In fact, the concept that echoed through every session was the rise of the AI agent. Far from being just another chatbot, Salesforce’s powerful agentic technology, Agentforce, is positioned as a new face for the brand—a concierge, a personal shopper and a problem-solver, all powered by a company's unique data and content. This vision has the potential to reshape everything from customer service to a marketer's daily workflow.

So, let’s unpack the key announcements that build toward this vision. We’ll explore what it means to redefine customer interactions through AI agents, look at the underlying platform changes in Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud that make it possible, and contextualize how this could transform your day-to-day reality.

AI agents are transforming brand communication into a dialogue. 

For years, digital marketing has largely been a monologue where brands broadcast messages and hope customers are listening. The vision presented at Connections signals a definitive move away from this dynamic. The future showcased by Salesforce is one of dialogue, where every touchpoint becomes an opportunity for a meaningful, two-way conversation orchestrated by AI.

This marks the end of the "do not reply" email. Imagine sending a promotional email with a curated set of product recommendations. Instead of that being the end of the interaction, it becomes the beginning. A customer could reply directly to the email with, “I like those pants, but do you have them in blue?” and Agentforce, acting as a personal shopper, would respond with available options, check inventory and even help complete the purchase. This transforms a static campaign into a dynamic, personal shopping experience.

This shift also forces us to rethink the purpose of content. We’ve traditionally viewed content as a destination; the goal was to get a visitor to land on a blog post or a product page. In the new paradigm, content becomes fuel for the AI engine. That blog post about new product features is no longer just for human readers; it’s a critical input that teaches AI Agents how to intelligently discuss those features with a customer. Every article, every product description, every FAQ becomes a knowledge source that makes the brand’s AI smarter and more helpful. 

Ultimately, this leads to a new front door for your website. AI Agents will become the primary way visitors interact with a brand online, moving beyond static navigation and simple search bars. It will be a conversational interface that can answer complex questions, make nuanced recommendations and even take action on the user's behalf, like booking a meeting or making a reservation.

A unified platform makes all your data ready for AI.

This conversational future requires an immense amount of power running behind the scenes. The strategy presented at Connections rests on two pillars: unifying the marketer’s experience with the Marketing Cloud Next platform and making all data AI-ready with major enhancements to Data Cloud.

One of the key enablers of this vision is the forthcoming Marketing Cloud Next platform, built on Salesforce Core. It’s designed to solve the problem of platform fragmentation that has long challenged marketers who navigate disparate tools for different channels. Instead, the new vision is one of consistency, where the experience is seamless from one tool to the next. The HTML editor for building a web campaign will look and feel just like the one for creating an email. The same powerful product recommendation engine will be used across every channel, from web to email to mobile. And a single, unified AI brain—Agentforce—will power every interaction. This consistency will not only streamline workflows but also make it significantly easier to cross-train teams, allowing them to become true cross-channel experts.

Of course, any AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on. This is where the enhancements to Data Cloud become critical. Salesforce showcased features designed to supercharge the process of getting data ready for AI agents and recommendation engines.

• A renewed focus on data foundations: While new features are exciting, they amplify the need for a solid data foundation. Without it, brands face common challenges like low-quality data that erodes trust, data sprawl across disconnected systems, and limited access that prevents teams from acting on insights. Getting the foundation right is the prerequisite to unlocking the true power of AI.
• Smarter, broader data resolution: We’re familiar with identity resolution for customer profiles, but a key enhancement is the extension of these resolution rules to all Data Model Objects (DMOs). Imagine being able to resolve your entire product catalog, ensuring clean, consistent product data for your AI to use.
• Making unstructured data usable: One of the most powerful announcements was the ability to "vectorize" unstructured data. In simple terms, this is a kind of technological magic that allows AI to understand the meaning and context of content without needing manual tags. The full text of a blog post can now be used as if it were perfectly structured data, allowing the AI to mathematically determine which parts are most relevant for answering a specific question.
• Secure, seamless collaboration: To further break down data silos, Salesforce announced Data Cloud-to-Data Cloud zero-copy connectors. This will allow different business units, or even different companies, to join their Data Cloud instances together. These “data clean rooms” enable data sharing for richer insights in a completely privacy-compliant way.

AI will become an essential co-pilot for every marketer.

So, what does this all mean for the marketer? Their role will evolve from a manual builder to something more akin to a creative director. Using Agentforce, a marketer will be able to generate campaign ideas, customer journeys and even certain components of creative assets simply by providing a strategic brief. Crucially, this output is fully editable. The marketer remains in complete control, but their time is freed up to focus on strategy, creative oversight and optimization, rather than the nuts and bolts of campaign setup and creative production.

Monks is also building tools that empower marketers to take their ability to scale content to the next level. Monks.Flow can be integrated into Salesforce to supercharge a marketer's ability to build net new creative assets that power these journeys and are incorporated into these HTML templates to support better, smarter dynamic personalization.

Collaboration will also become more fluid. These AI agents can be invited directly into Slack channels, acting as a new kind of teammate. Teams will be able to brainstorm with the agent, review its proposals in real-time and collaborate on campaign elements in the same digital space where they conduct the rest of their work.

Finally, this changes how we approach analytics. Instead of digging through complex dashboards and manually cross-referencing reports, marketers will be able to use AI dashboards to get instant, natural-language summaries of campaign and channel effectiveness. This boosts the productivity of not just marketers, but data scientists as well, allowing them to focus on deeper strategic questions instead of routine reporting.

Brands can prepare now for this conversational shift.

The message from Salesforce Connections was clear: the future of marketing is a shift from monologue to dialogue. This approach is built on the pillars of a unified platform that simplifies execution, smarter data that makes every piece of content valuable and AI co-pilots that empower marketers to work more strategically and creatively.

The key takeaway for brands isn't simply to "buy more AI." It's to start thinking differently today. How can we prepare our content to be AI fuel? How can we structure our data to be ready for these new conversational experiences? Those who begin asking these questions now will be the ones best prepared to lead in the conversational future. The time to prepare is now.

Our talk, “Combating Early Student Drop-Off with Conversational SMS Journeys in Marketing Cloud,” focused on a use case well known in the education sector: addressing drop-off rates for students embarking on their first experience with online learning. However, the tools and strategies we covered are just as relevant for brand marketers of online or SAAS products who are looking to combat similar issues when needing to comprehensively onboard customers to prevent churn. By understanding how to maintain engagement and foster loyalty from the start, businesses can drive significant growth and success.

In our presentation, Ghea and I demonstrated how personalized, multi-touchpoint SMS journeys can keep students—or any customers—engaged. We utilized Salesforce Marketing Cloud's powerful SMS features and used data extensions and AMPScript to craft dynamic and responsive communications. By leveraging these features and the integration of Marketing Cloud with Salesforce CRM, we created a framework that enhances customer support and interaction. This integration also enables real-time insights and proactive support, ensuring that your brand can meet the needs of your audience promptly.

 The journey we designed also highlights the use of Salesforce Sales Cloud to keep student advisors abreast of their cohort’s journey, and for advanced tracking and reporting that provides a comprehensive view of customer interactions. If you're interested in discovering how these techniques can help your business reduce churn and build stronger customer connections, I invite you to watch the full presentation. You'll learn how to implement a proactive, personalized approach that not only addresses existing challenges but also anticipates future needs. You'll also gain valuable insights into creating personalized communication that resonates with your audience, driving lasting engagement and loyalty.

From cutting-edge AI solutions to enhanced cloud capabilities, Dreamforce 2024 showcased a vision where data-driven insights and intelligent automation lead the charge in boosting innovation and efficiency. So, let’s dive into the most exciting revelations from this year's event, highlighting how these advancements are set to empower businesses to reach new heights in building meaningful and enduring customer relationships.

Agentforce introduces intelligent agents across enterprise use cases.

One of the most exciting announcements at Dreamforce was the reveal of Agentforce, an autonomous agent platform that lets brands build AI agents that support their customers and employees. The idea is that when working together, humans and the AI agents who augment their abilities can drive customer success together.

These agents fulfill key, specialized roles that range from supporting marketers as they build campaigns and journeys to serving as a coach that helps employees practice their pitching. On the customer side, Agentforce can serve as a personal shopper who makes recommendations based on customer preferences, a sales development representative who engages leads on behalf of the sales team, or a service agent who can resolve cases in natural language. These agents are grounded in your data, ensuring accuracy as well as an experience that greatly surpasses standard chatbots that customers are used to.

At its core, Agentforce is a Salesforce innovation that answers the critical question of how to integrate AI into business operations. It goes beyond traditional chatbots by incorporating a higher level of intelligence, powered by your Data Cloud data, allowing it to complete repeatable tasks more effectively. Therefore, it’s essential that you have data foundations to support these intelligent actions.

Agentforce and our own Monks.Flow represent a dynamic duo of AI solutions that can significantly enhance how businesses interact with customers and manage internal processes. Together, these platforms exemplify how assistive AI technologies are crucial in helping brands scale their operations and elevate customer interactions. The synergy between Agentforce's customer-centric AI agents and Monks.Flow's operational efficiencies enables businesses to operate smarter and at a larger scale, without sacrificing personalization or effectiveness. Learn more about Agentforce in depth here.

Data Cloud puts even more insights at your fingertips with wider unstructured data support.

Speaking of Data Cloud, Salesforce announced a handful of new features to help make your data far more insightful than ever before. Perhaps the most exciting new feature is additional unstructured data support, including native processing of audio and video content.

This is transformative because it unlocks new data sources, providing a more complete understanding of customer preferences, pain points and behaviors by analyzing content like customer calls, webinars or product demos. By revealing nuanced insights into customer sentiment and intent, companies can enhance customer profiles and enable personalized, data-driven marketing strategies.

Moreover, applying AI to these sources allows for more accurate predictions of customer needs, improving customer service interactions and fostering loyalty. Once processed and searchable, this content becomes a valuable asset across business functions, enhancing operational efficiency and decision-making accuracy. For example, examining customer service chats can help support teams or sales reps identify frequent issues and improve response strategies, leading to increased customer satisfaction or higher conversion rates.

Find—and act on—information you need with enhanced search.

Despite so much data coming from so many sources, finding what you need will become a lot easier thanks to hybrid search. Hybrid search combines vector search with keyword search, bringing information together from across different media. These improved search capabilities enable faster information discovery by considering the customer's specific situation, preferences and history, thereby reducing the friction often encountered in traditional searches that rely solely on exact matches or keywords.

With personalized customer interactions, searches become more tailored to individual needs, allowing service representatives and sales teams to provide faster, more relevant responses, which enhances customer satisfaction. This leads to enhanced efficiency for teams, as quicker access to relevant customer data lets employees respond to inquiries more efficiently. As a result, customers enjoy an improved experience, receiving seamless, fast, and accurate service that effectively resolves issues or recommends products.

Additional governance and security features keep your data safe—including prevention of data leaks when using AI.

Security and governance have always been crucial to storing data, but the use of external AI applications have raised new concerns about eliminating data leaks and reducing risk. Salesforce has implemented additional data security and governance features to help keep your data safe, including the prevention of exposure to unauthorized parties when using AI. These enhancements are vital for compliance with regulations, as privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA are becoming more stringent.

Preserving customer trust is crucial, as customers expect their data to be managed securely and responsibly, and additional security measures reassure them that their data is protected. Moreover, these features mitigate risks associated with growth and innovation, providing a secure foundation for companies to expand operations and introduce new products or services without increasing vulnerabilities. You can find more details on added security, along with more info on all of the Data Cloud features discussed above, on Salesforce’s website.

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition helps small and medium-sized businesses do more with less.

Switching focus to Marketing Cloud, Salesforce revealed Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, which we recently examined in depth. This edition is crafted to empower smaller marketing teams to achieve more with less, thanks to its innovative features that streamline AI-driven efficiencies, enhance user journey experimentation, and bolster cross-team collaboration. Notable additions include a reimagined campaign home, robust AI-powered tools like Einstein Engagement Scoring and Frequency, and advanced dynamic content creation. These tools are set to transform how marketers engage with customers by predicting user behaviors, optimizing messaging strategies, and personalizing interactions.

Moreover, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition introduces event-driven messaging and two-way conversational capabilities, enabling seamless, interactive communications triggered by specific customer events. For those curious about path experimentation, the Advanced Edition supports testing various campaign paths to refine strategies further. These features are designed to address the evolving challenges marketers face today, ensuring businesses can deliver impactful, personalized marketing experiences.

From free training to product upgrades, additional goodies were shown off.

A connecting thread across the news dropped at Dreamforce is the use of AI and the crucial roles it plays across connecting with customers, understanding their needs, and ultimately building content and touchpoints that keep them engaged. Beyond new product features to support this trend, Salesforce will also offer free, hands-on AI courses and training for anyone. This is to help ensure that everyone can gain the skills they need to excel in a world transformed by AI. Learn more about the training here.

Finally, as reported earlier in September, Salesforce is offering its free Foundations upgrade to Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Enterprise Edition customers. Foundations provides a new, enhanced UI that gives brands a unified view of their customer. Read more about that update here.

Dreamforce 2024 was an incredible step forward in advancing AI-driven business growth and customer engagement.

This year’s Dreamforce left us with a wealth of insights and innovations that promise to reshape how businesses operate and interact with customers. From the transformative powers of Agentforce to the enriched capabilities of Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, the announcements this year underscore the pivotal role of AI in driving forward-looking strategies and enhancing business efficiency.

The emphasis on AI as a cornerstone for customer engagement and operational excellence reflects a broader industry shift. Salesforce's commitment to equipping businesses with the tools and knowledge to harness AI's potential is evident not only in its product offerings but also in the free educational resources made available to the community.

By fostering an ecosystem where technology and human ingenuity work hand-in-hand, Salesforce continues to empower brands to thrive in a rapidly evolving landscape. As we look forward to the future, it is clear that the advancements unveiled at this year's event will serve as catalysts for growth, enabling brands to forge deeper connections with their customers and lead with confidence into the digital age.

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.

First, Salesforce has announced its new product, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, which is designed to put data at brands’ fingertips to help them grow. Second, Salesforce is extending no-cost access to Data Cloud to Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement customers with Sales or Service Enterprise Edition (EE) licenses or above, giving them access to tools they can use to fuel stronger business outcomes with Einstein 1. This includes increasing speed to market, generating more relevant content, increased conversions, and the ability to connect conversations across the entire customer relationship. Both announcements roll out to the Americas this February and the EMEA region in the second half of 2024.

Whether you’ll just be trying Marketing Cloud for the first time or are firmly established on the platform, the news has promising implications for everyone. Read on to learn what the announcements mean for your team.

Data Cloud helps brands of any size prepare and streamline generative AI capabilities.

This is an exciting time to be a marketer; generative AI has ushered in an era of marketing-led transformation and new workflows that help us do our jobs smarter and faster. According to Salesforce’s Generative AI Snapshot Survey, 71% of marketers say generative AI will eliminate busy work and allow them to be more strategic. But AI is only as good as your data; high-quality data is essential for fueling accurate models and insights in the Einstein 1 platform.

And that’s where Data Cloud comes in. No-cost access to Data Cloud opens the door for even more businesses to use the platform for the first time, helping them build a solid data foundation that will service and streamline their AI transformation journeys.

Data Cloud is quickly becoming the leading customer data platform thanks to its ability to connect across sales, services, marketing, commerce, loyalty, third-party advertising and legacy applications. Previously, Salesforce announced no-cost access for Sales Cloud and Service Cloud customers.

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition applies marketing automation to help brands grow.

The launch of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition will expand the platform’s access to the small business market for the first time. In fact, this new edition of Marketing Cloud is designed to help brands grow their business. From delivering campaigns and content faster with trusted AI to better personalizing customer relationships with data, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition applies marketing automation to help small businesses connect their teams and drive revenue on a single, intuitive platform.

Benefits of the platform include helping small teams do more with fewer resources. This means small teams can spend more time building strong data foundations—data that will be critical for successful generative AI—and leverage enterprise AI capabilities for the first time. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition removes some of the technological barriers to entry that smaller businesses face in implementing AI, helping them get up to speed with fewer headaches.

What if I’m already a Marketing Cloud user?

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition might be the cool, new kid on the block, but there’s no need to move from an existing Marketing Cloud to this one. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition indeed brings new functionality to the table, but we look forward to seeing further innovations in Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement that will bring each platform in parity with one another. This means all Marketing Cloud customers can expect more good news on the horizon.

Whether you’re an existing Marketing Cloud user or will just be getting started with Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, we’re happy to help you make the most of platform features. Having a seat on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Partner Advisory Board and being part of the the product’s pilot program, I'm thrilled to see the platform become more accessible to even more businesses, granting them access to robust, enterprise-level data tools for the first time—especially at a time when that is so crucial to entering the new AI economy.

For those using Marketing Cloud in any of its forms, we offer guidance on how to connect your data strategy and implement features as they go live. For Data Cloud users, we can help you realize the role of data beyond the context of customer relationship management, like how to join it together with generative AI functions.

Unlock the power of AI with Salesforce.

Both of Salesforce’s recent announcements will be welcome news to marketers who are itching to ramp up their AI transformation journeys. While Marketing Cloud Growth Edition and no-cost access to Data Cloud are especially beneficial to smaller businesses, a strong data strategy is important for organizations of any size—and no matter your Marketing Cloud of choice, we can help you make the most of your customer data on the platform.

Got any questions about Marketing Cloud Growth Edition? Check out Salesforce’s announcement for more.

What are the new Gmail and Yahoo Mail deliverability rules?

Gmail and Yahoo Mail now require bulk senders to do the following:

• Meet email authentication standards, including DKIM, SPF and DMARC.
• Implement one-click unsubscribe, and honor unsubscribe requests within two days.
• Keep their spam complaint rate below 0.3%.

Platforms like Salesforce Marketing Cloud have done a lot of the heavy lifting here, helping brands get up to speed with their current guidelines. But it’s the responsibility of brands, and partners like us, to confirm their tech stack is properly set up. Throughout this process, we’ve found a common (but easily fixed) problem that has flown under the radar until now.

Don’t overlook this one detail.

Under the new guidelines, brands must implement one-click unsubscribe, otherwise known as the list-unsubscribe header. This shouldn’t be confused with the subscription preference center link that is typically placed at the footer of every brand’s commercial emails; this is a new and additional button that now appears within the header of an email on major email provider platforms like Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

The problem: unless you’ve accounted for it, that button won’t behave as expected. When a recipient clicks the button, your system may not be set up to honor those unsubscribes in Marketing Cloud, particularly if you utilize a Custom Preference Center connected to an external source of truth such as Salesforce CRM, a common practice for most Marketing Cloud users. Instead, the request will be stored in some obscure part of the platform, unbeknownst to you. This means that your Custom Preference Center or CRM may continue to reflect the incorrect subscription preference, putting you at risk of non-compliance with unsubscription preferences. This problem may exacerbate if you are running automations that overwrite subscription preferences based on your source of truth. As a result, you may accumulate spam complaints (and fines) over time.

In short, if you are relying on an external source of truth to manage subscription preferences in Marketing Cloud, the new one-click unsubscribe button won’t automatically behave like your existing unsubscription process. You must review and, if necessary, update your subscription process to account for this additional one-click unsubscribe method that your recipients may adopt to unsubscribe from your emails.

Ensuring compliance is easy.

Want to test whether you comply with these email authentication standards? Start by checking with your email analysis tool of choice, like Google Postmaster, Microsoft Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) or Yahoo Sender Hub. These platforms allow you to easily check email performance and message authentication, including tracing spam complaints.

If you are unsure how to get started or are looking for a quick solution to ensure compliance, especially with the one-click unsubscribe (list-unsubscribe header), don't despair. Our Marketing Automation team has developed an easily deployable solution, so you can rest assured that you won't fall short of Gmail and Yahoo Mail's new email requirements.

Brands have already done so much to meet changing modern guidelines, so it would be a shame for that effort to go to waste because of an easily overlooked disconnect. But we can get you up to speed quickly and easily if you need it.

CTA: Got any concerns about Gmail and Yahoo Mail’s new email deliverability rules? Reach out and we can help!