5 Innovative Features in SFMC Spring Release’23 to Enhance Your Email Marketing Program

The Spring ‘23 Product Release of Salesforce includes several new features in Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC). Per the Salesforce release schedule, the main Salesforce release dates are January 13, February 3, and February 10. All the features in the Salesforce new release will become generally available on February 13, 2023.

According to the company and the latest Marketing cloud release notes, the innovative solutions in this release could help organizations achieve higher cost savings and efficiency at scale, deliver seamless, personalized experiences to customers, and ultimately, “deliver success now”.

As always, Salesforce release notes provide high-level descriptions of the new enhancements in the latest Salesforce release. This article explores 5 of these innovations from the current Salesforce release (SFMC release) in detail. We hope you can take advantage of these new innovations to make the most of SFMC for your email marketing and customer engagement program. Need help? Salesforce Marketing Cloud experts at Email Uplers can help you get started.

1. Engage with customers in personalized ways with WhatsApp Business Messaging and direct integration with SFMC

The Spring ‘23 Product Release includes WhatsApp-first business messaging that’s directly integrated with SFMC so you can sell and market your offerings right from a WhatsApp conversation. You can also provide customer support via WhatsApp and SFMC. This could benefit your brand in all these ways:

• Increased customer engagement through richer interactions and personalized conversations
• Build new WhatsApp-branded messaging experiences with your audience
• Promote products and accelerate sales through conversational engagement
• Drive better customer support outcomes with increased convenience and decreased wait times

With the new SFMC/WhatsApp integration, you can easily connect with your customers in a fast, simple, and hyper-personalized way to answer their questions, provide 24/7 support, and promote and sell your products. You can also activate them directly by using trusted first-party customer data through Salesforce Genie (which powers the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform). Use this data to:

• Deliver seamless, highly personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce interactions
• Target the right audiences with real-time data that informs Click-to-WhatsApp ads on Facebook and Instagram
• Leverage AI-insights from multiple sources to deliver personalized promotions and recommendations at scale.
• Drive more customers towards sales by using customizable message templates (including emails) and offering one-to-one messaging experiences

In addition to all these benefits, the integration between WhatsApp and SFMC offers privacy and security by default. Thus, every WhatsApp message you exchange with customers will be protected by Signal encryption protocol before it leaves your device.

2. Build and understand customers with real-time data via the Customer Data Platform

With the Salesforce latest release, you can use the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform to personalize every moment and email message for your target audience. The platform will help you unlock the value of all your real-time customer data to create personalized Salesforce email templates and experiences for every customer.

Use the platform to:

• Automatically connect and unify customer data from any system, including Salesforce, AppExchange, and partners.
• Power connected and hyper-personalized marketing customer experiences.
• Analyze cross-channel engagement behaviors, reconcile identities, and understand every customer with a single source of truth.
• Offer 1-to-1 personalization and experiences to increase conversions.
• Connect the platform with analytics tools like Marketing Cloud Intelligence to optimize marketing spends and customer segmentation capabilities.

Since all customer data is now easily available to you, you can easily build intelligent audiences faster and personalize every engagement at scale across email (and other channels like web and mobile). You can also use the data to design and automate personalized advertising campaigns.

You can use the platform’s AI-powered intelligence and analytics to save time and lower costs as you personalize your marketing moments. AI and flexible matching rules will also help you to enrich profiles across any device and target advertising across Google and Meta. You can also extend the platform’s use by installing data kits and packages.

3. Simplify data stream management with Data Stream Control Center in Marketing Cloud Intelligence

The Spring ‘23 Product Release of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (and Marketing Cloud Intelligence) includes the Data Stream Control Center. If you collect and analyze data of multiple types and from multiple sources, you likely need a way to  improve oversight over and transparency into your data estate. The Data Stream Control Center will help you achieve this transparency and oversight. 

It provides a dashboard that centralizes SFMC data stream management into a single, consolidated view. Through this dashboard, you can assess stream status, evaluate data quality, and identify ingestion issues. You will also get actionable insights to easily monitor data usage, and improve your brand’s data hygiene and row management capabilities. With its consolidated view, you will be able to see exactly which data streams need your immediate attention.

You also get out-of-the-box analytics capabilities on your data ingestion flows and daily insights into the freshness of your data. The Data Stream Control Center is automatically filtered to show data for Today. Plus, you get an overview of active data streams by status: failed, success, pending, and waiting.

If you’d like to view data processing status by each data source (TikTok ads, Facebook, Google Ads, etc.), you can do that too. And if an error occurs, the Control Center will show you all the failed data streams by source for the previous 7 days and all the data streams that are scheduled to re-process. In this way, you can respond quickly to errors.

Ultimately, all the insights available in the Data Stream Control Center will enable you to:

• Stay on top of data management
• Improve overall data hygiene
• Improve your data strategy

4. Make the most of your marketing data with visual pivot tables in Marketing Cloud Intelligence

Marketing Cloud Intelligence (formerly known as Datorama) is a marketing data platform that can help you improve data onboarding, integration, reporting, analysis, visualization, and optimization. With this platform, you can connect your entire marketing data ecosystem to measure campaign performance and overall marketing effectiveness.

And now, with visual pivot tables available with the Spring Release ’23, you can explore your data from multiple perspectives and use it for a wide variety of use cases. Here are some examples:

• Validate your data and ensure that it’s loading correctly from the source
• Confirm that all values are aggregating correctly
• Export pivot tables locally or convert them into a scheduled report

With an intuitive UI, pivot tables in Marketing Cloud Intelligence will allow you to easily query, calculate, summarize, and analyze data by seeing comparisons, patterns, and trends. Since the UI is consistent with the rest of the Intelligence platform, you can easily navigate your way through each pivot table. If you need custom reports, you can easily create them without using query formulas (e.g., SQL queries). You can also create and edit calculated metrics directly from the pivot tables page in Marketing Cloud Intelligence.

All in all, pivot tables in Marketing Cloud Intelligence provide an easy and visual way to dissect and explore your data across various dimensions and measurements to capture useful insights and answer critical marketing performance queries.

5. Connect with customers and improve team collaboration with Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for Slack

You can now use Slack and SFMC together to connect with customers and ensure that your marketing and sales teams collaborate seamlessly from anywhere. Connecting SFMC Account Engagement and Slack will also allow you to automate many marketing tasks.

Powered by Salesforce’s proprietary Einstein AI engine, Account Engagement can help you target the prospects that are most likely to become customers in future. More importantly, it will show you  ways to personalize every touchpoint along each customer’s journey so you can develop and strengthen long-term relationships and generate more revenues.

Here’s what you can do with Account Engagement in your company’s Slack workspace:

• Send real-time notifications when prospects interact with your marketing assets
• Customize the messaging for each notification
• Send notifications to the right teams (Sales, Marketing, Service, etc.) automatically to accelerate follow-ups and increase the probability of conversion

Once your admin connects Account Engagement to your Slack instance, you can notify various teams automatically every time a prospect engages with high-impact content, which could be anything from a form to a white paper. You can easily add a custom message with a suggested next best action. So, every time a prospect fills out a form or downloads your white paper, your custom message will automatically appear in the dedicated Slack channel. In this way, all teams will know who the most engaged prospects are so they can follow up quickly to increase the chance of conversion.

Make the Most of SFMC Spring Release ’23 with Email Uplers

SFMC Spring ’23 Release includes numerous innovations and enhancements to help you save time, cut costs, and boost efficiency as you pursue new opportunities to engage with customers and impress them with personalized email content.