What’s New at Dreamforce 2024: Everything to Know About Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition

What new features does Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition offer?

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition offers a broad range of new product features, particularly focused on helping smaller marketing teams do more with less. At a crucial time when brands are racing to achieve new efficiencies with AI, enhance experimentation of user journeys and effortlessly collaborate across teams, new features in Advanced Edition are sure to please. Here’s what to look forward to:

Reimagined campaign home. Like Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition includes a reimagined and reengineered Campaign home. In this new experience marketers can view guidance on building key marketing components. Those include access guidance cards for tasks like creating audiences, creating content, and creating campaigns. Accessing recent campaigns in the new campaign home is easily done as well—just review a list view of your most recent campaigns.

AI-powered features. The Advanced Edition introduces robust AI integration, making sophisticated marketing tactics accessible to SMBs. Einstein Engagement Scoring will enable you to predict engagement to segment and personalize more effectively. Score every individual on their likelihood to open, click and stay subscribed to email and to convert. Then use those scores to create audiences, segments, split paths in Flow, and personalize content. Einstein Engagement Frequency helps ensure you send the right number of messages to optimize engagement. Markers will be able to see a distribution of their email sends and subscriber engagement for a given period of time. EEF will predict the optimal frequency range of emails to maximize engagement goals. This will allow you to adjust messaging cadence based on data, and create data extensions for over and under-messaged subscribers.

Dynamic content creation. With the Data Cloud data graph, marketers can build dynamic content directly within the content builder. This feature, which is also available in Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, allows the configuration of rules that operate against your data graph, ensuring that your marketing material is as dynamic and responsive as your audience demands.

Event-driven messaging. Like the Growth Edition, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition supports event-driven messaging, enabling marketers to trigger communications based on specific events, such as form submissions or commerce purchases.

Two-way conversational messaging. Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition enables marketers with Service Cloud and Digital Engagement to turn one-way promotions into a connected conversation. With help from Data Cloud, marketers gain the ability to respond in real-time with unified data to deliver connected interactions across departments and respond instantly.

Path Experiment. Companies using Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition are able to test up to ten paths to multiple variations of your campaign paths with varied channels, messaging copy, and cadence. Users can remove bias from testing paths by randomly assigning individuals to different paths to ensure fair and unbiased distribution. It is also possible to tailor the distribution of individuals across paths according to your specific testing needs.

There’s even more to look forward to soon. In addition to these Advanced-specific features, Salesforce will continue to build out innovations in both Growth and Advanced Edition, which customers will be able to use in October.

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition addresses key CRM use cases.

Each of these new features are engineered to address key challenges and priorities marketers face today, ensuring their businesses can deliver highly personalized and effective marketing experiences. In fact, according to Salesforce’s State of Marketing Report (Ninth Edition), a staggering 88% of marketers believe they must innovate to meet rising customer expectations—but achieving that is impossible without a unified view of the customer. Here’s how Advanced Edition is designed to enable that use case and more.

Unify data for personalized engagements.

With both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions, marketers can now personalize every customer engagement using a unified data source. This allows teams to create campaigns faster and more effectively with the aid of Salesforce's trusted AI.

Enable collaboration through greater data visibility.

Built on Salesforce's platform, both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions offer brands or companies the opportunity to remove silos in their sales and marketing technology stacks. By choosing Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced you are bringing your core sales, marketing, service and commerce technologies together under one roof. This enables a profound change in the availability of your customer data, already in Salesforce CRM and Data Cloud, to be used by your marketing team. This goes a long way towards realizing the goal of gaining a unified view of your customers. This holistic view supports informed decision-making and enhances the overall customer experience.

Better understand customer journeys through detailed engagement metrics.

The upgraded Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions transition from simply measuring marketing influence through campaign members to utilizing detailed engagement metrics. Both editions will include Opportunity Influence, a feature launching in October, which use engagement data to tie closed and won opportunities and their revenue back to specific campaigns. This shift provides marketers with profound insights into how customer interactions drive sales. By understanding which engagements are more likely to lead to conversions, marketing teams can focus their efforts more strategically, including the creation of multi-channel journeys through both email and SMS.

Moreover, the feedback loop created by these metrics feeds data back into the marketing system. This allows for more targeted campaigns and sophisticated lead scoring, ensuring that only the most qualified leads are passed to sales. As a result, marketing becomes a more evident driver of growth, enhancing the value of every interaction and elevating the role of marketing within the business.

Is Advanced Edition fit for your team’s specific needs?

When considering whether the Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is the right fit for your business, it's essential to understand who stands to benefit the most from these offerings, how they compare to other Salesforce products, and what your existing Salesforce setup looks like.

What separates Growth and Advanced Edition from other Marketing Cloud products?

Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Edition are streamlined versions of Salesforce's comprehensive Marketing Cloud, specifically designed to be intuitive and accessible. Built on the Lightning platform—the same foundation as Salesforce Sales Cloud—these versions allow new customers to set up and begin testing customer journeys quickly, without ever leaving their salesforce org.

For small and medium-sized businesses who are moving to Salesforce or already use Salesforce, it is in your best interest to use Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced for your marketing. By choosing Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, businesses immediately gain the ability to scale their marketing operations with one of the most cutting-edge marketing platforms available today, all from within their Salesforce instance.

What About Marketing Cloud Engagement?

If you are already utilizing Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement, this announcement does not affect the availability of those platforms. Salesforce will continue to innovate and enhance these existing platforms. While Growth and Advanced Edition both bring new features to the table now, Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement will continue to receive updates that bring each version into greater parity—meaning current customers won’t need to migrate to the new platforms to access future innovations.

Get started with Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition.

Getting setup with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is designed to be straightforward and accessible, ensuring that your team can quickly harness the platform's power. The Advanced Edition is available in November, enabling businesses across AMER, EMEA and LATAM to begin leveraging advanced marketing functionalities without delay.

For current Salesforce customers, upgrading to Growth or Advanced Edition is seamless. Your team can continue operating on a single platform as your marketing footprint expands, eliminating the need for disruptive migrations and ensuring continuity in your marketing efforts. Importantly, all your existing marketing engagement data remains intact, preserving the insights and analytics you've built over time.

I’m excited to see these tools become more accessible to a broader range of businesses, granting them robust, enterprise-level data tools at a pivotal time as we navigate the new AI economy. And whether you're an existing user of Marketing Cloud or just starting with Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced Edition, we are here to help you maximize the platform's features. Let us help you unlock the full potential of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions to ensure that you can seamlessly integrate and leverage these capabilities to drive your marketing success.