Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2020 Release: Your guide to all the important features – Part 2

This blog is the second one in the two-part series covering all the important features released as a part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2020 release. In part one, we discussed and analyzed the following new features:

• Maximize Engagement with Optimal Send Frequency
• Einstein Engagement Split to support MobilePush
• Availability of Send time optimization in Single Send Journey
• Mixed content blocking by Google
• Synchronized Data extension field limit
• Removing Campaigns from Email studio
• More Details via Alert Manager Email Job Error Summary

We’ll cover the rest of the important features from the Marketing Cloud Oct 2020 release in this blog. Let’s begin…

Track Automation Studio Changes with Advanced Audit Trail

Auditing is an essential part of every enterprise, and tracking the historical details can serve multiple purposes like keeping company health intact or keeping records for legal purposes, etc. 

As a part of Oct 2020 release, Marketers can track logged events for automation and activities within the Automation studio module. You can now track the audit details of the Automation and activities within the Automation studio for the last 60 days. Audit trails also display the users who have made those respective changes. 

There are two ways of extracting Audit trail details from Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

• The audit trail can be extracted via SOAP APIs 
• Audit trails can be exported to SFTP location using an Audit trail data extract activity within Automation studio

This event is only accessible to the users who purchase the Advanced Audit Trail feature.

The below screenshot shows the sample of an Audit trail.

Use Asset Attributes Ethically

There is a big debate in the marketing world about the ethical use of Artificial Intelligence. Salesforce has always been a big advocate of technology and, at the same time, is using it in ethical ways to help humankind. Salesforce provides marketers the power of Artificial Intelligence to help them avoid biased content selection as its display to the subscribers. Salesforce is all about practicing transparency in their choices and leading from the front. 

In the context of the above points, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has introduced a feature to remove the bias in Asset Attributes to be fair and transparent as a part of the Oct 2020 release. The algorithm beneath the Einstein feature looks at the attributes created for the subscriber profile. The algorithm then evaluates the attributes for the possibility of bias in their usage. If the algorithm detects any potential match for bias attributes, it automatically flags to the marketers. Post flagging, marketers can revisit the Salesforce help documentation, which will aid them in spotting and rethinking the data attribute flagged by the algorithm as a potential for unethical use. 

The marketers or the users can include, edit, exclude the respective profile attributes to display responsible behavior.  

Understand Your Data Quality

As they say, data is the new oil, and no one understands this fact better than marketers. Once the data is available with the marketers, the next important aspect is checking the data quality.

As part of the Oct 2020 release, Einstein provides an indicator of your enterprise org’s data quality. Data quality is critical to understand how Einstein Send time optimization [STO] can help your enterprise. Better quality data will provide better predictions displayed by Einstein and better predictions will lead to more optimized email sends.

Data quality score can be viewed on the Einstein STO email and mobile dashboards at the enterprise account level. Einstein analyzes the engagement data of emails over 90 days. While it analyses the emails, it doesn’t cover the transactional emails, test sends, and bounces.      

Tag Einstein Content Selection Assets Automatically

Einstein content selection is an AI-based feature that selects the best possible content assets from the list of assets and uses that for personalizing the email for each subscriber. Einstein content tagging applies searchable tags to the images in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud account. This tagging helps Einstein to use the images in an optimized fashion. 

Einstein will now automatically generate feature tags for image assets within the Content Builder module with Marketing Cloud. Post generation of feature tags for images, Einstein Content Selection is used with Einstein Content Tagging. With the responsible Artificial Intelligence feature’s help, Einstein Content Tagging goes through the images once every 24 hrs and analyzes the images to generate the relevant tags for the images with the Content Builder module. The tags help Einstein content selections to select the optimized tags for the emails. Tags are also helpful in assessing the standard features of content that are performing well or not well. 

You can utilize this feature by turning on the Einstein Content Tagging in the setup module within the Marketing Cloud org. Users can configure the tags with a minimum or maximum level of confidence, and assets are then tagged as added; tags appear as an attribute to the asset.

Standard Content Builder Blocks – Now Output Accessible HTML

As a part of this release, Marketing Cloud Content Builder has introduced HTML attributes to the HTML, FreeForm, Image, Text, and Button blocks. This will be helpful to allow the screen reader software and assistive software to read block HTML within the Content Builder. The new attribute called ‘Role=Presentation’ designates the HTML table as a presentation table instead of a data table.

Enjoy General Email Form Block Enhancements

Marketing Cloud has made general improvements to the Email Form Blocks within the Content Builder module. These improvements will help to maintain the best experience across multiple Email clients as used by the customers. These general email block improvements are available to all the newly created or updated Email form blocks within Content Builder.

New Data Points for Email Not Sent and Email Bounce Events

Customer experience is the most important aspect of any marketer’s playbook. Keeping that in mind Salesforce Marketing Cloud has introduced some important new features to aid the end-to-end experience debugging the email sends. 

As part of the Oct 2020 release, Marketing Cloud has introduced new data points in the two events: 

• Email Not Send event
• Email Bounce Event

As a part of new data points, if you have a subscription to Transactional Email Sent, Not Sent, and Bounce Events, as a verified callback, there is an additional object type on the JASON payload called ‘composite:{}`. It includes list ID, job batch ID, job ID, email ID, and subscriber ID. These attributes will track the complete end-to-end cycle of Send-to-click and aid in normalizing these data events.

Wrap up

We have covered the complete list of all the important features of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Oct 2020 release.For a complete list of Salesforce Marketing Cloud features of Oct 2020 release and the details, you can refer to the link below:
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_rn_october_2020_release.htm&type=5