What's Hot: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Updates July 2020

It’s that time again! Salesforce have released additional updates to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform and we are here to highlight some of our favourite updates of this round. Journey Builder has definitely had the biggest face lift in this release so we’ll start there!

 

Journey Builder

Journey Builder: Behavioural Triggers

If you sell products or services online, and specifically retail ecommerce, having an Abandoned Cart and  Wishlist communications is a no brainer. You can recover lost revenue, re-engage customers who have abandoned and connect their web and email experiences.

Now there is the ability to trigger a journey based on out-of-box customer data for: Abandoned Cart, Abandoned Wishlist, and Abandoned Browse.  

In terms of pre-requisites; all of the relevant product data will need to be available within SFMC and sit in a Data Extension in order for the Journey to call upon the relevant data.

In Content Builder, there is a pre-built block that users can drag-and-drop into emails: it will auto-populate the products that your subscriber has abandoned or browsed (up to 10 products). You can also;

• Preview this within the user interface. 
• Mix and match products, change the fields that are shown and also update the number of products per row.
• If you have a custom master email template you will need to be sure that this drag and drop block doesn’t break your template.

Be mindful that the data coming from your ecommerce platform is syncing in a timely fashion, to ensure you don’t send an email to someone who has removed items from their cart or already converted.

If you run your ecommerce on Sitecore (lucky you), the release includes a Sitecore Journey Builder Connector enabling journey entry and messages that are directly informed by a customers web behaviour.

This feature is available in Corporate, Enterprise, and Pro Editions.

Check it out in action below:

 

 

Journey Builder: Transactional Sending

Transactional messaging is now more accessible for non-technical users, thanks to the removal of complex APIs on both Multi-Step and Single Send journeys.

Create, manage and personalise transactional API campaigns from inside a journey and leverage a dashboard showing near-real-time metrics. Within a 24 hour period, you can see how many sends were attempted, how many weren’t sent and the overall not-sent rate.

A great use case for this would be a post-purchase journey where you can trigger the purchase transaction data and combine that with post-purchase information that requests for product or online buying experience review, product care and maintenance how-to’s etc.

Once you become accustomed to this functionality it will allow greater unity between your commercial and transactional communications and higher visibility because typically these communications are driven from their source of origin. Ie ecommerce platforms, Magento, Sitecore etc.

Available in Corporate, Enterprise accounts. Pro Editions will need to purchase a Journey Builder add-on.

 

 

Single Send SMS Journeys in Journey Builder

No need to manage messages across multiple apps to manage your SMS sends anymore. This will work for all channels; Email, SMS and Mobile Push now for single journey sends, the first iteration was introduced at the last release. 

Users can send the single SMS journey which is similar to the single send email within Journey builder module either for immediate send or schedule for a future date. Single send SMS journey will be helpful in the use case of promotion or updates to a small group of your audience through Journey builder’s rich user interface and the bonus of keeping things centralised. 

Great starting point for beginners to Journey Builder to become comfortable with the technology, especially for marketers. And with the greater visibly being added to Journey Builder in terms of error messaging, contact placement in journeys and insights there’s much more confidence for marketers.

Use cases for this functionality would be a 50% OFF sale communication or updates to a single audience group through the Journey Builder interface which has a much richer experience than Mobile Studio.

 

 

Identify and delete a contact in Journey Builder

Contact path update has been long waited for and requested, so it’s a game changer for anyone who’s ever been asked to locate and troubleshoot the exact location of the individual contact within a journey. This update makes it easy to know whether the contact has exited the journey at an early stage or has completed the full journey. 

Here’s a snapshot of what you can do:

• Locate individual contacts within a running or a stopped Journey.
• Display the journey undertaken by a contact within the last 30 days, find out if they still active or did they exit early.
• Remove the individual contact from the journey at any point.

To find this feature, jump into the Journey Health Panel, for any running or stopped journey and enter the Contact Key for a specific contact and it will show what path the contact has taken, then you can click on ‘Remove from Journey’ to completely remove them.

A handy use case for this would be, a customer complaint that has been raised from within your customer service team and whilst the case is being dealt with, you want to ensure that you suppress or stop them from receiving communications until the issue is resolved. You don’t want to exacerbate an irate customer even further by reminding them of the product or service that has caused them issues.

 

 

Real-Time Contact Details In The Journeys

View the real-time status of a contact in a journey using Journey Builder’s Einstein STO (Send Time Optimization) activity which enables:

• Marketers to view the contacts progression through the journey.
• The ability to view the contacts who are waiting to pass through activity.
• Overview of which contacts have passed through the activity on an hourly basis.  
• Analysis of the contact counts for the last 30 days.

The best part? No configuration necessary and it’s available out of the box.

  

 

Mobile Studio

Einstein Send Time Optimization To Increase Push Notifications Engagements

It’s nice to have more visibility on the impact of mobile marking efforts, so the Send time optimization [STO] updates to Mobile Push are a welcomed addition. Gain insights from a contact’s previous engagement with Mobile Push messages. From this feature you can also capture:

• The past engagement pattern is defined as the time & day at which the subscriber is most likely to open the push notification.
• The pattern used for sending the push notifications at the appropriate time to gain maximum exposure from the subscriber.  
• Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO) dashboard insights on the likelihood of a notification to be opened.

ETO activity can easily be located in the Journey builder module and the action can be achieved by adding an Einstein STO activity in a journey before a Push Notification activity.

You can also chose to activate Einstein STO in Setup for both email and mobile push notifications.

If you have high impact marketing communications, perhaps for an exclusive pre-order for a limited edition product that is being sent via Mobile Push, you might use previous data and insights to decide on what day and time will likely achieve the highest level of engagement for your subscriber base.

 

  

Admin

Now for the least sexy but still handy updates that have been made to Marketing Cloud Admin.

 

Multi-Factor Authentication 

You’ll be familiar with Multi-Factor Authentication if you’ve ever used LastPass, Okta or even Google Authenticator before. 

Simply put Multi-factor authentication is a method to ensure only the specific user for an account is granted access after successfully presenting two or more pieces of evidence when logging in. With a global increase of attacks, phishing, credential stuffing and account take overs ever since working from home during COVID-19 was the norm, it is worth safeguarding your accounts.

At first I wasn’t a fan but now after using it for some time it’s quite handy and less laborious than I was expecting. There is a free Salesforce Authenticator app that you can download on smart phones, available on iOS and Android.

Currently it’s not enforced on any existing Marketing Cloud accounts however it might be worth jumping onto it as it may be a standard requirement next year.

 

 

Alert Manager for Setup

In Setup you can now enable Alert Manager to set up email notification subscription for any email send job errors or triggered send job errors. You will need to be an existing user within Marketing Cloud in order to enable this feature.

Common use case for this would be; an automation where an email activity has incorrect AMPscript or perhaps a triggered send where error limits are reached. When the error is identified an email notification will be sent to that subscription list for immediate attention. Nice!

 

 

Now we’ve only just touched the surface on the July 2020 updates, so if you are keen for further reading, follow the link below to see the full list of updates for this release:  Salesforce Marketing Cloud Updates July 2020.

 

If there are other platforms/studios from the Salesforce Ecosystem (ie. Datorama, Pardot, Interaction Studio) updates that you would be interested in please reach out and we’ll incorporate into our next release review set for October 2020. Or if you have a specific question, feel free to reach out to us on contact@sokka.com.au