses are hard failures.

With soft bounces, SFMC retries sending the email to the subscriber every 15 minutes for 72 hours, for up to 288 tries. Only after the system stops attempting to retry does a subscriber appear in your tracking as Bounced.

Breaking Down SMTP Codes

Nowadays, SMTP responses can be broken up into three parts:

1. Basic status code
2. Enhanced status code
3. Reply message

• Reply Code / Basic Status Code: first defined in 1982 (see RFC 821), this response is limited to three digits. They are also referred to as basic status codes since “enhanced status codes” were created 14 years later. This response is used to communicate the success or failure of every SMTP command. This value is returned by selecting the SMTPCode column from the _Bounce data view in your SQL.
• Enhanced Status Code: defined in 1996 and expands upon the basic status code, it uses a series of 3 digits separated by decimal points. The enhanced status code offers more granularity and answers the larger question “tell me why my email delivery failed?” This value is returned by selecting the SMTPBounceReason column in your SQL.
• Reply Message: the text string regarding the bounce relayed by the mail system. This message is meant for human consumption, while the codes are typically meant to be read by machines.

SMTPCode ⟺ Basic Status Code
SMTPBounceReason ⟺ Enhanced Status Code

Marketing Cloud’s own defined bounce codes

The below fields are Marketing Cloud defined codes based on the “smtp” data sent from the recipients Mail Transfer Agent:

• BounceCategory
• BounceCategoryID
• BounceSubcategory
• BounceSubCategoryID

Where can I see what each response means?

I have compiled all the status codes in the workbook below.

If you need help with interpretting SMTP bounce codes, IP warming or bounce mail management please reach out.

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.

Excited to be starting the new year with the January 2020 Release of Salesforce Marketing Cloud that is going live from the 25th of January just before our Australia Day celebrations.

Some highlights are included below but you can read the full official release notes here.

Contact Builder

Record Count Column Included in Contact Builder Data Extensions

Data Extensions viewed from the Contact Builder will now display a new column called Record Count.

Label Changes in All Contacts View

The All Contacts View will now display the Marketing Cloud channel product name on the filter sidebar for the following channel name labels:
Contact Builder > All Contacts.

Journey Builder

Create, Send, and Monitor Single Send Journeys from Journey Builder

For a more streamlined user experience in Journey Builder can now be used to send all your emails.  When creating a new journey, you many choose to create a Multi-Step Journey or a Single Send Journey.

This feature allows you to manage all your email sends from a unified workspace to increase visibility across campaigns and streamline navigation.  This simplifies the on-boarding for new team members since there is a unified user experience for both types of sends.

MobileConnect

Access MobileConnect Admin Pages from Marketing Cloud Setup

With this release of Marketing Cloud, you can now access the MobileConnect Admin pages from the Marketing Cloud Setup.  The page functionality remains the same.

Find Your SMS Analytics Faster with the Updated Message Name

When sending SMS messages through Journey Builder, these now use the Activity Name as the Message Name in all reports and data extracts.  You also have full control of your SMS message name.  The Report ID is no longer populated for Activities created after the new release.  Unfortunately, existing and running journeys do not show this change.

Marketing Cloud Platform

SameSite Chrome Changes

Google’s SameSite cookie change is to be released with Chrome 80 in February 2020.  Marketing Cloud has evaluated the use of cookies within their applications and are implementing fixes to ensure the Marketing Cloud applications are unaffected.  Customers using iFramed components in browser operations could be impacted and these should be examined for compatibility.

Create New Marketing Cloud Users Directly from Setup Home

Salesforce has made it easier to create new users quickly directly from Setup Home.  Basic name and contact information are added in the first step and then one or more Marketing Cloud roles are added in the second step. Once you have reviewed your information, click Create, and your new user is created and receives a notification email and a temporary password.

Marketing Cloud Provisioning Is Changing

Great news, Marketing Cloud Provisioning is now changing and aligning with other Salesforce clouds and standardising the provisioning features based on products or SKUs purchased.  You may see features added to your account as a part of new provisioning requests.  These may occur at your renewal or even outside of your renewal time frame.

Add Up to Three SFTP Accounts Per MID

Up to three FTP accounts per MID are now permitted. These users can be created or deleted  in the Setup section of your account.  This allows you to restrict account access by specifying the IP addresses a user can access the account from.  Different users can now be assigned to different business units as needed.

Remove Salesforce Logo from Marketing Cloud Email Footers, Default Profile, and Subscription and Unsubscription Pages

The Salesforce logo in Marketing Cloud email footers is being replaced with a blank image and does not impact the formatting or your footer.  Footers can be accessed from the Account Settings section of Marketing Cloud Setup.

Marketing Cloud Einstein

Set a Custom STO Send Window

Einstein Send Time Optimisation (STO) now lets you select a custom window of time for your email send, providing flexibility when sending shorter promotional campaign sends or observe 2–6 day windows.  When you don’t have enough data to create a personalised model, you can now set a default for unmodeled contacts to control how Einstein STO handles these contacts.

Social Studio

Remove Connected Personal Accounts from Social Studio

You can now delete registered Facebook, Instagram or Google My business pages that were previously registered with your own personal accounts from Marketing Cloud Social Studio.  There is no longer a need to transfer these pages to a new user.

Create Instagram Stories in Social Studio and Push to Mobile to Publish on Instagram

In Marketing Cloud Social Studio you can now create Instagram stories, assign the post to a mobile user to then post the story from Instagram.

Advertising Studio

Updates to the Lead Capture Dashboard

The Lead Capture application is available from the AppExchange and you can now sort, search, filter, receive notifications, and re-authenticate directly from the Lead Capture dashboard. This is available to all clients.

End of Life

With the January 2020 release the following are retiring:

• Marketing Cloud Campaigns Approvals & Approvals Classic
  • Use Content Builder Approvals to approve emails.
• Classic Live Content
  • Use Content Builder partner blocks or the Content Builder Block SDK to create live content.
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM Connector

A friendly reminder that SFMC will be release some new updates on October 12, 2019.

Key highlights include:

View Google Analytics 360 SMS Activity Metrics in Journey Builder 

See how SMS activities in journeys impact the web conversion path of your customers in single and multi-channel journeys.

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_october_2019_sms_tracking_and_reporting.htm&type=5

Shared Data Sources for Business Units in Contact Builder

A new Sharing tab provides Data Sync customers with a straightforward sharing model for more customer control when using synchronised data in Marketing Cloud.

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_october_2019_cab_shared_data_sources.htm&type=5

Engage Customers Through the Event Follow-Up Journey Template in Journey Builder

Use the Event Follow-Up template to build a journey to engage with attendees after an event.

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_jb_event_follow_up_template.htm&type=5

Use Facebook Advanced Match in Journey Builder’s Ad Audience Activity 

Expands the number of attributes to improve match rates and achieve a higher return on advertising spend.

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_october_2019_ad.htm&type=5

Nested tags in Content Builder 

Add multiple dimensions to tags, making them easier to find, categorise, and analyse.

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_october_2019_ceb_nested_tags.htm&type=5

 

Allow Multi-Select on All Contacts View in Contact Builder 

All contact builder users can now delete multiple contacts on a single page at one time

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_october_2019_cab_allow_multiselect.htm&type=5

Please reach out if you have any questions about the above.

Full release notes can be found at:

https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_october_2019_release.htm&type=5

There is nothing more exciting than reading through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud release notes and seeing what new features are included. The August 2019 release is going live on Saturday, August 24th with some exciting additions and we have picked out some of our favourites, but you can read the full official release notes here.

Send time optimisations

The holy grail for marketers, being able to select the best time window to communicate with your customers.

Marketing Cloud Platform Extensions/Upgrades

With major platform add-ons/upgrades like Setup Assistant to help set up your new account, copying your contact model into a different account or business unit with Deployment Manager, and more:

• Removal of v1 request authentication whilst creating packages for integration.
• Add CC and BCC recipients to transactional send definitions using the messaging/v1/messages/definitions REST resource.
• If the standard tabs in Content Builder don’t meet your needs, you can add custom tabs using the Content Builder Block SDK.
• Too many support tickets? As part of a new provisioning request, you might see features pre-loaded to your new account.

Automation Studio revised

For everyone who has tried to query the unsubscribes from a Child Business Unit this feature is on its way for Enterprise 2.0 accounts and will make your life much much easier. In addition, to help you troubleshoot SQL queries the automation log will include a more detailed error messages.

Social Studio and Mobile Studio revamped

Get ready for some social action with the ability to:

• Register Facebook Ad accounts and promote Facebook posts.
• Single Sign-On capability to access Social Studio.
• Register Google My Business accounts in Social Studio and see the review content from location pages in Engage and more.

Furthermore, Mobile Studio has some key enhancements like:

• Associate campaigns with SMS messages, and shorten URLs in your SMS messages in Journey Builder and Content Builder with the click of a button.
• New Android MobilePush SDK hosted on https://salesforce-marketingcloud.github.io/MarketingCloudSDK-Android/

Limitless Content Builder and Email Studio

Content builder now has more content than ever:

• Users who want to be more intentional about when edits are saved can now disable Email Autosave.
• For better email experience content builder will show a warning in Preview and Test for messages larger than the 102-KB. Note: This warning does not prevent sends.
• Finally, you can now upload files into Content Builder with a new limit of 5MB either via UI or REST API.

Email Studio updates include:

• Ability to include source and publication list-level opt-outs when using a transactional send classification during A/B Tests.
• Fallback value to populate when unverified address is found during the validation check using the AMPscript for dynamic sender profiles.

Distributed Marketing tweaks

For anyone who uses the power of Distributed Marketing (DM) within the Salesforce ecosystem, this release will bring appealing features to the tool. These features are scheduled to be released to non-production environments on August 25, 2019, and Production environments on October 23, 2019.

• Use Quick Send to send a single message to up to 75 contacts, leads, or person accounts at once in Sales, Service, or Financial Services Cloud.
• For users with Person Accounts, the contact key can now be mapped to AccountId or PersonContactId as the unique identifier in Marketing Cloud.
• The approval process is simplified by allowing the marketers to approve distributed marketing sends only under certain conditions (target audience criteria, approval upon modification of content).
• With the ability to add custom character limit on the rich text and plain text blocks, the sending and savings will be disabled upon exceeding the limit by the business users.

Wait, there is more…

Apart from above, there are some key honourable mentions:

• Use Facebook Advanced Match in Journey Builder’s Ad Audience Activity: Facebook Advanced Match which expands the number of attributes to improve match rates and achieve a higher return on advertising spend is available to all clients with an Advertising Studio license and Journey Builder.
• View Google Analytics 360 Email Activity Metrics in Journey Builder: View goal metrics, such as site usage and ecommerce activity related to individual email activity.
• Marketing Cloud Connect API Compatibility: Objects that are available in the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud API version 46.0 are now available to Marketing Cloud Connect, Data Sync, and Journey Builder.

It is time for another Salesforce Marketing Cloud release in June, so we thought we would pick out some of the best features in the upcoming release. If you want the full June release notes they are available here.

Increase Email Open Rates with Einstein Send Time Optimization

With Einstein Engagement, over time Marketing Cloud can identify and determine the optimal time to send communications to a customer to increase the chances of them engaging with the emails they receive.

Store More Content and See Large Email Warning

Content builder now allows you to store more assets in folders and will now also warn you if your emails are too large to prevent from rendering issues when emails are deployed to customers.

This is a helpful new function as you are now made aware if emails exceed 102kb which is the size limit for Gmail, which clips emails if they are larger than this size.

Create and Share Journey Templates

Sharing is caring! Not only can you now you can template common journey structures that you use but you can also share these across business units. This new feature will make creating common marketing campaigns (that use journey builder) more efficient to get them into market as quick as you can with less time to produce than what it would normally be.

Track Message Changes with Mobile Audit Logging

Changes to mobile messages (MobileConnect, MobilePush, inbox and in-app messages) can now be tracked and who modifies a message is now noted in the Mobile Audit Log. This can be helpful to determine who last made changes to a Mobile message and can also be viewed in a running journey in the Mobile Activity.

This feature needs to be enabled by your Salesforce Marketing Cloud representative and may need to be added to your account at an additional cost.

View Push/SMS Message Activity Configuration Details in Journey Builder

Checking the details of Mobile activities in journey builder can now be viewed whilst a journey is in flight, you no longer need to stop a journey to see details about how what has been configured. The good news is, that once its released, you can view this for journeys that are running pre release.

• Mobile Push

• SMS Messages

Send Transactional SMS Messages via API

Much like emails, you can now have transactional SMS messages that are differentiated from your commercial SMS sends. This is useful to get information out to customers that is very important that is not for a marketing purpose. As SMS is a very upfront real time way to communicate, it will have better reach for urgent messages rather than a transactional email.