What You Should Know About Salesforce Marketing Cloud Winter’23 Release

Salesforce is well-known for its unstinting focus on constant improvement. To this end, users get access to new upgrades and releases multiple times a year. The latest upgrade is the Salesforce Winter ’23 release which occurred between October 5 and October 28, 2022 and includes lots of new features and enhancements.

If you are an email marketer, the Salesforce Winter ’23 release will help you save time, drive efficient growth, personalize customer experiences, and automate even complex processes in your email marketing program. Here are the five most important new features that you should know about if you are an SFMC user and email marketer.

1. Digital Command Center for Slack to Correct Campaigns Quickly

The Digital Command Center for Slack app is designed to help you make course corrections to your marketing campaigns early and as often as you need. This monitoring tool is available inside your Slack workplace so you can:

• Monitor SFMC cloud activity from within Slack
• Identify and fix campaign anomalies before they can impact campaign and business performance
• Get alerts on Journey performance
• Adjust processes and automations as required

With this new feature, you can access prebuilt SFMC workflow rules, alerts, and calls to action to proactively prevent problems instead of reactively resolving them. You can also create your own custom rules for more granular detail and better control. Use these rules to identify issues early before they negatively impact a campaign. Set thresholds to specify which behaviors you consider “abnormal”. This app will define actions around an alert so you will know what’s wrong, and can act quickly to fix the error or abnormal activity. Examples of actions include opening a ticket and creating a new dedicated channel.

Digital Command Center for Slack is available with SFMC in Professional, Enterprise, Unlimited, Performance, and Developer editions. Your Slack admin can add the app to your Slack workplace and connect your SFMC account to the app. Make sure you have a permission set that includes the Connect Salesforce with Slack permissions.

2. External Actions in Account Engagement to Streamline Your Marketing Tech Stack

With the Winter ’23 release, you can use External Actions in SFMC Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) to leverage all your customer engagement channels. You can automate tasks, work with prospects outside Account Engagement, and build external actions for third-party apps from within SFMC Engagement Studio. For example, you can register new prospects for an upcoming webinar.

External actions will help you promote events and new content to engage with your audience, while also saving time, whether the event/content is related to a webinar registration, a survey send, or an SMS message. This new feature is also an advantage for customers since they get a seamless and unified experience across all apps throughout their journey with your brand. Plus, you get a robust system of record to track prospects with problematic amounts of activity and simplify consent tracking. This new feature is available in SFMC Plus, Advanced, and Premium versions. Keep these best practices in mind to get all the benefits of this new feature:

• Use the new MarketingAppExtAction metadata type to define, submit, and execute external actions to third-party apps.
• Use the existing MarketingAppExtension metadata type and the new MarketingAppExtAction subtype to package external actions.
• Customize external actions to fit your business needs (you can do this because they are built on invocable actions).
• Use external actions independently or combine them with external activities to seamlessly integrate multiple solutions and close automation gaps across platforms.

3. Intelligence: Ecommerce Marketing Insights App to Enhance Your eCommerce Program

If you are running an eCommerce program, you need to know how it is performing in order to optimize it and drive higher revenues. But this requires marketing and eCommerce teams to work together and share data and insights. With the Winter ’23 release of the eCommerce Marketing Insights app; you can eliminate the isolated silos that prevented these teams from knowing what the other is doing. They can view how email marketing campaigns are driving eCommerce performance at granular level, from any platform, and for any time period. These insights will help them to uncover opportunities to optimize campaigns and boost eCommerce revenues .

As an SFMC Intelligence user, you can automatically connect all marketing and eCommerce data from the point of awareness and consideration through conversion. You can also connect your Google Analytics web data. Then use the harmonized data model to generate actionable insights that can inform your decisions and actions regarding customer engagement, retention, and transaction experiences.

Explore data about sales, returns, cancellations, etc. to get a complete view of how your campaigns and marketing investments are affecting eCommerce spends and revenues. Then leverage this understanding to optimize campaigns to:

• Optimize products and campaigns.
• Drive higher revenues for target products.
• Increase the sales of halo products.
• Improve customer experiences and drive greater customer loyalty.
• Optimize return on ad spend (RoAS) and spend your marketing budget more efficiently.

Ecommerce Marketing Insights is available with all Intelligence Editions (Starter, Growth, Plus). The app’s data model will automatically update as you add more data sources and keep showing you revenue KPIs.

4. Intelligence: Intelligence Connector for Sprout

Sprout Social is an integrated social media management and intelligence platform for managing all your social profiles from a single place and surface in-depth analytics to understand your brand’s performance on social media sites. The Winter’ 23 Release of SFMC brings you an Intelligence Connector which will help you connect and optimize everything you do inside the Sprout Social platform.

Through this connector, you can ingest and connect all social media data from Sprout Social, whether it’s organic or paid. You can also combine this data with web analytics, sales, and marketing data into SFMC Intelligence. This will enable you to create a comprehensive data ecosystem and derive crucial insights that can inform decision-making. These social and marketing insights will also help you design appropriate strategies to optimize marketing spends and revenues.

The Intelligence Connector, which is available with all Intelligence Editions (Starter, Growth, Plus), will also help you uncover omni-channel insights. Access cross-channel, interactive reports and dashboards to analyze performance across multiple social media channels.

5. Einstein Content Selection (ECS) to Simplify Campaign Testing with the Power of AI

Einstein Content Selection (ECS) is one of dozens of Einstein AI-driven features in SFMC. It is part of Content Builder and works by selecting the most engaging content for each of your subscribers based on the rules that you define in SFMC, plus subscriber attributes and historical information about content that was popular in the past.

The tool leverages AI to scan the content in your content pool in real time, that is, at the exact moment when a subscriber views your email. It then intelligently considers changes to attributes and subscriber engagement to help you automate testing and improve testing results.

Advantages of Einstein Content Selection:

• Easily set up and scale campaign tests, whether you prefer automated testing with Einstein or want to manually choose a winning asset.
• Limits on ECS image size upload increase system reliability while supporting larger size and animated gif images when required.
• Test up to 32 images simultaneously.
• Single-step process to archive asset classes and fallback images.
• Einstein will continuously learn and select content as subscribers open and engage with your email messages.
• Dashboards with real-time analytics where you can view selections and engagement at the content level.

ECS replaces the Live Weather content block in September 2022 and targets assets based on local weather conditions. It is available with all SFMC accounts with Einstein features. However, since it is a premium feature, it is only available with the Professional edition and above. Earlier, the feature had to be activated. Now it displays as a standalone feature, which makes it easy to access and use for campaign testing. 

Conclusion

As with every new release, the SFMC Winter ’23 Release is geared towards helping you optimize your brand’s email marketing program with innovative new features and updates. You can take maximum advantage of these new features with expert email marketers working with you and for you. Contact Email Uplers and we’ll show you how you can make the most of the ever-expanding and ever-improving SFMC ecosystem.