Key Highlights of Salesforce Summer ’23 Release for Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is a world-class platform for building and optimizing 1:1 customer journey and leveraging data to guide customized marketing initiatives. With SFMC, your marketing team can deliver personalized content across any channel, including email, to the right audience and at precisely the right time. You can even measure the impact of each campaign to optimize your approach and generate better results.

And every year, Salesforce releases new features to update SFMC. Salesforce email specialists, CRM users, and marketing professionals all over the world enthusiastically track the Salesforce release calendar and look forward to scheduled Salesforce releases.

The latest Salesforce release for SFMC, Summer ’23, will enable you to do all of the above and more. The Salesforce summer release for 2023 includes numerous new innovations that will help you save time, automate faster, and personalize more customer interactions. Read on to discover these innovations and how they can help you make the most of your SFMC investment in 2023 and beyond.

Alerts, reporting, and validation to optimize automation and improve automation health 

SFMC Summer ’23 focuses a lot on automation optimization and health. The goal is to help you save time, publish email campaigns faster (especially with Salesforce HTML email templates), and use your limited resources for higher-value work.

Some of the key automation-focused innovations in SFMC Summer ’23 release are:

Automation alerts through Event Notification Service (ENS)

Through ENS, you can get business-critical alerts about all your SFMC automations. Each notification will include important information so you understand which automation you have set up and where, including:

• Name and type
• Business unit
• File location
• Error details

All you have to do is subscribe to the notifications you need for your business needs. These notifications are available for started, completed, stopped, errored, and skipped automations.

View marketing data usage by downloading your data extension (DE) storage details

As a SFMC user, you want to optimize your DE storage usage and performance. You may also want to comply with one or more data privacy regulations. Now you can do both by viewing your marketing data usage, which you can do by downloading your DE storage details as a CSV file. The file will show how much data you are currently using, how it is performing, and if you need to remove any unneeded data and/or update current data retention policies.

Evaluate automations over time

One of the best ways to improve automation health is to review the success rate of each automation and identify the automations that have high skip or error counts. With SFMC Summer ’23 release, you can download your automation history as a CSV file, which will enable you to evaluate your automations over time.

Merge and transfer data across SFMC DEs

DEs are a key feature of SFMC because they store information about all your contacts. You can use DEs in both Contact Builder and Email Studio to run queries, pull information, and create subscriber subsets for one or more campaigns.

DEs can be sendable, non-sendable, standard, filtered, or random, and can be shared with other business units. And now, with Summer ’23, you can merge or transfer data across DEs as needed by using an import activity. Unlike SQL query activities, import activities don’t have a 30-minute timeout window, so it’s advisable to use this method for DE data merges and transfers.

Furthermore, you can optimize the performance of SQL query activities by validating their syntax. The validator will warn you of select code issues that could cause poor performance and also make suggestions to improve your code quality.

Easily manage and restore deleted content in SFMC Content Builder

In the past, your Salesforce email specialists may have struggled to recover deleted content from SFMC Content Builder. Summer ’23 release eliminates this struggle. Now, Content Builder users can send recoverable content to the Recycle Bin and restore recycled content items without involving the Support team. They can also easily manage and reuse the content for new campaigns.

Summer ’23 also provides CloudPages custom domain upgrades. Users of these domains can create friendly error messages that customers will see when they enter a wrong URL or try to access unpublished or unrendered pages. These messages will guide customers through potential issues while reducing friction and improving their experiences.

You can also specify content at the root URL for CloudPages custom domains and easily manage all your CloudPage assets. Moreover, customers won’t see an annoying 403 error if they try to access root URL pages. Instead, you can deliver superior navigation and search experiences, and thus delight them and earn their trust.

SFMC is already well-known for its advanced content personalization capabilities. Summer ’23 takes personalization a step further with a new AMPscript function. This function will let you parse JSON data and extract nested data to personalize SFMC content for your email campaigns.

Customize subject lines and track send activities with Distributed Marketing

As an email marketing specialist, you know that subject lines are a powerful element of email messages. Per one recent research study, 47% of email recipients open messages based only on the subject line. Plus, personalized subject lines increase open rates by a massive 50%. That’s why it’s important to craft compelling, catchy, and customized subject lines for every email campaign.

SFMC Summer ’23 makes it easy to do this in Distributed Marketing. Distributed Marketing admins can predefine email subject line options so the email marketing team can easily customize subject lines. They can also define their own subject lines.

Distributed Marketing is also useful in many other ways. For example, you can add default customizations in Quick Send messages to streamline the Distributed Marketing experience for SFMC users. You can also track send activities with advanced reporting. These reports will give you greater visibility into activities and view the entire communication history with a contact or lead.

Optimize journeys in SFMC Journey Builder

Effective email marketing starts with customer journey mapping. You need to understand who your customers are and how they interact with your brand throughout their journey over different touchpoints. SFMC’s Journey Builder is an easy tool to create 1:1 journey maps that will guide your email marketing activities and practices.

Now you can further optimize journeys in Journey Builder with the System Optimization Dashboard. This dashboard includes information about journeys and configurations. Use these insights to improve system processing speed and optimize journey performance.

With SFMC’s Summer ’23 release, you can also:

• Simplify journeys with enhanced exit and goal criteria instead of using unnecessary Decision Splits
• View each customer’s journey by Salesforce DE objects
• Simplify journey navigation with expandable and collapsible paths
• Expand or collapse all activities simultaneously in running journeys
• Review configuration builds by collapsing activities (Decision Splits) and zooming in on specific sections of the journey canvas

Your developers can download the Journey Builder history (up to 30 days) to a CSV TSV file via REST API. The history will include data about journeys, activities, status, and errors and can help with troubleshooting, segmentation, and reporting.

Yet another new innovation in SFMC Journey Builder is that you can now use an email activity delivery window without an hourly threshold. Separately specify the delivery window and hourly threshold for an email activity to throttle email sends. Thus, if you want to implement a burst send during a specific time frame, simply define a delivery window; Journey Builder will do the rest. Journey Builder will also allow you to compare dataset attributes and streamline use cases so you can monitor whether a subscriber’s status or lifetime value has changed since entering the journey and leverage this understanding to further simplify journeys.

Conclusion

The Salesforce Summer ‘23 release date is actually three dates: May 6, June 3, and June 10. The release for SFMC will occur between June 3 and June 23. Take advantage of this release to enhance your email marketing program: create better content, automations, subject lines, and reports, and get better results from each email campaign and message.

We hope you found this article useful. For more information about SFMC Summer ’23 release and its world-class innovations, contact Email Uplers. Our Salesforce email specialists, developers, and campaign managers will help you do more with SFMC and its world-class features.