Every three months we get a Salesforce Marketing Cloud release and write notes for you about its new features and options. This time we waited for a little and during two weeks after the release tried all updates in our workflows. Now, we are ready to tell you how it actually works.

Content Builder

No More Live Offers, Live Coupons

As you remember, Salesforce plans to retire support for classic content in Email Studio and starting December 31, 2019, Marketing Cloud will no longer support Live Offers (Live Coupons). After this date we will not be able to create new classic emails with Live Coupons. Also, all previously created emails which contain coupons cannot retrieve coupons.

Usually, I use special AMPScript function ClaimRow. This function returns a row from a data extension which contains coupons and what more important – locks the row to prevent from use in another context.

Nested Tags in Content Builder

When publishing content in Marketing Cloud, you can add free-form tags to categorize and analyze content. Sometimes tags have a double meaning, for example: sales as a department and sales as a campaign. To avoid this, add multiple dimensions to tags.

Nested tags are available in Content Builder. But, first of all, we should add tags in Setup menu: Setup > Feature Settings > Tags:

Email Studio

Account Level Seed Lists with Return Path Integration

To check email deliverability or status and to see how customers review our emails, Salesforce offers Return Path tools. This tool is now available in Email studio but to use it you need to ask Salesforce Marketing Cloud relationship manager for activation first.

Return Path Account Level seed lists will be used in Return Path seeded sends and account Level seed lists will be automatically synced with Return Path.

Contact Builder

Multi-Select on All Contacts View

With this new option, users with appropriate access can now delete multiple contacts on a single page at one time.

For that we should navigate to All Contacts in Contact Builder, Select multiple records in the All Contacts view, click  button. Then we select a source from where contact will be deleted:

• Delete contacts from a list or data extension.
• Navigate to the correct list or data extension and select the appropriate checkbox.
• Choose whether we want to delete just the contacts from the list or data extension, or delete the entire list or data extension.

Shared Data Sources for Business Units

There is a new Sharing tab in the Marketing Cloud Enterprise Account. If we have synchronized data sources with a single Sales or Service Cloud Organization, after this release we can share data sources across different Business Units.

We can find the Sharing tab at the Enterprise level by the next path: Contact Builder > Data Sources > Synchronized > Specific Org.

Data Sync customers who uses query activity in Automation Studio with the “ent.” prefix for Synchronized Data Sources will receive automatic sharing across Business Units.

Be sure to enable Enterprise Sharing option in Marketing cloud setup:

Advertising Studio

Facebook Advanced Match

Now we can create an individual audience in an advertising studio with Facebook Advance Match. To make matching of attributes more accurate and achieve a higher result Marketing cloud provides for us the list of attributes.

While creating new Audience we should select Facebook as a destination ad network, then select an ad account and on Facebook Customer Match page we need to drag the source attribute field from the data extension to the corresponding Facebook identifier:

NOTE: Facebook Advanced Match is available to clients with an Advertising Studio license and Journey Builder.

Interaction Studio

Interaction Studio Integration

This release allows us to configure the Interaction Studio integration directly from Marketing Cloud Setup. It will remove the necessity for manual provisioning through API calls.

Improved Interface for the Interaction Studio Activity

October 2019 release allows map an Interaction Studio Proposition to a Marketing Cloud data extension value. Also we can set a fixed value for a Dynamic Proposition which will help us to avoid common Interaction Studio Activity configuration errors.

Sync Customer Identifiers in Journey Splits

Now we have an option to add additional identifiers to an Interaction Studio Decision Split and it will help us to support better matching in Interaction Studio. New activity Interaction Studio Decision Split is now available in Journey Builder.

Journey Builder

New Event Follow-Up Template

To engage customers in more ways, there is one more Journey builder template. This template provides a model campaign for common marketing use cases. For example, the company holds a campaign and use the Event Follow-Up template to engage all attendees after the event.

Google Analytics 360 Integration

SMS Activity Metrics

To understand which communication channel brings the best performance and how SMS activities impact the engagement, we analyze activity and compare the results to other channels’ metrics. It helps us to build the marketing strategy.

After this release, we can review SMS activity metrics directly in an active journey. We just need to click an SMS activity, then click Analytics 360 Goals Summary and select View Details

NOTE: Before using SMS activity metrics we need to set the utm_source value for the SMS channel in our Google Analytics Admin parameters in Marketing Cloud Setup.

Analytics Builder

Mobile Subtotals

A little change in “Contacts Counts” report in Analytics Studio. Now it will include mobile addresses in Mobile Connect, Mobile Push, and Group Connect channels across all business units in an organization and don’t have associated subscribers.

New in Distributed Marketing

Now we have an option to send a single message to the primary contact, lead, or person account on a case directly from the case record without their standard sales service or community cloud instance.

Keep in mind we can’t send emails to the associated records from outside of the primary contact, lead, or person account.

Also, we can view and edit message directly in Sales cloud:

We can use Distributed Marketing content block as a reference block. We should create content block once and then reuse it in multiple emails. All new changes inside the content block will be synchronized with every email that contain this block.

Just one click needed to move between editing and previewing content. For that we should use icons on the left side of the modal.

Now users can create their own custom list views of Quick Send messages or use list views shared with them. Previously they had only “Recently Viewed” list view.

Connect

JSON Web Token Authentication

For the authentication between the Sales/Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud we now have the JWT Authentication. To apply this option enable Tenant-Specific OAuth Endpoints. To activate JWT make changes in Marketing Cloud Connector Settings –> Advanced Settings or make Change API User –> Show Advanced Settings.

NOTE: If Salesforce org has tenant-specific endpoints activated and integration works properly, we will be automatically migrated to JWT.

Einstein

Einstein Content Selection

Einstein helps to create hyper real-time personalized content for each customer. This release has brought for us a new tool in Marketing cloud – Einstein Content Selection.

This feature recognizes which content our subscribers are interested in and selects the best asset for each customer. It works this way.

Einstein Content Selection combines customer data, marketers rules and AI to select appropriate asset for content block inside every email message. All assets-images should be uploaded previously and asses catalog file should also be created. This file contains a URL and different metadata for each asset image which can be selected.

When sending the message, Einstein chooses appropriate asset and necessary information from it for each subscriber. Also, we can add customer profile details to help AI make the best choice.

To add Einstein Content Selection in Content builder we should drag “Content Selection” into our message, then choose the asset class from which Einstein Content Selection will select appropriate asset, select if necessary fallback image and save the content block.

The main goals are to save time for building messages, increase lifetime of the content, improve open rate metrics and create a strategy based on content analytics.

Mobile App

Filter MobilePush Messages by Status

We can review statistics about sent, open, status of active push sends and track information regarding push messages from the iOS or Android Marketing Cloud Mobile app home page. For now using by filter bar we have useful option to filter records by All, Active, or Drafts.

Mobile Studio

MobilePush and GroupConnect

To make Marketing Cloud more productive for working and learning Salesforce team added MobilePush and GroupConnect Admin Pages to Setup.

During creating in-app messages in Content Builder or Journey Builder on the Design tab we can set a hex value in the color picker. We can do that for any element with a color picker. Easy and very helpful.

For GroupConnect admins this release provides an option to register and deactivate LINE channels within the Setup. Before adding new LINE Channel we should get the following required information from the LINE Developer Console: LINE Channel ID, LINE Channel Secret, Customer Connect secret. We will be able to send messages nearly 30 minutes after registering new LINE.

The same as for in-app messages we can set a hex value in the color picker when create LINE carousel messages in Content Builder or Journey Builder.

Personalization Builder

Recommendations Processing Improvements

To improve executing time, increase system performance and do it more reliable Marketing cloud recommendation engine will no longer processes scenarios that are currently applied to a web or email recommendation. Only new scenarios will be processed and recommendations aren’t impacted for up to 24 hours.

NOTE: This change will affect all Einstein Email Recommendations and Einstein Web Recommendations customers.

Marketing Cloud Platform

After this release we can enable useful Email Studio features directly in Marketing Cloud Setup without asking Salesforce Customer Support.

To improve Marketing cloud account security select an option for automatically expiring FTP passwords. You will receive email reminders about expiration dates of FTP account. Password expiration time period setting are in Setup > Security Settings.

Also, there is new AMPscript Function available. After sending new GetSendTime() function returns either the date and time that the send started or the date and time that the send completed for the individual subscriber. As we know, function Now() returns either the current system date and time or the date and time that the send started.

For now with a new transactional messaging API resource we can delete all queued SMS messages for a send definition: DELETE messaging/v1/sms/definitions/{definitionKey}/queue

All deleted messages will be marked as “Not Sent”.

On a Final Note

Salesforce Marketing Cloud improves with every release. This October we got features we didn’t know we needed before, but which are now a part of our workflow. Waiting for the next things from Salesforce to come.

The post Salesforce Marketing Cloud October 2019 Release appeared first on CoreValue.