Marketing Cloud Winter ‘21 Release Notes

Marketing Cloud Winter ‘21 Release

We have already looked at what’s coming to Salesforce Sales Cloud and Lightning Flow in the new Winter ‘21 Release. Now, it’s time to check what’s happening with everybody’s favorite marketing tool.

The latest Salesforce Marketing Cloud Winter ‘21 Release brings a lot to the table. This time, we aren’t just getting enhancements and features to the existing tools, but brand-new studios that are bound to help boost your marketing efforts.

With that said, let’s dig in!

Interaction Studio

Deliver an even more improved 1-to-1 marketing to your customers by optimizing their real-time web experience.

Interaction Studio lets you view real-time data about any type of interaction from your customers.

We aren’t just talking about conversions data, but all possible insights that might help you understand who the customer is and what they want, such as scroll depth, mouse movement and any sort of behavioral data you need.

Based on the user’s interactions, the tool automatically displays relevant content to each customer, giving them a truly personalized experience.

See the Release Notes

Enhancements to Journey Builder

There are a lot of new features and improvements coming to Journey Builder in the Marketing Cloud Winter ‘21 Release. Here are the most exciting ones:

  1. Determine the optimal path with A/B and multi-varied tests. Just drag and drop a new Path Optimizer element and configure winner evaluation, which determines how the winning path is selected. This is a great way to test out your emails - something that wasn’t possible in journey builder before without having to use some workaround techniques.
  2. Single Send Journeys can now send one-time messages, regardless of channel, including SMS and Mobile Push. This provides a simplified way for sending messages for all users.
  3. Create, manage and personalize transactional API emails with Journey Builder without developer support! Well, you still need some help from a developer to connect a specific event to the Marketing Cloud, but once that’s done, you can freely configure the message with Journey Builder. It’s a great improvement in managing these types of messages, especially since the automated emails are a must in all kinds of business transactions. Also, transactional send journeys are the fastest way to send transactional messages (faster than the record-triggered sends).

See the Release Notes

Einstein Send Time Optimization for Mobile

Send push notifications at the best time for each customer. Einstein STO is finally coming to mobile. If you have never used it, here’s a short explanation on how it works:

Einstein Send Time Optimization determines the best time to send a message to each individual user based on their historical engagement patterns. When Einstein doesn’t have enough information to create a model for a contact, it uses a generalized model. With the Send Time Optimization you can increase your customer’s engagement and get the results you could never achieve with manual testing and configuration.

See the Release Notes

Upgraded Einstein Engagement Frequency for Email

Another very useful Einstein functionality that increases email open rates. Based on historical performance Einstein can predict optimal email send frequency for each customer. This way you can avoid “contact fatigue” from sending too many messages, which directly translates to better engagement and customer satisfaction.

See the Release Notes

Customer 360 Audiences

In the Winter ‘21 Release Salesforce Marketing Cloud introduces a new customer data platform for marketers.

With Customer 360 Audiences you can create a marketer’s source of truth by unifying all your customer data in one place. Customer 360 Audiences enables you to ingest and curate data to create connected and personalized experiences for your clients across every touchpoint.

While the interaction studio focuses on real-time personalization, Customer 360 Audiences provides a data system to store, segment and understand customer data.

Both products are built to work together, but can be utilized independently. If you are planning on choosing only one of them, the decision should be based on what your pain points are.

If you are looking for a better way to manage customer data that you can use for insights and analysis, go for the Customer 360 Audiences.

If you want to optimize and personalize your content in real-time, start with the Interaction Studio.

See the Release Notes

Conclusion

As you can see, the new features are big this time! If you are looking to further enhance your marketing campaigns, you should definitely try them.

Click here for the full documentation on the Marketing Cloud Winter ‘21 Release.