(Marketing + Data + AI = Growth Edition)
The Salesforce community has been buzzing ever since the announcement of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, a new marketing platform from Salesforce. Growth Edition is intended for small businesses in the B2B space, but we predict this is the beginning of a whole new generation of Marketing Cloud solutions. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is built on top of Salesforce Data Cloud technology and it’s the first iteration of Marketing Cloud on the Einstein 1 Platform.
Historically marketers have used various data repositories connected to marketing execution point solutions to build segments, deploy campaigns, and perform analytics. With the advent of generative AI tools, marketers are scrambling to determine how to bring AI into already cumbersome martech stacks. The beauty of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is having one unified platform that’s built on Data Cloud and has embedded CRM, generative AI, marketing automation, and analytics capabilities.
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition does not replace existing Salesforce solutions, Marketing Cloud Engagement or Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. It’s simply the next generation and another option, and it’s likely that the innovation in Growth Edition will lead to great things for all Salesforce users.
A Few of Our Favorite Things
Our friends at Salesforce Ben wrote a great summary of the new features of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. In this article, we’ll break down the capabilities that we are most excited about.
As we mentioned, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition combines classic core/CRM functionality, powerful Data Cloud features, innovative generative AI functionality, and brand-building marketing capabilities. Honing in some specific capabilities:
1. Scoring & Insights
This is an exciting feature set because lead scoring and grading is a capability that longtime Marketing Cloud Engagement users have been wanting.
Engagement Scoring: This is a way to score engagement and segment audiences based on that score. This feature allows us to combine behavioral data (like clicks) with grading rules (which could include demographic information, for example) to create a scoring attribute that can then be used to create segments.
2. Campaigns & AI
New generative AI features will be a game changer for campaign production, giving marketers the ability to get their messages out faster than ever before.
Einstein Co-Create: In this new interface, users are able to leverage Einstein in bigger and better ways. With Einstein Co-Create, you can spin up a new email campaign with consideration for tone and length with the help of generative AI through conversational prompts.
For all the one-person or small but mighty teams, this is how you are going to grow at scale quicker with less time sunk into copywriting.
Message Template Series: Salesforce Admins get your confetti ready; this new template series will launch an interface to configure multi-step messaging campaigns with Flow Builder that will feel very similar to those familiar with Journey Builder and/or Engagement Studio. Here you can leverage Einstein AI capabilities such as Send-Time Optimization to ensure your subscribers are getting your message at the right time.
3. Optimized Email Building & Sending
Builder: This builder works in a step-by-step fashion, functionally prompting users to define their audience, generate their message, define the friendly “from” for sending, set the tracking parameters (clicks, opens, etc), and schedule the email for deployment.
Einstein STO & Scheduling: This one is for all the Einstein-AI fanatics out there. With the new Growth Edition, you’ll be able to launch send time optimization (STO) on as many series as you select. With STO, your send will automatically be deployed at the best day/time based on your historical performance.
Flow-Powered Campaigns: We all know Flow as the automation backdrop for Salesforce CRM; however, this new use of Flow technology is a level-up. A few of the main features include minute-based wait steps for sending, event-based actions, and email sending all under one view.
As Growth Edition and future editions are expanded, we’re excited to see what the future of marketing automation looks like with Flow as the backdrop. Flow, connected to all data in Data Cloud across sales, service, commerce, and marketing, could kick off automations that do a tremendous amount of work that is manual today across an organization.
4. Content Creation with Salesforce CMS
In Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, you will be able to build and host emails, landing pages, and forms to drive your marketing efforts. It gets better though: Growth Edition leverages Salesforce CMS to ensure a consistent user experience as you build your marketing assets. That means you’ll be able to enjoy the drag-and-drop experience for content creation that stays true to the Salesforce ethos of “clicks not code.” You will be able to create emails and forms in a fraction of the time it takes in other platforms.
Beyond hosting and building, the Brand Center (currently in beta), helps ensure consistent brand styling across content types. So whether your clients/customers are on a form of yours, reading your email, or getting to your landing page, you can sleep soundly knowing your branding stays consistent.
Additional Things to Come
Marketing Cloud Growth Edition Analytics
Dashboards Galore: We don’t know the exact parameters of the Marketing Cloud Growth Edition dashboards, but we know they will be built off of that Data Cloud foundation and leverage a traditional dashboard setup with accompanying reports. We’re waiting for more, and so far, it looks like something that is only going to get better.
Want to learn more?
If you’re a smaller organization or in the B2B space and this sounds amazing to you, give us a call. Let’s talk through it.
We will be publishing more on Marketing Cloud Growth Edition – stay tuned for more.
