Let's take a look at the marketing updates that have been introduced in the Salesforce Winter '23 release.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)
Automate Tasks with Extensibility Enhancements
As part of extensibility enhancements, you can now take actions on prospects outside of Account Engagement. Supercharge your Engagement Studio programmes by automatically registering prospects for a webinar, sending them an SMS, creating a new lead in Salesforce, and lots more! External actions are built on invocable actions, so you can customise them to fit your business needs. Use external actions independently or in combination with external activities to close automation gaps across platforms.
One thing to note is that you will still be seeing the Pardot name around for a while until everything gets switched over to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement…
So why do you want to do this you might be asking? Most marketing teams use multiple applications to work with prospects and nurture leads. These extensibility enhancements remove barriers for marketers between Account Engagement and other applications they use to get their jobs done. You can now use these actions to link external applications to MCAE.
How do you do this then? Each third-party app you use to interact with prospects, set up a marketing app extension and work with your developer to create the invocable action that fits your use case. Then, add an action type to your marketing app extension.
After the action is configured, your marketing team can use it in Engagement Studio programs.
Simplify Prospect Opt-Out Status Between Account Engagement and Salesforce
You now will have to choose either Salesforce or MCAE as the system of record for where prospects opt-out. Previously this used the most recently updated value.
This is going to apply to anyone out there who has a connector between Salesforce and MCAE/Pardot.
So, you might be asking how you do this. Edit the default prospect Opted Out field and select an option under the Sync Behaviour dropdown. After you make a selection, the option to use the most recently updated record isn't available anymore.
This is already up and running and Business units created after that date are set to use Pardot by default.
Form Security Features Now Mandatory
A security update that better protects your forms and marketing content can affect forms served over the default go.pardot.com domain. For continuous form support, we recommend that you use a custom domain with forms or use them with Account Engagement landing pages. To find out where affected forms are being used, refer to the Content Served Using the Default Domain report in your business unit settings.
This is for everyone using MCAE and went live a couple of weeks ago. One thing to note is that this is unable to be switched off.
Update WordPress Plug-In After the Security Update
The August 2022 security update that better protects your forms and marketing content affects the WordPress plug-in for Account Engagement. To get the latest updates, clear the cache in the WordPress plug-in settings.
This also went live a couple of weeks ago… to make sure that this is functioning, go to the WordPress admin dashboard, open the setting for Pardot/MCAE plugin and then click Clear Cache.
Tracking Pausing
In Account Engagement (Pardot) you can pause activity tracking for prospects with a large amount of activity. A prospect’s activity tracking is paused only if it impacts Account Engagement’s performance. Paused prospects who are opted in will still receive marketing emails.
If this feels impersonal at all, it’s not. The reality is that these thousands of activities are captured by bots, so this is data we don’t want.
Another example might be that the tracking code is placed in a site that has a high volume of traffic (homepage etc) so to avoid pausing the wrong people, think about where you want your codes to be placed.
Read our Platform and Analytics release blogs or watch our Salesforce Winter '23 release video!