Every Spring, Summer and Winter, our friends at Salesforce announce major releases aimed at improving the performance, security, logic, and usability of the Salesforce platform. These new features and functionality (and sometime new products) become readily available to Salesforce customers across their suite of products. Our Bold Orange Salesforce Marketing Cloud practice recently met to discuss the Winter ’23 Release notes which runs from October 5 – October 28, 2022.

See what we’re most looking forward to leveraging with our current and future clients.

Slack enabled Journey and Automation Monitoring

A long-endured pain point of Marketing Cloud has been the lack of monitoring for evergreen automations and journeys. Now, with Slack’s digital command center, users can proactively monitor journeys and automations, looking for things like performance drops, notify their teams automatically and drive actions to triage and rectify. Users can also set customizable thresholds for things like journey send volumes, open and unsubscribe rates which trigger a notification with little to no configuration.

Einstein Content Testing

Another new addition? Einstein Content Testing. This feature allows users to run manual or automated tests. The exciting thing about both of these test types is that they support A/B testing in Journey Builder, something that historically required manual intervention to deploy a “winner.” The manual feature allows you to split an audience and then manually deploy a winner once a designated engagement threshold is met. On the flip side, the automated feature uses multi-armed bandit testing, allowing users to test and learn throughout the duration of a send versus splitting an audience and manually deploying a “winner.” A lower level of experimenting happens throughout the duration of the journey, continually gathering data and pivoting content as more statistical significance is gained.  It maximizes for a given metric and this feature will automatically display the “winning” content (based on click to open rate) over a period of time.

Consent Data Model

Finally, users can now apply a standard, centralized data model for managing consent across leads, users, person accounts and contacts in Sales and Service Cloud through the Consent Data Model. For those that utilize Marketing Cloud Connect, this allows for a consistent application of consent at a global, channel and brand level. Marketing Cloud admins can use these new objects and include them in their sync, assuming these design considerations are fully understood, and use this data to access and interpret their customer data and preferences at a more granular level than ever before.

Other items of note in this release:

  • Package interactive emails in package manager
  • New data views to support automation monitoring
  • Trigger file imports from Amazon S3 buckets and others
  • Self-service for securing custom domains

More details from Salesforce product experts on the items included in this release will be available during the new feature overview session on October 27th at 11pm CDT. You can register for the event here.

At Bold Orange when exploring new features and functionality within the platform, we keep in mind how they ladder up to our individual client’s strategy. And even moreso, how we can start with a prioritization approach and actually drive the organization forward. When you marry up these new capabilities of the platform with prioritized use cases, that’s when the magic happens, making results both measurable and actionable.