We have good news: The latest Salesforce Marketing Cloud release lives up to its promise of delivering more personalized and integrated customer journeys across channels. The January 2019 release empowers organizations with new levels of data insights as well as real-time optimization of business intelligence to help delight customers and drive the bottom line.
Right from powering cross-channel customer journeys and personalized advertising on social media to facilitating seamless content sharing and agile brand messaging, this Salesforce Marketing Cloud release has a lot to offer. Here’s looking at the top features that won our hearts:
Google Analytics 360: Tailored insights for all
Abandoned carts, premature page exits, aborted searches…there’s valuable data in every customer action. It’s now possible for enterprises using Salesforce marketing cloud to capture customer behavior and activities and convert them into actionable data with Google Analytics 360.
By importing a list of shared subscribers from Google Analytics 360, as an audience, into a Marketing Cloud Contact Builder, it becomes effortless to power cross-channel journeys across business units. Whether it’s via email, SMS, Google’s native ads or website tools, personalized targeted messaging is easier than ever before.
Advertising Studio: Pinterest makes its debut
Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Salesforce DMP – Advertising studio is known to use these powerful platforms to integrate digital ads with marketing and CRM data. Now, with the most recent Marketing Cloud release, Pinterest, one of the most popular photo-sharing social media sites, joins the gang.
With a solid base in B2C advertising, Pinterest has the potential to take customer engagement and personalized marketing to a whole new level. This integration allows marketers to utilize first-party data to control which unique audience sees which ads on Pinterest. Multi-channel campaigns are going to get a lot more interesting this year!
Marketing Content Blocks: Contextual messaging
Can we talk about the weather conditions to make marketing messages more personalized? With Marketing Cloud’s new Live Weather Block in Content Builder, it’s possible to deliver personalized brand messages based on weather conditions that the subscriber is experiencing.
The idea behind Dynamic Content Blocks is to equip non-marketers with agile tools to create and deliver dynamic content and personalized customer journeys. Using contextual images, offers, headshots, and the like, Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps enterprises increase consumer engagement and create seamless cross-channel journeys.
Journey Builder: SMS, push notifications & more
For those who hate traveling back and forth from Email Studio, MobileConnect and MobilePush to create emails, SMS and Push messages, Salesforce Marketing Cloud January 2019 release brings an end to your woes. You can now create SMS, emails and Push notification messages directly in the Marketing Cloud Content Builder, without having to leave Journey Builder.
All tasks – from writing and editing to doing previews and testing emails – can now be performed in one place, bringing down the risk of errors as well as the time taken to get things done. What’s more, you can also review all metrics, including deliverability performance stats, on the same interface where the activity was created.
Social Studio: More love on Insta & FB
How do you make an influential social media marketing tool more powerful? By rolling out new features that let users do more, while boosting efficiency and data privacy measures. Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s latest release does just that with Social Studio.
The update offers enterprises more flexibility with their Instagram and Facebook accounts. Users can now view and engage with customer replies in Social Studio as well as view tagged content and conversation threads in Social Studio and Command Center. The inclusion of Instagram Stories in Social Studio calendar is another welcome move, given that over 300 million people use this feature.
Similarly, for Facebook users, audience targeting is a lot easier. It’s now possible to target posts published in Social Studio by interests. Enterprises can also keep track of their online reputation by filtering the Facebook Engage column by ‘Recommends’ or ‘Doesn’t Recommend’ options. It’s a great way to gain more visibility in communities that are relevant to the brand.
Transactional Messaging APIs: No communication gaps
The importance of closing the communication gap between operations and marketing, especially in the case of critical emails, cannot be over-emphasized. With Marketing Cloud’s new update, enterprises can now send mission-critical transactional messages (such as order confirmation messages or password reset email messages) in real-time from a trusted platform. And, for some reason, if the transactional email doesn’t reach the intended subscriber, the sender is notified immediately, thereby helping him look for alternative solutions.
By connecting promotional and transactional messaging in a single platform, Salesforce facilitates a complete view of the customer journey. Besides, delivering transactional messages with an open API platform helps increase customer engagement with the brand through a personalized and consistent voice across all messages.
All in all
Salesforce Marketing Cloud has only been getting better with time. And now, with the 2019 update, the premium platform has become a lot more streamlined, with improved security, better user access and time-saving content creation strategies.
In another news, the Classic Content end-of-life is moved to second half of 2020. However, it’s best not to wait till the last minute to switch from Classic Content to Content Builder. There’s so much to be done! Talk to us to know how you can make the most of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s latest offerings.
