What's Hot: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Updates May 2020

Every quarter or so Salesforce Marketing Cloud release new updates to the platform, which is great! There is a consistent effort from the product team to continue to optimise the platform, however, the tricky part is trying to identify which of those updates are of most interest and benefit to you. Below we’ve collated some of the best updates based on what we believe are the most useful updates to SFMC users and also updates that many marketers and developers alike have been looking forward to.
 

Journey Builder: Path Optimizer

Journeys are never set and forget. You consistently need to revisit, test and learn from previous variations of your current journeys. Being able to adapt to change has never been more important. We need to be observing customer behaviours and readjusting our marketing efforts to offer a better customer experience and in turn hit our business goals.

With Path Optimizer you can now perform multivariate and AB Testing within your journeys to determine the best path. You can test up to 10 different paths!! Yes 10! Testing can be tested against content, frequency of sends and which message channel is the best performing. However just because you can test 10 variations, it’s important to be clear on what outcome you are testing for each variation. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. If you have too many variations to keep track of and not enough distinguishing features between the variations, you might be creating busy work for yourself that isn’t necessary.

So, how do I set it up and understand which variation is the best performing?

Within Journey Builder, you can choose to select the winner manually or you can set the winner based on Email Engagement i.e. Click Rate, Open Rate or Unsubscribe Rate and elect how many days you will run the test. If you’re running a high value and timely promotion journey, 24 hours might be a sufficient amount of time to garner customer engagement. However, if your journey has a longer life span, the testing time will be dependant on the lifecycle of the offer, promotion or the message that needs to be delivered.

For example, you might run a Dry July campaign, so it would make sense to create awareness and warm up with the audience in June. Then we can see how audiences are engaging for between 5-14 days and then select a winner to run throughout the duration of the campaign month of July. Any new contacts entering the journey will automatically choose the winning path. 

To find the Path Optimizer, scroll down the left hand navigation bar to ‘Flow Control’ and select the Test Tube Icon named Path Optimizer, add to the beginning of your journey and then configure the Winner Evaluation. You can also pick the path distribution based on percentage. It will default to a 50/50 split. In this case it will create two different variations to populate with 2 emails - either a new email build or you can utilise emails that are pre-built. If you have one email built you can actually copy it onto the Journey Builder clipboard so that you can drag the email into the remaining variations. You might choose to test the Subject Line to understand best Open Rate or change the hierarchy of offers/information within each email to test the Click Through Rate. Maybe you’ll look to test an email that has a focus on lifestyle imagery VS an email that is product heavy and focuses on features and benefits. By testing in this fashion it is a sure way to understand what communications resonate with your customer.

Check out Path Optimizer in action here:

 Pause Journeys

Like many of you, I’ve experienced the pain of being forced to stop a live Journey and then afterwards I'm stuck with multiple versions of the same journey within my account. Also when that happens there will be duplications of messages sent to a contact as they have entered the journey again or in the worst cases - they never entered at all.

It’s a pain especially if you simply want to pause your journey whilst you await; content updates from product teams, or there’s been an issue with a data sync and the IT team needs time to resolve the issue to ensure the journey is using the correct dataset or to stop errors from wrecking havoc in a live journey. Perhaps your website or customer portal is down or there’s a black swan event **cough cough** COVID-19 and the message is either insensitive or no longer relevant to the audience at that time.

Note that journeys can now be paused for up to 14 days and what happens here is you are temporarily halting the contact processing which in turn stops the communications from triggering via the journey.

The more consistent behaviour that comes from Journey Builder, the better for developers and marketers alike. But like many who work in Marketing Cloud, we’d love to see debug suggestions and access to back end files to help us communicate why an error has occurred to avoid it in future. But one step at a time!

Single-Send Push Journeys

It appears that there is a trend here. Communications are more often than not now coming from Journey Builder. Earlier this year Single-Send Journeys were enabled for Email and now it has been extended to Mobile Push.  Be warned though, you will need to ensure that you have Mobile included in your account and also that the Mobile App has been configured within Marketing Cloud.

How does a Single Send Journey compare to a Multi Step Journey in Journey Builder?

Well a Single Send journey enables you to create and manage a simple, one-touch customer journeys within the same workspace used for Multi-Step journeys. You’ll need to define the target audience for the entry source, add existing message content or create a message from scratch, then activate immediately or schedule the send for a later date and time. You can also monitor message engagement metrics all within the Journey Builder tool. Rather than utilising an automation to execute a once off communication, you can build in Journey Builder for ease of use, and greater visibility to better understand customer engagement.

Single Send journeys enables you to automate sending when the customer journey only requires one message, without subsequent follow-up communication.

Here are two examples:

• You will need to ensure that you have an appropriate Data Extension that reflects any AMPscript personalisation included in your email build.

• Be careful to select a date and time to push your Single Send Journey live rather than On Activation, as the latter will start the journey immediately once saved. Also ensure the correct time zone has been selected depending on where your audience is that will receive the Email or SMS.

Please note that for now you cannot trigger a Single Send journey based on an action, if you require a single email push to be completed based on a subscribers behaviour, you’ll still need to use Automation Studio or set up a Multi-Step Journey. Times that you might use a Single-Send Journey would be for; a Click-Frenzy Promotion, Birthday month promo, or perhaps a customer service communication that doesn’t require follow up and is cyclical in nature. 

Check out Single-Send Journeys in more detail here:

New CloudPages Experience (Preview)

Cloud Pages has been around for some time but it definitely has been in need of some attention. CloudPages is a great way to collect customer data and immediately act on that data by; pushing customers directly into Journeys, Mobile Push notifications, or facilitate the gathering of subscription preferences from your customers.

The old User Interface was built in a way that was reminiscent of the Email Studio UI, to ensure the tool was easy to use for marketers. However Marketing Cloud users are keen to see improvements to allow a more powerful and visually appealing offering.

Keep your eyes peeled for the update as it’s looking like a full release will occur later this year. For now, Salesforce have released a preview of the new Cloud Pages User Interface for accounts that have Cloud Pages included so you can play with the new interface and features.

Some key features of the preview are:

- Improved sorting of assets.

- Ability to copy content for a CloudPage Collection.

- And support for Interactive Email CloudPage support. 

This is a great opportunity as part of the community to give Salesforce direct feedback on what works and doesn’t work with the new preview, so that they can make improvements prior to releasing the full update which will ultimately lead to an improved product and increased adoption.

Now we’ve only just touched the surface on the May 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 May 2020.