Salesforce Marketing Cloud June 2019 News: Everything You Need To Know

Salesforce's main challenge is applying Artificial Intelligence to Marketing and other business areas to offer a wealth of tools to companies of all size. With this mission in mind, they work on creating new products, but they also announce new functionalities in all their Clouds. This month, we want to highlight what's new in Marketing Cloud in June 2019.

The latest release this month is full of updates. As Salesforce Platinum Partners, we've reviewed them all to choose the most interesting ones to tell you what's new in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Not only that, we had help from our colleagues from LeadClic to give their take on each of the updates we highlight here. Different experts have shared their thoughts with us, as well as the benefits they see in these updates.

Before we get started, we didn't want to miss out on mentioning Salesforce's recent acquisition of the Tableau data analysis platform on June 12th, signaling an improvement in Salesforce's analytical capabilities. As Salesforce Chairman and co-CEO Marc Benioff noted in the official press release, "we are bringing together the world's #1 CRM with the #1 analytics platform." The company’s other CEO, Keith Block, remarked that "...the addition of Tableau will accelerate our ability to deliver customer success by enabling a truly unified and powerful view across all of a customer's data."

What is Marketing Cloud?

Marketing Cloud is Salesforce’s suite of cloud-based marketing software that affords you the ability to have a genuinely customer-centric marketing strategy. You can implement a high degree of personalization through cross-channel customer journeys, giving you the tools you need to offer seamless experiences that your customers crave. Another one of Marketing Cloud’s significant benefits is that it works both B2B and B2C entities, allowing corporations to configure their settings based on their business’s environment.

What's new in the June 2019 Marketing Cloud Release? We've taken a look through the Release Notes and have chosen some of the dozens of features included in the release to break down.

General Recap of Marketing Cloud Updates

The June 2019 Marketing Cloud Release updates encompass a plethora of features. They range from technical upgrades, such as allowing you to access the Admin pages from either Setup or Email Studio, and managing Core Tenant and Enterprise permissions on the Setup page instead of multiple places to being able to send transactional SMS messages through the new REST API.

Some features are also phasing out, such as Playbooks that will cease functioning the week of July 1st, as well as eliminating the ability to create Legacy Installed Packages using the legacy v1/requestToken authentication endpoint as of August 1st due to the packages having advanced functionality.

There are also new Marketing Cloud Trailhead modules too to enhance your Salesforce certification prowess, but here’s a look at some of the specific features in some of the sub-clouds we wanted to highlight.

Updates to Advertising Studio

Say goodbye to only being able to see your key performance metrics for Journey Builder ad campaigns in Facebook Campaign Manager. With the latest Advertising Studio update, you’ll now have access to the figures for these critical metrics for your Paid Media campaign performance directly in the Marketing Cloud app. This enhancement will make it even easier for you to analyze the ROI you’re receiving from those campaigns.

Jen Hernández, Marketing Cloud Technical Consultant at LeadClic.

“As Salesforce fans, we love everything that lets us have a more comprehensive view of our actions. That’s why this Advertising Studio update not only makes our work more agile but also lets us have a global view of how our Paid Media campaigns on Facebook are working.”

Updates to Marketing Cloud Connect

One of the most significant benefits of using a CRM tool like Salesforce is integrating all your data on a single platform. The latest Marketing Cloud Connect update has made a fix for all new Marketing Cloud 2.0 Connect Enterprise accounts that have shared objects. These accounts now have an option for a shared Salesforce data extension so you can share the data extensions you’ve created in a parent account with child accounts you may have in your ecosystem, ensuring your Marketing Cloud connector offers the connected experiences your customers expect with data-driven insights.

Ana Timón, Marketing Cloud Technical Consultant at LeadClic.

“Although this functionality has been in the tool for a long time, it’s great that in all new instances that come in, it’s already activated. It’s a way of making processes more agile for basic setup when it consists of a hierarchical structure for sharing information.”

Updates to Journey Builder

Journey Builder is one of the features we implement most for our clients, and in this product release, the two upgrades included in this release are noteworthy. The first is the ability to create Journey Templates, save them, and share them across business units across your organization. For firms operating all over the world, the templates will help you standardize journeys across markets and business units.

How easy is it to create a journey template? Salesforce says you start by saving a draft journey you've made as a template with a name, description, and instructions for other users. When you save, you can choose whether you want to share the model with other business units. When you want to find them again, you'll be able to access them in your Templates Gallery under the My Templates tab.

Salesforce discovered that some Marketing Cloud customers only want users to access Salesforce events, while others wish to access just Sales and Service Cloud activities. With that in mind, Marketing Cloud has added these two separate permissions in Setup. If you're wondering if there's a catch to this, here's how it works.

If your Salesforce account has an integration user and the Salesforce Integration package, those users with Journey Builder have permission to create Sales and Service Cloud activities as well as events. For those accounts getting created after the release, unless if it's a Marketing Cloud administrator role, you do not receive that default capability. Those users will need explicit access to edit or create Salesforce events or activities. Why is that? It's because, with the new upgrade, these permissions override any other role-based permissions associated with a particular user. If you need to add these permissions, all you need to do is grant them this access using their enterprise ID (EID) or member ID (MID).

Jen Hernández, Marketing Cloud Technical Consultant at LeadClic.

“We can tell that Salesforce is continuing to work on the platform’s speed and efficiency; that’s why the idea of directly being able to create templates in Journey Builder and that others in different markets can access them is exciting to us. Similarly, applying different visibility to events or activities that trigger a user’s entrance into the journey brings closer to the idea that CRM integration is even more of a reality.”

Updates to Email Studio

Email Studio is one of the most critical studios in the Marketing Cloud universe, given that email marketing is a mainstay for many digital marketing campaigns. This release has two updates to keep in mind. The first relates to a marketing cornerstone, and email marketing is no exception: A/B Testing. While you used to not be able to use angle brackets, otherwise known as the greater-than/less-than brackets (<>) in A/B test emails in the subject, you can now employ these brackets in A/B test emails in the subject line.

The other update can be activated when you have Domain Verification enabled when sending an email in Content Builder. When this is enabled, AMPScript will dynamically populate the form address by using a verified send classification containing the sender profile that uses the AMPScript.

Ana Timón, Marketing Cloud Technical Consultant at LeadClic.

“This latest update is completing the functionality introduced in the April release, which was the verification as a way of controlling the sender used for emails sent from the tool. It’s often useful that the user is dynamic, and if we factor this in with that it needs authorization, this functionality was necessary for closing the cycle.”

What about the rest of the June 2019 Salesforce Marketing Cloud Release?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s strength comes from the wealth of sub-clouds that comprise its ecosystem. That means that the June 2019 release touches each of the sub-clouds, adding new features that will boost your effective use of the platform and all it has to offer.

If you’re looking for a sub-cloud that we haven’t had time to cover, you can read all the Product Release Notes on the Salesforce website. You can also tune into the June 2019 Marketing Cloud New Release Feature Overview webinar on June 27th at 12 PM Eastern Time (6 PM Central European Summer Time). Or, should you prefer, you can go ahead and get in touch with us. We’d be happy to help!