Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2021 Release: Your guide to all the important features – Part 1

It’s the last quarter of the year, and this is the time that Salesforce comes up with the final Salesforce Marketing Cloud release. The Oct 2021 release has a host of much-anticipated features and a couple of surprises.  The Salesforce ecosystem which comprises the customers, Salesforce partners, marketing agencies, have been eagerly waiting for the Marketing Cloud release.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud release October 2021 is available for general use from October 16, 2021

There are multiple new features or enhancements in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2021 release, and we will be covering them in a two-part series. 

This is the first blog of the two-part series and we will cover some important features from the release, including  Interaction Studio, Journey Builder, Multi-Factor Authentication[MFA], etc.  

New Journey Builder activity for Interaction Studio

Interaction Studio is the real-time management product from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which improves the customer experience [CX], customer loyalty & conversions by personalizing the content and using the array of features to target the customer in real-time based on online or offline touchpoints.

With the new release of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce brings a new activity in Journey Builder to help reach customers in the customer journey. With Interaction Studio Journey Builder Activity, we can pass the valuable attributes from Journey Builder to Interaction Studio. Interaction Studio Journey Builder Activity enables us to send the attributes like Interaction Studio customer identities, attributes, and actions from Journey builder to Interaction Studio. Post that, Interaction Studio can reach out to the customers with personalized content on various channels like websites, call centres, mobile app. etc. 

This data sharing between the two apps helps to create a valuable & personalized connection with the customers.

Below is the screenshot from Journey Builders Interaction Studio activity configuration.

Multi-factor authentication aka MFA 

Multi-factor authentication [MFA] is a technique to enhance the security mechanism in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud org. This feature protects the users against unauthorized access and threats.  This feature uses two sets of evidence [factors] to provide authentication to the users.  There are typically two types of factors:

• Username/Password – Known to the user
• Other factors like app authentication or security key, etc. 

With the new Salesforce Marketing Cloud release, Salesforce is auto-enabling the MFA opt-in for all the tenants created before the August 2020 release. Users can configure the MFA for their org or skip it till February 1, 2022. Post that, users need to configure & use MFA.

The screenshot below shows the optional opt-in of the MFA features within Marketing Cloud org. 

Improved interface to view the Journey Builder History & Analytics

With the latest Salesforce Marketing Cloud release, Salesforce has provided a better experience for analysing the metrics of the Journey’s history.  These metrics are important to monitor the performance of the Journey. The improved dashboard shows the following:

Analytics Overview 

Success rate

Contacts entered

History events

Details of the contacts 

Given below is the screenshot of the improved dashboard of the Journey History. Source Salesforce. 

New Use Case support by Package Manager 

Package Manager is a tool used for the deployment of the various fully-built configuration items from one BU to another BU or one Enterprise Account to another Enterprise Account.  

The configuration items supported are as follow:

• Asset
• Journey 
• Automation
• Data Extensions
• Attributes Group

With the new release, Salesforce has added support for other configuration items like all forms of CloudPages other than microsites. 

Goto Package Manager & Create Package. Then select the CloudPage collection & dependencies and the supported items. 

The screenshot below shows the creation of the package in the Package Manager app.

Wrap up

We are sure that the above features from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2021 release will be beneficial to marketers, partners, and customers.  This will help marketers prepare better with their strategy.  We have touched upon some of the important features in this first part of the blog. We will cover the other important features comprehensively in the upcoming blog of the two-part series. 

For a complete list of Salesforce Marketing Cloud features of the Oct 2021 release and their details, you can refer to this link: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.mc_rn_october_2021_release.htm&type=5