If your organization uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) for email marketing, you are in great company. The platform is regularly upgraded every few months. Each new release adds new features and capabilities to help firms like yours make the most of email marketing for brand engagement and growth.
The latest Summer ’22 Release happened between June 4 and June 17, 2022. If you are an email marketing manager, team leader, admin, or specialist, here’s why you should get excited about this release!
Einstein Engagement Frequency ‘What-If’ Analyzer will help you better plan upcoming campaigns
You probably already use SFMC Einstein Engagement Frequency (EEF) to determine how many emails to send to a subscriber and optimize your brand’s send frequency for each individual contact. EEF can help you maximize engagement rates and reduce unsubscribes.
And now, EEF comes with a “What-If Analyzer” feature so you can assess engagement data to clearly see whether your contacts are saturated and to what extent. You can:
- Review how sending frequency has affected engagement over time.
- Predict your subscribers’ likelihood to engage with your campaigns.
- Analyze how your sending frequency affects subscriber saturation levels
There’s no need to guess or compare yourself against industry benchmarks. Instead, you can review engagement data to decide how many message activities to add to each path and Einstein Frequency Split Activity within Journey Builder. You will get better visibility into frequency performance to avoid over- or under-sending your campaigns and better plan for upcoming campaigns.
With the EEF What-If Analyzer, you can also:
- Segment and target subscribers by creating separate groups for on-target, over-saturated and undersaturated subscribers.
- Understand which subscribers are experiencing email fatigue to reduce their email frequency.
- Determine which subscribers are not getting enough communications and which ones are on-target to guide the email frequency strategy and get a majority of contacts into the on-target group.
- Leverage Einstein AI to visually test multiple message frequency scenarios with respect to engagement over time and quick course corrections as required.
In addition to the What-If Analyzer, the Summer ’22 Release includes many other Einstein enhancements so you can:
- Use updated AI models to enhance Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) and make more accurate predictions.
- Uncover which language factors impact your subject lines and update them for the highest impact.
- Leverage local weather conditions with Einstein Weather Content Selection to personalize and promote your email content.
Use Real-time Behavioral Triggers with Triggered Campaign Messages to Set Up Marketing Cloud Journeys
Triggered Campaign Messages combine Marketing Cloud Personalization with the outbound communication engine of Journey Builder. This combination will help you optimize your personalization capabilities. You can “listen” deeply to each customer, understand customer intent, measure how much time they spend on your site or email messages, and create 1:1 engagement with your brand.
You can easily deliver personalized, relevant messages across numerous channels including email-based on detailed and contextual customer behaviors – all in real time. Use nine configurable behavioral triggers to start many kinds of SFMC journeys, including:
- Cart abandonment
- Browse abandonment
- Product price reduction
- Product back-in-stock
Since this information is available in real time, you can see exactly what’s happening and take quick action to personalize each email to each subscriber. In addition to emails, you can also respond in real time by triggering mobile app messages, push notifications, and in-store experiences based on each subscriber’s behavior.
This Summer ‘22 Release also includes powerful AI-based segmentation capabilities so you can create relevant subscriber segments and deliver contextual experiences to each segment to inspire action.
You can also send subscriber information to Journey Builder Entry Events and then use this data to create personalized content and recommendations. You can also determine decision splits, run A/B tests to test campaigns before sends, and view the performance of triggered campaigns via built-in reports and dashboards.
One useful report that is now available in this release is for bounced email addresses. In a single report, you can review all bounced email addresses from the previous year for each sent email instead of having to view individual list email reports. In addition, the Summer ‘22 release also includes four new fields to list email reports to provide a more accurate picture of who is receiving your emails. These fields are:
- Total prospects on recipient lists
- Total suppressed prospects
- Total unmailable prospects
- Total duplicate prospects
Create your own dashboards to analyze and optimize email messaging with Intelligence Reports Advanced
SFMC Intelligence Reports Advanced is an analytics tool available as a premium upgrade for SFMC. With this tool, you can create your own dashboards and measurements to analyze email messaging and determine how you can optimize it for the best results.
You can also query high-volume and granular data with a Codeless Query Builder. Add Data Extensions (DE) and query them with engagement data such as opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes. Querying these DEs will help you to enrich engagement data with additional context and optimize messages based on performance by audience attributes.
For instance, suppose you have a DE of subscriber IDs and an audience attribute showing that these subscribers are part of your loyalty program. You can run queries to compare the engagement performance of subscribers in the program versus subscribers who are not in the program. Such a comparison based on audience attributes will uncover optimization opportunities for your brand’s email messaging. With Intelligence Reports Advanced, you can also query DEs to validate and explore data using standalone querying.
Dashboards have also received a glow-up in the Summer ’22 Release. With Tabular Reports, you can limit the number of rows in your report. Filter by standard/custom objects to see a report list containing only relevant report types for your needs. You can also include a Median calculation within the Reporting Summary Functions, perform in-line editing, and edit multiple fields within the Report Run page.
Export “clean” marketing data into your enterprise database to inform your data strategy
Many companies need to export clean and harmonized marketing data into their enterprise database to inform their data strategy and guide business decision-making. With SFMC Summer ’22 Release, you can do this easily.
If you use a Snowflake data platform or Postgres database system, you can easily export clean marketing data into the enterprise database. This data will no longer live in a “silo” that only the marketing team can access. If anything, anyone who needs to access this data for enterprise decision-making can do so with ease.
This data will be available to the company’s Business Intelligence (BI) group so they can glean key insights without worrying about data integrity. Moreover, you will get an audit-proof system of data to manage exports since the data will be automatically backed up in your preferred database. The new database export capability will enable you to unlock more value from your enterprise data strategy and guide decision-making.
Enhance personalization with Conditional Completion Actions and by sending additional customer information from Customer Data Platform (CDP) to SFMC
Now you can send additional subscriber profile information from CDP to SFMC to enhance your email personalization. You can also take advantage of mobile push as an activation contact point. These new capabilities will help you reach more subscribers with just the right message on their preferred channel and at the right time.
With these new capabilities, you can:
- Change the volume and variety of data types that can be shared with Marketing Cloud Engagement.
- Leverage more personalization options for messaging and journeys.
- Connect marketing and non-marketing data to improve collaboration.
- Increase marketing reach by connecting with customers on their preferred channels, including email.
These activation enhancements for CDP and SFMC are available for free for all editions.
You can further improve personalization in your email campaigns by using “conditional logic” in completion actions. Not all prospects are created equally, so a Conditional Completion Action in SFMC will help you set basic criteria like “if a prospect has opted-in, send them an email”. You can get granular on emails by triggering follow-up actions if a prospect meets a specific criterion (or set of criteria).
OR
With this update, you can:
- Prevent completion actions from triggering for certain groups. For example, you can prevent them from getting engagement campaigns or receiving auto-responder emails.
- Assign prospects to the right team for further action based on the prospect’s actions.
- Segment prospects at the point of interaction based on their actions and set criteria.
Wrap Up
If you’re looking for a 1:1 briefing on how the SFMC Summer ’22 Release can enhance your email marketing program, contact the Email Uplers team. Connect with us to take your program to the next level.