Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions

Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is the next evolution of their Marketing Cloud product suite, specifically designed to empower small businesses by offering advanced marketing capabilities, enhanced automation, and AI-powered tools. Building on the foundation of the previously launched Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, Advanced Edition introduces new functionality aimed at improving personalization, customer engagement, and operational efficiency for growing businesses. Unveiled at Dreamforce 2024, the new edition will be available in November 2024, offering small businesses an expanded toolset to meet their marketing goals with greater precision and ease. Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions.

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Why Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition Matters for Small Businesses

Small businesses often face unique challenges, such as limited resources, smaller teams, and tighter budgets, but they are expected to deliver the same high-quality experiences as larger competitors. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition was launched earlier in 2024 to help address these challenges by allowing small businesses to connect marketing, sales, service, and commerce on one platform.

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition takes this a step further by offering even more functionality to help businesses scale their personalization efforts, increase team efficiency, and deliver smarter marketing campaigns with the power of Salesforce’s AI and Data Cloud technologies. As the next tier in the Marketing Cloud suite, it introduces new tools to automate repetitive tasks, provide deeper insights into customer behaviors, and optimize marketing communications in real time.

How Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition Differs from Growth Edition

At its core, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition builds on the foundation established by Growth Edition. Both editions are part of the new generation of Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud on Core, which is built on top of Data Cloud—the underlying data platform that ensures seamless integration and flow of data between various Salesforce Clouds like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Commerce Cloud. However, the key difference between these editions lies in the depth of functionality.

While Growth Edition is tailored to small businesses looking to get started with robust marketing automation, Advanced Edition caters to companies that need more sophisticated tools to scale personalization efforts, improve customer engagement, and streamline workflows. It offers additional features, including real-time journey testing, predictive AI for customer scoring, and advanced SMS capabilities, allowing businesses to enhance every touchpoint with their customers.

Key Features of Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition

Unified Conversations for SMS Messaging Advanced Edition revolutionizes SMS messaging by introducing Unified Conversations for SMS, a feature that allows businesses to unify customer communications across marketing, service, and commerce using a single SMS number. This two-way messaging capability enables deeper engagement by allowing customers to seamlessly interact with your business across different departments. For example, a telecom company can use this feature to keep both sales and service teams informed of customer actions in a churn campaign. Service teams can assist with onboarding or troubleshooting while sales teams can focus on contract renewals, all through a unified SMS channel.Additionally, marketers can gather insights from customer responses, such as demographic data, affinities, and purchase intent, and use this data to further refine campaigns. However, this capability requires the Digital Engagement SKU and an SMS add-on.
Real-time Journey Testing with Path Experiment One of the challenges in creating effective marketing journeys is the ability to test various approaches to see which works best. With the Path Experiment feature in Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, businesses can now experiment with different customer journeys in real-time. This tool allows marketers to test various paths that customers can take, whether it’s through email, SMS, or other channels.By randomly assigning customers to different paths, marketers can gather unbiased data and adjust their strategies accordingly. This feature helps businesses optimize customer interactions and improve campaign outcomes, as it allows for continuous tweaking and refinement of customer experiences based on real-world data.
AI-Powered Messaging with Einstein Engagement Frequency One of the cardinal rules of effective marketing is to avoid overwhelming your customers with too many messages. Einstein Engagement Frequency in Advanced Edition helps small businesses strike the right balance by using AI to determine how frequently a customer should be contacted.This tool automatically evaluates how many messages a customer has received across different channels and prevents oversaturation by removing them from journeys if they’ve received too many. Conversely, if a customer hasn’t received enough outreach, Einstein Engagement Frequency can add them to a journey. This ensures that marketing efforts are both effective and considerate of the customer’s experience.
Predictive Customer Insights with Einstein Engagement Scoring Understanding which customers are ready to make a purchase and which need more nurturing can be a manual, time-consuming process. Einstein Engagement Scoring changes that by using AI to predict customer behavior, helping marketers prioritize their efforts based on real-time insights. This feature assigns engagement scores to customers based on their interactions with marketing content, such as email opens, clicks, and website visits. Marketers can use these predictive scores to segment customers, create more personalized journeys, and optimize conversion efforts. Einstein Engagement Scoring eliminates guesswork, allowing small businesses to act quickly on valuable insights and focus on their most engaged and interested customers.
Rules-Based Dynamic Content Personalization is key to modern marketing, and Rules-Based Dynamic Content enables marketers to deliver highly customized content to different customer segments based on their profile data. Instead of creating separate emails for different audience segments, marketers can build a single email with dynamic content blocks that adjust based on a recipient’s attributes. For example, a retail brand could use dynamic content to display different product recommendations to customers based on their past purchase history or location. This feature not only improves personalization but also enhances operational efficiency by reducing the time it takes to create multiple versions of the same campaign.
Opportunity Influence for Smarter Attribution Opportunity Influence is a new feature in Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition that builds on the concept of Campaign Influence but with a more streamlined approach. This feature automatically links marketing activities, such as email clicks or content engagement, to opportunities in the sales pipeline, giving marketers better visibility into the direct impact of their campaigns on revenue. With first-touch and last-touch attribution options, marketers can understand which campaigns are driving awareness and which ones are closing deals, providing them with actionable insights to refine their strategies.
Event-Triggered Campaign Flows Event-triggered flows allow marketers to initiate specific actions based on customer behavior or events, such as completing a purchase or abandoning a cart. Event-Triggered Campaign Flows enable businesses to create highly responsive and timely marketing campaigns that react to customer actions in real time. For example, a customer who abandons a shopping cart could automatically receive an email reminder or a promotional SMS offering a discount. Over time, Salesforce plans to expand the types of events that can trigger flows, making this feature even more powerful for businesses looking to create personalized, event-driven marketing experiences.

Global Expansion and Availability

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition will initially launch in North America, Latin America, and Europe in November 2024, with further regions being added in the future. Both Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions require Salesforce Enterprise Edition (Sales/Service) or higher, making them ideal for businesses looking to scale their operations.

Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is a robust toolset that offers small businesses the opportunity to scale their marketing efforts with cutting-edge technology. From AI-powered messaging and real-time journey testing to unified SMS conversations and predictive customer scoring, Advanced Edition provides businesses with the tools they need to better understand their customers, optimize their outreach, and drive meaningful engagement. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is the previous iteration.

With the flexibility to grow alongside businesses and the power of Salesforce’s Einstein AI and Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition helps companies deliver smarter, more personalized marketing campaigns. As Salesforce continues to expand its marketing offerings, small businesses now have access to enterprise-level tools to compete on a larger stage and deliver exceptional customer experiences at every touchpoint.

With the recent update of Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, Tectonic has updated this content.

Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions

Content Updated October 2024.