With the new 2023 Spring release, Salesforce continues to provide its users with great functionalities that leverage marketing data to drive business success. The latest features and upgrades are designed to enhance your analytic capabilities and customer engagement, leading to improved marketing and customer experience.
Here are the top Marketing Cloud features on our watch list:
1. Enhanced Analytic Capabilities With Visual Pivot Tables
Answer your most critical marketing questions with an improved and upgraded visual pivot table. With added functionalities, you can explore, compare, summarise, and analyse data trends for multiple-case scenarios to gain better insights and instantly visualise marketing trends. It’s now easier to find and organise valid and specific data for any case from your marketing data collective using new filters and configurations. And while working, you can simply switch between a simple pivot table and widget views to better visualise your trends or patterns in data.
Unlike in previous versions, checking data quality also got simpler as you can get analysis results without waiting until the end to apply changes you make to the table. There is no need to use query formulas to create custom reports even. Intelligence Reports users can formulate and edit calculated fields and organise data better from within the table, making data analysis even easier and better than before.
2. Simplified and Centralised Data Stream Control Centre
Improve the management of your marketing cloud data and ensure data transparency and oversight with the efficient Data Stream Control Centre in Salesforce. This centralised centre is designed to handle an ever-increasing multitude of data streams that constantly flow into the marketing cloud. The control centre dashboard gives a consolidated view of data stream insights, enabling you to visibly assess stream status, evaluate data quality and volume, and detect errors in data streaming.
With the ability to continuously monitor and evaluate data streams and their usage, you can promptly identify sources that require intervention and respond to ingestion errors from the past seven days. The single-view interface offers an overview of data stream status—whether successful, failed, on standby or in progress— and that too with respect to their data sources like ads and other social media sources. By default, the centre is set to ‘Today’, providing you with fresh and daily insights on data streams.
The centre also provides actionable insights that ultimately improve data hygiene and row management capabilities.
3. Personalised Advertising to Provide Enhanced Customer Engagement
Salesforce promises big upgrades to its Advertising Studio with this release. With Advertising Studio, you can create and coordinate creative ad campaigns to engage with your customer base across various platforms like social media, mobile, sales, and customer service. You can use your customer relationship management (CRM) data to engage with existing customers or new leads and prospects, utilising platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
By securely integrating first-party data with key advertising partners like Google and Meta, you can create personalised advertising campaigns that extend your reach to newer channels while ensuring consumer privacy.
4. Get Actionable Recommendations with Account Engagement Optimiser (Beta)
Salesforce’s Account Engagement Optimiser is a powerful tool that provides you with reviews and recommendations to monitor and solve issues within your business unit. These actionable recommendations help you improve email send times and smoothly manage visitor tracking to maximise efficiency. You also get an overview of the status of your business unit, enabling you to immediately respond to any critical issues that may arise. The Optimiser also allows you to pause and prioritise actions as required based on the recommendations, helping to streamline the optimisation process.
5. Marketing Cloud WhatsApp Messaging: Personalised Engagement with Customers
Salesforce has integrated WhatsApp messaging channels into its platform, offering you a new and simplified way to engage with your customers through integrated WhatsApp messaging channels. Get the conversations started with your global audience and gain even more personalised customer insights through WhatsApp Chat (Sinch) and Business (Meta) Messaging. The integration enables direct communication with your customers, allowing you to efficiently manage and track interactions with them.
You can use the Contact Builder to manage your opt-in audience from the Salesforce data cloud and create highly personalised engagement content with the Content Builder to initiate a WhatsApp journey with your customers. You can provide custom promotions and templates, as well as one-to-one messaging experiences, to enrich and promote your marketing content and drive more sales with actionable messages. The platform also allows businesses to connect with their customers around the clock, enabling you to provide better customer assistance and reduced wait times. Similarly, you can embed a Click-to-WhatsApp option in emails, text messages, and other advertising options to connect with possible leads or customer prospects in real time from various channels.
Rest assured, Salesforce and WhatsApp prioritise users’ privacy and security concerns, and every message exchanged in the app is encrypted.
6. Review External Action Errors for Error-free Automation
Salesforce’s latest release introduces a new feature that enables businesses to monitor external app integration errors that may hinder automation processes. With a dedicated tab to monitor errors for external actions, it is easier for you to find the root cause of the errors and the specific automation or process that has been affected. With this information, you can then create an effective diagnosis and solve issues accordingly to ensure your automations continue to run smoothly as intended. This helps you reduce disruptions to workflow caused by any external app integration errors, thus giving you greater control over such processes and helping you achieve more work efficiency.
With these latest advancements and features, Salesforce Spring Release ’23 certainly strives to offer unique ways to reinforce your marketing strategies and capabilities for business success.
And while you’re here, do visit our Salesforce Spring 2023 highlights blog to see more of our favourite features from Salesforce.