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6 Ways the Latest Marketing Cloud Release Can Boost Your Campaign Effectiveness

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The new release allows marketers and admins to create and define custom app events and orchestrate journeys in real time based on app use. [ZHPH Production / Stocksy]

The new updates make it easier to customize how you track and measure first-party data and help you optimize cross-channel personalization.

“Unprecedented” (yes, you have permission to cringe) has been the theme of this past year – not just unprecedented change, but the unprecedented speed of change. Marketers like you have felt the impact of these changes as much as anyone. Whereas before you were jogging toward digital transformation, now you’re sprinting. And the proliferation of the digital channels your consumers are engaging with is happening at a breakneck pace, too. 

But as we learned in the 7th Edition State of Marketing report, the use and value of digital channels is only part of the story. Just as critical is the extent to which marketers can use those channels together to deliver the right message at the right time. More than two-thirds of marketers now describe their cross-channel coordination as dynamic — meaning messages evolve in a hyper-personalized way based on customer actions.

The latest Marketing Cloud release offers new features to help you maximize the value of your data and better align all of your activities. You can customize how you’re tracking and measuring consumer behavior, optimize cross-channel personalization, and extend the power of your first-party data across both Marketing Cloud and third-party applications.

Get up to speed on the latest Marketing Cloud release

Salesforce experts explain how to get the most out of each new update.

Here are six ways Marketing Cloud can help take your marketing campaigns to the next level:

1. Mobile Marketing Enhancements

As the behaviors of end users change, marketers need to be flexible on how they engage with their consumers. The new mobile marketing enhancements allow marketers and admins to create and define custom app events, orchestrate journeys in real time based on app use, and connect the mobile app software development kit (SDK) with Journey Builder. You can:

  • Track user behavior with events such as purchases and screen views
  • Base journeys on defined custom events, keeping users in wait-step until an action is taken
  • Set up the foundation for real-time contextual journeys

Check out the Mobile Marketing Enhancements demo to learn more.

2. Interaction Studio: Journey Builder Activity

Our State of Marketing report found that marketers’ top challenge is engaging with customers in real time. The key to making this happen is sharing data across systems. Journey Builder Activity allows you to:

  • Share identity, attributes, and actions from Journey Builder to Interaction Studio
  • Use the shared data to personalize across all channels, such as web, CRM, mobile, and email

It also lets customers create segments and/or triggers across all channels to ensure a consistent experience.

Watch the Interaction Studio: Journey Builder Activity demo to learn more.

80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services.

3. Customer Data Platform: Advanced Data Intelligence

According to Salesforce’s Marketing Intelligence Report, 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services. Salesforce CDP’s Advanced Data Intelligence features help make every customer interaction smarter and more personalized.

  • Advanced Identity Resolution links known duplicates and discovers more records that might belong to the same individual
  • Streaming Insights & Data Actions computes insights from real-time engagement events and activates workflows based on pre-set rules
  • Einstein in CDP Segmentation lets marketers create powerful segments beyond Email Studio and Journey Builder and couple them with cross-cloud data to activate these insights to new channels

Watch the CDP: Advanced Data Intelligence demo to learn more.

4. Customer Data Platform: Extensibility Enhancements

As we found in Salesforce’s Marketing Intelligence Report, marketers across the board continue to forecast increases in the number of data sources they’ll use in coming years. These four key enhancements in the Salesforce CDP help connect to even more data sources, leading to a richer single source of truth for each customer and more connected experiences across the entire ecosystem:

  • B2C Commerce Connector streamlines data-management tasks for marketing, commerce, and digital experiences in a single platform
  • Google Connector & Mulesoft gives more flexibility of data that can be ingested, leading to richer unified profiles
  • Salesforce Interactions SDK gives better synergy with a shared SDK tag and data model between CDP and Interaction Studio
  • Tableau Enhancements mean faster time to value with pre-built dashboards and more expansive access of CDP in Tableau products

Watch the CDP: Extensibility Enhancements demo to learn more.

5. Datorama: Personalization Insights for Interaction Studio App

Located in Datorama’s Marketplace, this all-clicks, no-code app gives marketers outcome-based insights and improves the lifetime value of their segments by:

  • Enhancing personalization efforts with automated insights into which segments, channels, and sources drive the greatest outcomes
  • Connecting upper-funnel personalization efforts to marketing results with out-of-the-box insights and visualizations
  • Generating deeper insights with single source of truth for cross-channel marketing and Interaction Studio first-party data

Check out the Personalization Insights for Interaction Studio: Datorama Marketplace app demo to learn more.

6. Pardot: Extensibility Enhancements

Marketers are now using an average of 21 marketing platforms. This has resulted in a lot of siloed data. Pardot Extensibility Enhancements allow marketers to streamline their workflow and take action on data collected in external solutions.

  • The new Custom Components feature makes it easy to use third-party assets and information for a seamless and reusable email design experience
  • With External Activity, data collected in external solutions can be used in Pardot Automations and Engagement Studio Programs

Watch the Pardot: Extensibility Enhancements demo to learn more.

Get up to speed on the latest Marketing Cloud release

Salesforce experts explain how to get the most out of each new update.

Alexis Mosier Senior product marketing manager, Marketing Cloud

Alexis Mosier is a senior product marketing manager based in San Francisco, supporting go-to-market and new product introduction for the Marketing Cloud.

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