What’s New in Marketing Cloud - January 2020 Release

With the new year, new features are coming to Salesforce products. Last week I wrote a piece on what’s coming to the Sales Cloud (lots of cool stuff so check it out). This week, it’s time to talk about the Marketing Cloud.
Let’s get started.
If you are a Marketing Cloud user, you’ve probably already noticed some changes that came with the new release - a new Einstein icon in the navigation bar or a new creation menu in Journey Builder.
But not everything is visible to the naked eye. Let’s take a deeper look at some of the most interesting new features that are coming to Marketing Cloud in the January 2020 Release.
Streamline User Creation Process in Marketing Cloud
Let’s kick off with some administration staff.
Creating new users became much simpler in the new release of Marketing Cloud. From now on, you can add users directly from Setup Home. Just click on the “Create” button in the upper right hand corner and follow the instructions - you can add contact information and assign appropriate roles.
A basic, but much welcomed feature.

Classic Content Retirement
If any of you folks out there are still using Classic Emails, it’s time to take a deep breath and finally say goodbye to them. Creating new Classic Emails will be retired in June ‘20, and editing any existing Classic Emails won’t be available after January ‘21.
Use Content from Sitecore Content Hub in Content Builder
Build your email messages using images stored in Sitecore Content Hub. You can resize and crop the images to fit your message to create beautiful designs that will captivate your customers’ attention.
Note: Remember that images from the Sitecore Content Hub don’t exist in Content Builder. This means tagging them is not possible!
Nested Tags
An enhancement to one of the features introduced in the October ‘19 Release. Nested tags can now be added directly from the Content Builder library. You can tag multiple assets using Content Builder’s grid view.

Single and Multi Sends in Journey Builder
Are you doing a lot of single email sends using Journey Builder? If so, this change might help you navigate through all of your journeys.
From now on, when creating a new journey you have a choice to create a simple Single Send journey, or a more sophisticated Multi-Step Journey. You can easily navigate between them in the Journey Dashboard.

Distributed Marketing
Salesforce introduced Distributed Marketing some time ago and has been regularly improving it with each new Release. It’s no different this time.
Let’s take a look at some new exciting features that the January 2020 Release brings to the table for Distributed Marketing:
- Send messages to up to 25,000 people (contact/leads/person accounts) in a single Quick Send. A big improvement from the 75 contacts limit.
- Enhance your one-off sends by adding non-message activities into journeys. This allows you to create tasks for sales reps or other activities that will not only engage your customers, but your business users as well.
- Bring new personalization options for your sales reps and marketers with the Distributed Marketing Multivariate Block. This new feature allows you to create up to 12 different content variations that business users can select from when personalizing messages. It’s a great way to give your business users an opportunity to participate in the personalization process while still remaining control of what they can do.
And there’s still more - 9 new features/improvement in total were introduced for Distributed Marketing in this release. Click here to read about them.
Manage Access to CloudPages with Roles and Permissions
Some more permission management to increase security in your account. Go to Marketing Cloud Setup manage app functions by user, including view, create, delete, edit, publish or unpublish for landing pages, microsites, MobilePushpages and other types of web content.
Einstein Messaging Insights
You might have already noticed an Einstein Icon at the top of the MC toolbar. Use this new tool to discover which factors affect your subscribers’ behavior in your journey and batch sends.
Any time Einstein sees an unusual anomaly in performance, a new notification appears.
It’s a very easy-to-use and very easy to find tool, so make sure you take advantage of this new feature.
Einstein Copy Insights
We all know how very important subject lines are in the email creation process. Einstein Copy Insights is another AI-powered feature that will allow you to optimize your subject lines like never before. This powerful tool gives you data-based insights on how to refine the subject line to create an engaging message and make sure that your next big email campaign will reach your audience.
Instagram Story Publishing in Social Studio
From now on, you can create Instagram Stories directly in Social Studio and assign them to mobile users to publish them.
Updated SMS Journey Builder Activity Name
Say goodbye to Reporting IDs when using SMS activity in Journey Builder. Now you can name your SMS messages any way you want. This makes identifying your messages in reporting much easier. Just remember that any running journeys activities continue to use Reporting ID.

Some other honorable mentions include:
- Datarama Data Lake
- Consumer Right Management in
- Audience Studio
- Parameter Manager
...and many more.
These are just some of the many new features coming to Marketing Cloud in January 2020 Release.
Click here to access full Release Notes.
Even if you aren’t using all of the fancy tools Marketing Cloud has to offer, it’s always nice to know what other solutions are out there. And you never know, a functionality you were looking for might be available in a different MC product. So, happy reading!