Release Notes

With every new release, Salesforce just gets better and better. The platform continues to add features and functionality, especially to the Marketing Cloud product, making it even easier to implement and extend your current Salesforce ecosystem. So let’s review the Salesforce Marketing Cloud release April 2018 to find out what’s new and interesting.

The following improvements are highlighted in the release:

• Lightning Homepage.
• Data Protection and Privacy.
• Google Analytics 360 Integration.
• Journey Builder: Einstein Splits.
• Content Builder: Enhanced Dynamic Content.
• Distributed Marketing: Quick Send.
• Social Studio: Instagram Publishing.
• Contact Builder Release Notes.

Lightning Homepage

The Marketing Cloud Dashboard and Navigation have been given a new and modern look and feel.  When we login to Marketing Cloud for the first time, we see a “Welcome” page containing a short description of the new widgets:

On the Dashboard now we have more relevant menu which we can use right away upon login:

• Recently sent or edited emails.
• Recently edited journeys.
• Recently run automations.
• Salesforce Marketing Blog links.
• Success Community and Help and Training access.

Data Protection and Privacy

This release addresses the data protection and privacy rules set out in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). GDPR expands the privacy rights of EU individuals, and places new commitments on all organizations that sell, track, or handle such personal data.

• Marketing Cloud provides functionality for removing subscribers which were deleted using the Contact Delete feature in Audience. This prevents those deleted subscribers from being included in new audiences.
• This process also removes any related usage data or data in sendable data extensions, as well as the removal of records deleted from a non-sendable data extension via the Data Extension user.

Google Analytics 360 Integration

In the April 2018 release, there is great new functionality for analytics. Google Analytics and Salesforce are now working together to connect sales, marketing and advertising into an inclusive pool of data. Marketing Cloud will empower marketers to better understand their customers and to make actionable decisions for long-standing relationships through the Google and Salesforce partnership.

Linking our Google Analytics 360 account to Marketing Cloud enables cross-channel data interactions and visualization customer journey analytics in Journey Builder.

Also, there is one more thing worth your attention – use an email name as the campaign name, or create a campaign name UTM parameter during the email activity send flow. This option provides more comfortable and user-friendly control for reporting in Google Analytics 360 and Marketing Cloud.

The Journey Analytics dashboard merges Marketing Cloud email and Google Analytics 360 data into separate and intuitive visualizations that enable measurements and analyze the efficiency of your marketing activities. Journey Builder and Google Analytics 360 Integration must be enabled on your Marketing Cloud account in order to use this feature.

Journey Analytics includes the following metrics:

• Goals Tile.
• Ecommerce Tile.
• Site Usage Tile.
• Marketing Cloud Email Performance Tile.

Journey Builder: Einstein Splits

With the addition of the Artificial Intelligence tool Einstein Split, Marketing Cloud has gained significantly improved functionality for customer data segmentation into logical, pre-built split paths. Marketing specialists who have enabled Einstein Engagement Scoring can use AI to predict consumer’s behavior and engagement over the next 14 days. Those subscriber groups can be targeted as optimal audiences with better customized marketing offers for more accurate decisions, which in its turn empowers more personalized interactions through Journey Builder with Einstein Splits.

The new functionality also empowers users to receive actionable targetable segments for the most loyal audiences, or win back inactive subscribers and use them in feature actions. By analyzing subscribers we can predict customer engagement across four patterns of behavior:

• Open an Email.
• Click an Email.
• Unsubscribe from list.
• Convert on Website.

There are five Einstein Split options (audience groups):

• Personal Split: Engage customers based on their Einstein Engagement Scoring Personas.
• Conversion Split: Engage customers based on their prospect to make a purchase, download content, or complete a form on your website.
• Email Click Split: Engage customers based on their preferences to click a link.
• Retention Split: Engage customers based on their tendency to continue as a subscriber.
• Email Open Split: Engage customers based on their likelihood to open an email.

Marketers might find this invaluable as they now have the ability to target all kinds of different groups with a variety of offers and promotions, as well as guide customers along the journey.

Content Builder

Enhanced Dynamic Content

In order to grow the efficiency and profitability of marketing campaigns, personalization and a variety of other contents are widely used. Salesforce offers a new type of Enhanced Dynamic Localized content that can now be swiftly created within numerous segments and then imported to a delimited .csv file containing multiple variations of content.

Another time-saver involves better automation for creating email that contains multiple content blocks and dynamic parts. Manual creation of numerous content blocks and the rules for each of them is no longer necessary. Marketing Cloud automatically creates blocks from the content in an imported file, and then allows it to define content compatibility with the imported data. After the content is combined with the imported data, the system automatically defines and sends the appropriate content type/version to applicable recipients.

Content Management Hosting URL Change

Attention should also be paid to the Marketing Cloud URL. The Content Management hosting URL now contains the new Salesforce Marketing Cloud brand tag. The hosted public domain for published content was changed from exacttarget.com to sfmc-content.com. Also, these changes are supposed to improve Marketing Cloud’s integration with Salesforce.  However, we have no need to worry about integrations in our organizations since our existing published information and services will be unaffected.

Distributed Marketing: Quick Send

This new feature gives marketers, owners, and partners a truly interesting functionality, that is the ability to quickly personalize and send a single, on-brand and most appropriate email to their customers. And we can prospect the targets directly from the individual’s’ record.

Now the marketer can select and send up to 50 single-email journeys only to contacts, leads, and person accounts. Standard Distributed Marketing users can access messages from the Quick Send component on the individuals’ records and personalize messages while on the records detail page.

For example: My Client (Contact in Salesforce) is expecting an immediate message with additional information regarding our conversation about seasonal sales. So, I can log into Salesforce and open the Contact and send a quick email:

Social Studio: Instagram Publishing

Another exciting benefit of the new release is the enhanced social channels list. Marketers can easily manage their Instagram account directly from Social Studio. There is no need for additional steps through mobile any more. Marketers are able to target multiple accounts and publish content at scale to Instagram accounts. We can share content from other channels (Facebook or Twitter) and easily post it to Instagram.

Using only Social Studio, users can quickly and easily publish images, captions, and hashtags to the feed for Instagram followers, as well as answer their questions and requests.

NOTE: The maximum image file size is 8 MB and acceptable image formats are JPEG, PNG, and BMP.

Contact Builder Release Notes

1. App Availability. Marketing Cloud customers now have Contact Builder automatically available as well as access to the Contact Builder REST API during account creation. All existing customers and new Basic edition customers also receive access to the Contact Builder REST API, but Marketing Cloud admins can manage and enable access to Contact Builder in the Administration section of Marketing Cloud.
2.  Contact Delete Enablement. Marketing Cloud admins have the ability to enable Contact Delete functionality for other Marketing Cloud users. This option is available under Contacts Configuration in Contact Builder.
3. Contact Restriction REST Resources
   Marketing Cloud introduces a Restrict Contact REST resource in order to support GDPR restrictions on the data processing of an individual subscriber. This feature contains a single Contact in a Restricted status that prevents sending, tracking, or other processing. Also we can use a new REST API resource to create a contact with the Contact Key and Contact Type provided in the system information.  

Some Minor Features in April 2018 Release

1. Installed Packages Delete Components
    Content Builder SDK was updated and now allows for the deletion of separate components within the packages. Deletion of Journey Builder Activity, Journey Builder Entry Sources, and Custom Content Blocks is supported.
2. Triggered Send Queues Expire after 14 Days
    With this release, all unprocessed messages in a triggered send definition queue will be automatically deprecated by Marketing Cloud after 14 days period.
3. Triggered Send Operation for Right-to-be-Forgotten and Restriction-of-Processing
   For emails which were deleted from our Marketing Cloud account, it can take several days to remove that particular subscriber from the list. Until the subscriber is deleted, triggered sends do not process against that subscriberKey or subscriberID. Also, the triggered send process will not be processed for subscribers who are restricted from process status as well.

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