Salesforce Introduces Advanced Edition at Dreamforce 2024
At the Marketing Keynote at Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce announced an exciting expansion to its suite of marketing solutions — the Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, which builds upon the existing Marketing Cloud Growth Edition and offers even more powerful tools to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) engage their customers in a more personalized and efficient way.
With customer expectations rapidly evolving, Salesforce recognizes the need for marketing platforms that deliver consistent engagement across channels, from marketing to sales, service, and commerce. The Advanced Edition, therefore, comes at a critical time for SMBs striving to innovate, leverage new technologies, and scale their marketing efforts effectively.
In this article, we will explore what this announcement means for businesses and provide a detailed comparison between the Growth and Advanced Editions. The DESelect Marketing Optimization Platform complements these offerings to maximize their potential.
Recap of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Growth Edition
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Growth Edition was initially introduced to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), particularly B2B organizations, scale their marketing efforts with an integrated platform that combines data management, AI capabilities, and marketing automation. Here’s a comprehensive look at its core features:
AI-Powered Campaigns
Automate and optimize email marketing campaigns using AI insights to better target and engage audiences. Einstein AI enables predictive analytics to enhance campaign effectiveness, ensuring content reaches the right people at the right time.
AI-Powered Segmentation
Leverage machine learning to segment customers based on behavior, demographics, and preferences. This feature allows marketers to create highly targeted audiences, enhancing the relevance and personalization of marketing messages.
Email Marketing
Utilize robust tools for creating, sending, and analyzing email campaigns. The platform includes customizable templates, drag-and-drop builders, and comprehensive analytics to track performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions.
Forms and Landing Pages
Easily build responsive forms and landing pages to capture leads, drive engagement, and convert visitors into customers. The Growth Edition provides templates and drag-and-drop builders to streamline this process.
Lead Scoring
Identify and prioritize potential leads based on their behavior and interaction with marketing content. This scoring helps sales teams focus on the most promising prospects, improving conversion rates.
Multi-Channel Journeys
Design and automate customer journeys across multiple channels, including email, social media, and SMS. This capability ensures consistent engagement and messaging throughout the customer lifecycle.
Web Tracking and Analytics
Gain insights into customer behavior on your website. Understand which pages are driving the most traffic and engagement, and use this data to optimize your content and marketing strategies.
Consent Management
Manage customer consent and preferences to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations like GDPR. This feature provides tools for capturing and storing consent, along with options for customers to manage their communication preferences.
Send Time Optimization
Use AI to determine the best times to send emails to maximize engagement rates. This tool analyzes past engagement data to identify optimal send times for different segments of your audience.
Cross-Object Merge Fields
Easily merge data from different Salesforce objects (such as Contacts, Accounts, or Opportunities) into a single view to personalize communications.
Dynamic Content
Customize email content dynamically based on user behavior, preferences, or attributes. This ensures that each customer receives relevant and personalized messages.
Campaign Attribution Reporting
Track the performance and ROI of your marketing campaigns, linking them directly to business outcomes such as revenue growth or lead generation.
SMS (Add-On)
Engage customers via SMS as an additional communication channel, particularly useful for time-sensitive offers or updates.
For a more in-depth exploration of the Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, check out this article, which provides a foundational overview, including setup, use cases, and benefits for B2B SMBs.
Key Features of Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition
The Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition builds upon the robust capabilities of the Growth Edition, expanding its feature set to meet the needs of both B2B and B2C SMBs. It includes all the functionality of the Growth Edition plus several new enhancements that make it a more powerful tool for marketers aiming to drive engagement, improve personalization, and optimize marketing performance.
Path Experimentation
The Advanced Edition introduces path experimentation, allowing marketers to test up to 10 different customer journey variations with varied channels, messaging copy, and cadence. This feature supports unbiased testing across multiple channels (e.g., email vs. SMS) to determine which strategies are most effective. Automatic randomization ensures unbiased results, and campaign effectiveness is maximized by tailoring paths based on performance.
AI-Powered Engagement Tools
- Einstein Engagement Frequency: This feature leverages AI to suggest the optimal frequency for messaging, preventing over-saturation or under-communication. It provides real-time insights into message effectiveness and dynamically adjusts send frequencies to enhance engagement.
- Einstein Engagement Scoring: This capability uses AI to automate lead scoring by evaluating engagement levels, helping marketers identify and prioritize the most promising leads. Every individual is scored on their likelihood to open, click and stay subscribed to email and to convert, enabling marketers to create audiences, segments, split paths in Flow, and personalize content.
Conversational SMS*
Integrates SMS with marketing and service functions to turn one-way promotions into a connected conversation experience. Marketing messages can be handed off to human agents or bots in real-time based on the context, ensuring a consistent and responsive interaction.
*Requires Salesforce Digital Engagement and Service Cloud.
Opportunity Influence
This new feature, available in both Growth and Advanced Editions, helps marketers understand the impact of their campaigns on sales by providing first- and last-touch attribution. It links marketing engagement data to sales opportunities, highlighting the contribution of marketing to the overall revenue.
Dynamic Content and AI-Enhanced Campaign Building
The Growth and Advanced Editions streamline the creation of dynamic content directly within the campaign builder, reducing workflow friction and speeding up the content creation process.
Comparison Table: Growth Edition vs. Advanced Edition
Feature | Growth Edition | Advanced Edition |
|---|---|---|
AI-Powered Campaigns | ✓ | ✓ |
AI-Powered Segments | ✓ | ✓ |
Path Experimentation | — | ✓ |
AI-Powered Engagement Frequency | — | ✓ |
AI-Powered Engagement Scoring | — | ✓ |
Conversational SMS | — | Add-on |
Opportunity Influence | ✓ | ✓ |
Dynamic Content | ✓ | ✓ |
How DESelect Optimizes Advanced Edition
The Advanced Edition’s new features, particularly Einstein Engagement Frequency, align perfectly with the capabilities of DESelect Engage. By integrating with Salesforce Flow, DESelect Engage can further optimize send frequencies, ensuring that customers receive the right messages at the right times. To get in touch directly with a DESelect Salesforce Marketing Cloud Expert, book a meeting here.
Conclusion
Salesforce’s strategic direction is clear: empowering SMBs with more robust, integrated, and AI-driven marketing solutions. The Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition not only enhances the capabilities of the original Growth Edition but also opens new avenues for B2B and B2C companies to innovate and scale their marketing efforts effectively. As Salesforce continues to build on its powerful platform, DESelect is excited to support and enhance this journey with our specialized solutions. The future of marketing looks brighter than ever, and we’re thrilled to be a part of it!
