Salesforce Marketing Cloud August ’21 Release – Key Highlights

Our favorite CRM leader Salesforce has recently released its much-anticipated August ‘21 release for its marketing cloud. SFMC has got some interesting and exciting features added to it that will help marketers more than ever before. Also, marketers can use these features to deliver robust, engaging, and personalized email campaigns to their customers.

This blog will walk you through these features and how they will help you. 

The next SFMC release, the final one of the year 2021 is scheduled for October – anywhere between October 16-23. For now, let’s dive in to find out what’s new in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud August ‘21 release. 

#1 Datorama Insights for Slack

In the August 2021 release, Salesforce has made it easier to use Slack to collaborate and act on your marketing analytics. Now, you can increase transparency across your business on marketing analytics insights through Slack. 

Also, this integration of Datorama and Slack allows you to send insights to Slack from your dashboards directly. Furthermore, you can share visualizations with your stakeholders via automated Slack actions. 

Benefits –

1. This feature will allow you to align your efforts with data-driven decision-making. You can connect all your data in Datorama and visualize insights. Also, directly share these insights with your teammates from Datorama dashboards to Slack. 
2. You now have the ability to optimize your campaigns faster. This enhancement in SFMC will allow you to set up automated alerts in Datorama to send notification updates about campaign KPIs and insights. Thus, you can increase engagement in real-time. 
3. This feature also allows you to seamlessly share marketing analytics with your teams as well as stakeholders. Thus, you can use cross-team collaboration to improve the performance needed to meet the business goals.

This feature is available for all existing and new Datorama customers.

#2 Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud Enhancements

With this feature, Corporate, Enterprise, and Pro customers can now analyze their campaign performance with Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud. You can view and share visual dashboards or create customized reports as per your needs. Also, with low/no-code Queries, you can easily explore your data in Datorama Reports- Advanced. 

Benefits –

1. With this feature, you have all-new Analytics for Marketing Cloud. Also, you get visual, shareable, and customizable campaign reporting.
2. Data exploration has now become easy with SQL-free data exploration. 
3. You can use your data the way you like. Use the data of your next email marketing campaign in SFMC to seek insights, troubleshoot, or export to external systems. 

Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud comes with Corporate, Enterprise, and Pro Marketing Cloud editions. 

#3 Interaction Studio: Experience Cloud Integration

This enhancement in SFMC will help you deliver even better personalized digital experiences! You can combine Interaction studio’s powerful personalization and interaction management tools with that of sites and experiences of Salesforce Experience Cloud. 

Benefits –

1. Deliver the best customer experiences with data-driven sites, portals, and mobile applications that are personalized for every individual’s intent.
2. Also, you can break down silos and content to personalize a consistent journey for your customers. 
3. Furthermore, you can build the best digital experiences by personalizing across your website and apps. You can then connect them with offline moments to continue delivering a consistent customer experience. 

This feature is available for all Interaction Studio customers in Growth and Premium editions.

#4 Wait Until Push Engagement- Journey Builder Activity

This is a new feature for mobile push notifications. It is the wait until activity for Journey Builder but for push notifications. Earlier, marketers had to create queries and decision splits to determine whether a user opened a push notification or not. But, with this latest enhancement in SFMC, marketers can drag the activity onto the journey builder canvas and listen for open events in real-time.

Furthermore, these events can orchestrate customized experiences for customers who don’t take a specific action within a defined period. 

Benefits –

1. React in real-time based on whether the contact opens your push notification within a defined time frame or not.
2. It allows marketers to set a defined period for the action to take place. If the engagement doesn’t occur in that time frame, send the contact down an alert path. 
3. Personalize customer experience. Wish them on their birthday, congratulate them on new loyalty levels, remind them about abandoned cart items.

If you are willing to know more about how to work with SFMC Journey Builder, then click here.

This feature is free for Corporate and Enterprise editions. Also, likely to be Generally Available by mid-September. 

#5 Distributed Marketing: CPI for Bulk Sends

It is the new enhanced distributed marketing bulk sends with Custom Personalization. This enables you to create custom plugin interactions. For instance, You can create a custom subject line that includes a contact’s title, first and last name by creating and registering Custom Plugin Interaction (CPI).

Benefits –

1. It allows you to add custom personalization interaction tabs for more complex use cases such as carbon copying or using an alternate email address. Also, for better performance, use not more than 10 custom interaction tabs with no more than 10 fields each. 

This feature is available to all customers who have distributed marketing version 233 or later installed.

#6 Datorama: Scenario Planning for Media Planning Center

You can now optimize budget allocations with scenario planning and increase your ROI from your media plans by comparing budget scenarios and forecasting performance. 

Benefits –

1. This feature in SFMC allows you to use advanced statistical methods to forecast performance, compare scenarios, and make decisions based on data. 
2. Forecast by using different methods driven by AI. Also, you can easily switch between different forecasting calculations, including ones built using Einstein Marketing Insights.
3. Furthermore, you can now make informed decisions with the help of this enhancement. It allows you to understand the expected accuracy of forecasts with accuracy calculations powered by Einstein. 

It is available for any Datorama edition with the MPC or MIO add-on. 

Wrap Up

This was the most interesting and much-awaited Marketing Cloud release of the year so far. These features are going to help marketing cloud specialists in delivering cross-channel marketing campaigns to their customers. Also, it will be interesting to see what’s lined up for the last SFMC release of the year in October. Stay tuned with us to know about the latest developments in and around Salesforce Marketing Cloud. 

If you need help implementing these features or want to know how to make the most out of them, you can get in touch with our team of SFMC specialists.