Understanding the Salesforce Marketing Cloud July 2016 Release

Back in June, I wrote a blog post with some tips about how to navigate Salesforce’s Summer ’16 release notes, which were hundreds of pages long and quite a bit to slog through. For that blog, we mostly focused on helping you figure out how to start digesting all of that new information without hyperventilating. Last month, Salesforce had another release, but this one is just for the Marketing Cloud, and it’s quite a bit more manageable.

Here are the main takeaways from the July 2016 Marketing Cloud release that you need to know about if that’s one of your clouds of choice.

Email Updates

Marketing Cloud’s Email Studio and Content Builder are now going to be available to all customers. Email Studio has a new creation and send flow which Salesforce says will “ensure accuracy of email content,” and Content Builder keeps what you need in one location, gives you access to a number of templates, and allows you to upload and tag images. Approvals Service is now going to be integrated with the email creation flow, so you can turn on this feature for any account and have that account’s emails submitted to an approval process. Finally, Marketing Cloud users will now be able to send emails using the mobile app.

Journey Builder Updates

You can now get even more granular with the way you split engagement campaigns: splits can be created based on the specific links that a customer has clicked within an email. Another new feature at the split level is the ability to compare two attributes in order to decide which route the customer should be sent down for future engagement.

Advertising Studio Launch

With the launch of Advertising Studio, customers can manage campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and mobile publishers, all in one place. The studio also allows you A/B test campaigns, get more specific with targeting, report on results, and visualize the data from your campaigns.

In Beta — Predictive Scores

An interesting new beta feature that customers can enroll in is what Salesforce is calling “Predictive Scores,” which is supposedly helpful at predicting the likelihood of your customers to engage. The feature uses aggregated data from the internet and Salesforce is saying that it “gives marketers the power to truly understand the behaviors that drive customer engagement.” No reports yet on how well this seems to work, in beta or otherwise, but it’s definitely something I’m keeping my eye on.

To really get into the weeds with this release, check out the release notes here.

Having trouble understanding the new features or configuring your clouds? Contact Xceli Global today and let us help.