markus.codes

I highlight my top 3 new features for Salesforce Marketing Cloud that will be introduced with the April ‘21 release. Have a look at the video or - if you prefer a text version - the transcript I prepared.

If you like what you’ve learned, please like the video and subscribe to my channel!

Transcript

Hello and welcome to my YouTube channel “markus codes”. In today’s episode I’m going to talk about the Marketing Cloud April ‘21 release. I picked three features that I want to highlight today:

The first one being a new activity for Journey Builder that lets you wait until an external event occurs. The second one is something that really helps if you need to deploy stuff to another environment - it’s the package manager that let’s you do exactly that. And the third thing is an integration that lets you pull data from an Amazon S3 bucket.

So what’s new in Journey Builder?

That new activity let’s you optimize your journeys by pulling together multiple journeys from one campaign, that you only split because of technical boundaries we previously had.

Let’s say you want to send a form to a customer and want that customer to proceed through the journey just as the form is submitted. Previously you had to split the campaign into two journeys - one until the form is sent to the customer and the second one after the submission. Another option was introducing a regular wait step, but you couldn’t trigger an immediate action after submission with that workaround. But now that’s all possible and you have a better maintainability and monitoring of your campaigns because you have everything consolidated in one journey.

What you can also do is define a maximum wait period and if the event doesn’t occur for a specific contact until that period is over, it will go through the alternative path. That also happens for contacts for whom the event is triggered but a certain filter criteria isn’t fulfilled.

From a configuration perspective it’s just like any other activity - drag and drop it to the interface, click on it and configure it. You can configure the API event, a data extension to log the event data to, a filter that defines if a contact goes down the first or second path and as already mentioned - a maximum duration for that wait activity.

In my opinion this is a great addition to Journey Builder and you should definitely have a look at it and see how it can improve your campaigns.

Marketing Cloud Package Manager

What will also save you a lot of time if you are developing and testing in a separate business unit or instance, as well as if you do international rollouts, is the package manager. It is the evolution of the deployment manager that has been available for quite some time now. It now let’s you group together certain assets that are preconfigured and let’s you deploy those packages to other business units. That works for:

• Data Model
• Journeys
• Automations
• Content

The great thing - it is also free of charge for all Marketing Cloud editions. In the interface, you have a selection of everything that can be deployed, you can group those assets together and deploy them as a package afterwards.

That will definitely save me some time - and I hope it will also do that for you!

Amazon S3 Integration

The next thing I’m going to talk about is the Amazon S3 integration. As you might have already guessed, it’s an integration that can be done via the file locations, so just like you would set up an additional FTP. But in that case you set up an Amazon S3 bucket. If you are already using Amazon S3, it’s a great addition to import data from there instead of having to move it to an FTP server before. This file location is something that can be used in Automation Studio - and if you ask me it’s a great addition to the platform’s integration options to other systems.

Futher Highlights

But that’s not all from the April release, so there is a lot more that you can have a look at and will probably enhance your experience. For example a Data Quality indicator for the Marketing Cloud Einstein products, enhancements to Datorama features, Interaction Studio and a lot more.

In order for you to have an opportunity to check them out, here you can find the official release notes.

If you liked that overview, I’d appreciate it if you also like the video on YouTube. And to stay up-to-date and don’t miss any of my Marketing Cloud updates, please subscribe to my channel! Thanks for watching and have a great day!