Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Top 5 hightlights of the Spring 18′ Release

Marketing Cloud was getting more and more in sync with Salesforce lately. The 3 latest transitions have marked a full-on integration of the two. I’m talking about the Login Page getting a new look, the help library moving to the help.salesforce.com and the releases getting a familiar Winter, Spring and Summer names.

This article will be about the Marketing Cloud Top 5 Highlights of Spring 18′ Release. Let’s dig into it!

On a general note, we can clearly see that the Journey Builder gets the most attention from the product team. No surprise here, it’s been a star product of the platform for a while now. Even as it is now, Journey Builder is a very powerful tool, especially given the 100% point-and-click configuration it offers. But if you have passed some time configuring it, you will probably agree that it has quite a backlog on the road to perfect UX.

Luckily enough the Product Team at Salesforce in sync with that.

 

1. Journey Builder Template

With this release, the Product team tried to make your life easier by introducing the Templates. First off, you now have pre-configured Journeys for the most common actions like “Abandon Cart”, “Welcome Series”, “Anniversary Send”. And the list promised to be growing with future releases.

Second, you can now create your own templates that provide a working canvas for your marketing team. This is particularly handy for big teams.

When it comes to the templates, they represent the canvas of the Activities in the “pre-configured state”, which basically is the placeholder for you to configure later.

I’m not going to go into the further details. In a nutshell, templates are a great time-saver feature coming with this release. If you want to get more details learn more here.

 

 

2. Advertising activities in Journey Builder

Another pole of the Journey Builder improvements in the Spring 18′ Release are the activities. And the most prominent one is the Advertising.

This feature gets you to the next level of automating an end-to-end customer experience: you can now imagine scenarios where subscribers who didn’t click your email be targeted with a Facebook ad campaign for a week and continue on with the journey or exit it depending on their interaction with the ad. Google ads are the next to come (safe harbour).

If you want to get more details learn more here.

 

 

3. Journey Schedule

Another one for Journey Builder – the scheduling. Now you can have 3 options:

• Run Once – evaluates your audience one time, either at activation or at a set date/time
• Recurring – evaluates your audience on a repeating schedule (that is, it runs more than once)
• Automation – evaluates your audience on a schedule defined by an automation in Automation Studio (Only for Data Extension entry source)

In the layout, it looks as following

If you want to get more details learn more here.

 

 

4. Live Image Content Block

This is something that goes beyond a usual understanding of the chronological nature of the email sends: once it’s sent the ship has sailed and you can’t change it anymore. With the Live Image, Marketing Cloud managed to broke this rule – you can change the content AFTER the email has been sent.

In the logic, it’s similar to the Dynamic Content, except that dynamic content is generated in the moment of send and the Live Image can be changed at any time when you Trigger Condition checks true.

For example, you can switch your Timer Gif for a Promotion that gets swapped by Offer Expired Image after a certain Date.

 

 

5. Distributed Marketing

Is a revolutionary feature for the companies working with distributors. This new feature facilitates the corporate marketing team’s work by allowing them to pre-build the branded assets and manage the access for each distributor through the Salesforce (with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or Community Cloud).

In turn, the partners can take the communication one step further by personalizing the content to adapt it to each customer using the standard Campaign object.

I think the best way you can visualize it is by giving a look to the short Demo here.

 

 

And here we are! You now know the top 5 updates brought to Marketing Cloud in the Spring 18′ Release. If you want to go beyond the top list, I strongly recommend this video.

And in this article, you can find the top highlights for the Sales Cloud Spring 18′ Release.