Salesforce Marketing Cloud May 2020 Release: Your guide to all the important features – Part 1

We are closing in on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud May 2020 release and can’t be more excited as Salesforce is rolling out a new set of features for marketing cloud. While some of these will make our life easier, there are some that are all set to help in many different ways. 

As the below table shows the various Salesforce Marketing cloud releases, the May 2002 release will start to roll out from the end of May and it will be completed by the first week of June. This rollout happens on stack by stack basis instead of a single big-bang rollout. 

All the stakeholders in the ecosystem like customers, partners get this release within that time span but in a phased manner. So don’t panic if the release is delayed for you due to phased rollout.   

The table below details the schedule of all the five releases by Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Social studio

RELEASE	MARKETING CLOUD RELEASE DATE	SOCIAL STUDIO RELEASE DATE
January 2020 Release	January 25 through February 1	January 25
March 2020 Release	March 21 through March 28	March 28
May 2020 Release	May 30 through June 6	June 6
July 2020 Release	July 25 through August 1	July 25
October 2020 Release	October 17 through October 24	October 24

This article is a two-part series, which will explore all the details behind features, functionalities or enhancements in the latest release. 

Please bear in mind that this article is based on the Salesforce release notes and not on the hands-on review.

New Marketing cloud Trailmixes and Modules 

Below are the set of new Trailhead modules and trailmixes slated to be released.

• Artificial Intelligence for Advertisers

Harness the power of AI to target ads, explore new audiences, and track the performance.

• Marketing Cloud Account Optimization

Regularly practice the art of reviewing your account setup, risk factors, and data hygiene to ensure the best sending performance.

• Interactive Email Forms

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s newest release i.e. Interactive forms get a trailhead module to learn and implement. It helps to collect the data from the email instead of redirecting the subscriber to the landing page.

• Get Started with Marketing Cloud

This new trailmix helps people to begin their learning in the world of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Pause and Resume Journeys in Journey Builder

Pausing a journey is required for a number of scenarios or business reasons eg. your website/portal is down or you want to stop sending the message due to a natural disaster [applicable to the current pandemic situation].

This is a great and a much sought after new feature that has been launched by Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Till now, if you wanted to pause a running Journey, there was only one method i.e. stop the current journey and create a new version of the same journey and make it active. This resulted in a duplication of messages sent to contacts since they entered the journey again or in some cases, contacts didn’t enter any journey. This was an inconsistent behaviour from Journey builder and led to bad customer experience.  

With this new feature, marketers can pause the current running journey for up to 14 days. This results in temporarily halting the contact processing through the journey and as a result of it halts sending messages from Journey Builder. This feature is applicable in Salesforce Marketing Cloud or via REST API requests. 

Use a Fallback Address in Sender Profiles

For the business scenario wherein the marketer wants to select the From address based on some criteria, marketing cloud has introduced this new feature of adding a fallback address. 

This dynamic From address is pulled at the send time via AMPscript code and should have access to Enhanced Sender profiles. 

With the advent of marketing cloud May 2020 release, marketers can provide the fallback address if an unverified address is detected during the validation check. 

This goes without saying that you should verify Fallback addresses via From Address Management and you can’t use an unverified or non-sendable From address as a fallback address.

Create Mobile Audiences in Contact Builder

Till now, marketers had to traverse to respective Mobile studios for the creation of a list for that channel. If the scenario was for a multi-channel customer of mobile, the marketers had to visit multiple mobile studios and duplicate the audience creation process. 

But with the marketing cloud May 2020 release, marketers can create the mobile channel list in contact builder within the marketing cloud. This will optimize the mobile list creation within Contact builder. 

Extract Contacts Without a Channel Address

This upcoming release brings a new self-service capability which enables marketers to create a data extract of all contacts that are not associated with any channel i.e. Email, SMS etc.

This is particularly helpful to investigate and manage the contacts which are not being useful for any channel. Based on the investigation, Marketers can make a decision about the future of those contacts. 

For this upcoming feature to be enabled, your company should have purchased the Marketing cloud edition with contact builder enabled in it with Core or Enterprise 2.0 accounts.

View Live Performance Metrics for Your Einstein Products

Till now, the Einstein app displayed the static cards which showed the Einstein products not being used by the marketers.

But all this has changed with this upcoming marketing cloud May 2020 release. Now, markets can view the total AI capabilities with their Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance. This comes to reality via interactive cards with live performance metrics within the Einstein overview app for each of the active Einstein products with the Marketing cloud org.   

These live performance metrics cards help Marketers to identify the current Einstein products and also provide data to measure the adoption of corresponding Einstein products.  

Wrap up

In this blog, we have covered six important features from the upcoming marketing cloud May 2020  release so that you can make the most of your Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance. This will be followed by another blog which will talk about the rest of the upcoming features.  

For the complete list of Salesforce Marketing cloud May 2020 features and their details, please refer to the link below. https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_may_2020_release.htm&type=5