It’s that time of year again, and with the change of seasons comes the introduction of new Marketing Cloud features. Winter ’23 contains some fantastic enhancements, some of which we’ve outlined below!
Name changes within Marketing Cloud
Over the last few months, we’ve seen a number of name changes within the Salesforce marketing world. Within this release, it’s the turn of Interaction Studio and Advertising Studio. Whilst the functionality of the tools won’t differ, you will see the name of Interaction Studio change to Marketing Cloud Personalization, and Advertising Studio will become Marketing Cloud Advertising.
New Data View Tables to help manage your Automation
One of the most integral features within targeting and segmentation are Data View tables, which provide behavioural insights into subscriber data alongside attributable information. The latest of these tables to be introduced relate to the newly coined Marketing Cloud Advertising tool within Marketing Cloud and will enable marketers to troubleshoot on the health of automations. Use an SQL query to find information held within the _AutomationInstance or _AutomationActivityInstance tables.
To find out more about the structure of the new tables, use the links below:
AutomationInstance
https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/marketing/marketing-cloud/guide/automationinstance.html
AutomationActivityInstance
Trigger Starting Source
When kicking off an automation in Automation Studio, the current options are File Drop or Schedule. Scheduling an automation run is straightforward – you need to choose the day, time, how often you want the automation to run and how long for.
File Drops trigger an automation to start when a file appears within a selected area of the FTP, meaning that a 3rd party solution can drop a file onto the FTP to start the automation within Marketing Cloud. The FTP works as a middleman between those working within Marketing Cloud, and those not utilising the platform.
The new Trigger Starting Source skips the intermediary FTP by enabling a direct API call to another system. Create or modify an automation using the Trigger Starting Source within the automation canvas. Specify where the file exists, and start the automation by calling the trigger API, which will transfer the information from the source file (held in Amazon S3, Azure Blog Storage or Google Cloud Storage) into Marketing Cloud.
Journey Validation Functionality
Journey Builder journeys often show warnings and issues when running the Validation tool. The newly enhanced Validation functionality proactively shows warnings for any configuration issues, which enables the users to view and rectify any issues impacting the journey’s performance.
This way, you can achieve maximum scale and performance for each journey, and each customer gets the best experience as they make their way through your journey. Whilst the warnings do not prevent you from starting to run the journey, they will ensure that you make any necessary changes to make your journey a success and connect with each customer.
Configure a Phone Number Across Multiple Clouds with Distributed Marketing
Phone number configuration is now consistent across all supported clouds – a Distributed Marketing administrator can manually set the value to use, and any prior settings are no longer in effect when it is enabled. Use the toggle to enable SMS Phone Field Configuration in the Distributed Marketing Admin page.
Use Favourites for Easier Access to Quick Send Content
You can now use Favourites to access your content quicker. By clicking the new star icon on your content, you can tag favourites when viewing Quick Sends. Filter through your content list for favourites. You can also manage your favourite content within the Quick Send Flow. Each favourite list is specific to each user and won’t be accessed by anyone else.
Filtering with Formula Fields Is No Longer Supported
Creating objects that use formula fields as a filter is no longer supported. You should be looking to update your existing filters to avoid issues with formula fields. You have until Spring ’23 to remove these filters, at which point support will no longer be available.
Monitor Marketing Cloud Engagement in Slack
Use the Digital Command Center in the Slack app to monitor automated processes within Marketing Cloud. From the Slack app, you can take immediate action on anything that is affecting the process by providing thresholds of abnormal activity according to business needs. Ask your administrator to add the Digital Command Center to your Slack app and connect your Marketing Cloud instance to the Command Center.
If you need any help with Marketing Cloud, read more about our services, or contact us.