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

It’s that time of the year when a new Salesforce Marketing Cloud release is around the corner and everyone, including the Marketing agencies, customers, and Salesforce partners, are eagerly waiting for this release.

As a part of the release plan for Salesforce Marketing Cloud July 2020 release, it will be rolled out from the last week of July 2020 till the first few days of August 2020. As per the roll-out process, the features will be released in a phase-wise manner, and hence, it will take a full week for all the stakeholders like clients, partners, and marketing agencies to get the release features enabled.

As per the Salesforce Marketing Cloud release schedule, this release is going to be the last but one release of the year. The last release is scheduled for the second half of October 2020, and it will be made live for everyone between 17-24 October 2020.    

In this article, we will explore the top features of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s July 2020 release. Since there are ample good features in this release and all of them can’t be covered in a single article, this is the first article in the two-article series.  

This first part of the article covers all the important features in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Journey builder module, the introduction of Multi-Factor authentication and Salesforce Marketing Clouds’ use of Internet Explorer 11 browser.  

Rest of the features like Einstein will be covered as the second part of two article series.  

Journey builder updates

There are multiple new and interesting updates for the Journey builder module in the Salesforce Marketing cloud July 2020 release, and we will cover some of the important updates here.

1. Micro-level user Permissions in Journey Builder

Salesforce Marketing Cloud users can be provided with specific permissions to activate and delete Journeys in Journey builder module. Previously there was no permission set dedicated to these activities within Journey builder. It was either full access or no access to the Journey builder module. These permissions can be granted by the Salesforce Marketing cloud admin in the Setup app and these permission sets will apply to all the users of Journey builder.

2. Transactional Send Email Journeys in Journey Builder

Transactional APIs are used to trigger an activity based on the APIs request from the external system. This facility is now available in the Journey Builder user interface. Transactional Send journeys work with out-of-the-box features as Multi-Step and Single Send journeys.

Also, users can view near real-time operational metrics from the Journey builder’s user interface. 

3. Single Send SMS Journeys in Journey Builder

With this new release, users can send the single SMS journey which is similar to the single send email within Journey builder module. Single send SMS journey will be helpful in the use case of promotion or updates to a single set of audience through Journey builder’s rich user interface. 

SMS single send can be configured for sending SMSs on an immediate basis or scheduled for a future date. This feature is available to all the users with Journey builder and MobileConnect access in their org. 

4. Identify and delete a contact in Journey Builder

This feature helps to locate individual contacts within a running or a stopped Journey. It also displays the journey undertaken by contact within the last 30 days. It allows you to remove the individual contact from the journey at any point. This is available to all the Journey builder users.

This feature is really useful to self troubleshoot the exact location of the individual contact within the journey and it is really helpful to know whether the contact has exited the journey at an early stage or has completed the full journey. 

To avail this feature, click on the  Journey Health panel and enter the contact key for the required contact and the system displays the paths taken by the contact in the last 30 days. Click on Remove from Journey to remove the contact from the journey. 

Interactive Email forms to have pre-populated data 

Interactive email forms are used by Marketers to gather subscriber data in the email messages instead of a traditional landing page. With this new feature, marketers can pre-populate the data in the answers. This makes it easier for the subscribers to edit the data if required. This is especially beneficial in the scenario of confirming subscriber data. The subscriber can just edit the data instead of typing the whole information.    

Multi-Factor authentication 

Salesforce promotes confidentiality, integrity, and availability of customer’s data as a part of the Trust building mechanism with the customers. To protect customer’s data from security threats, Salesforce Marketing cloud is introducing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). 

Multi-factor authentication is an authentication mechanism through which a user is granted access to the system if they can successfully provide two or more pieces of information to the authentication mechanism.

This feature needs to be implemented by the Marketing cloud customers in their tenants. 

Two-factor authentication can be of the following types:

• The Salesforce Authenticator mobile app
• Security keys that support U2F or WebAuthn
• Time-based one-time passcode (TOTP) 

Discontinuation of Use of Internet Explorer 11 for Marketing Cloud

Customers around the world are recommended to use google chrome browser as the preferred way of accessing any salesforce application including Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Internet explorer is not the preferred technique to access the salesforce application including Salesforce Marketing Cloud. On those lines, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is stopping the support to access the Marketing cloud on the Internet Explorer 11. 

Wrap up

In this blog, we have covered seven important Salesforce Marketing Cloud features from the upcoming Marketing Cloud July 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 Salesforce Marketing cloud features.  

For the complete list of Salesforce Marketing cloud features of July 2020 release and their details, please refer to the link below.
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_july_2020_release.htm&type=5