Marketing Cloud: January 2021 Release Updates

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This is a podcast episode titled, Marketing Cloud: January 2021 Release Updates. The summary for this episode is: <p>Hosts Bobby and Cole breakdown the highlights from Salesforce's January 2020 Marketing Cloud updates. </p>
Datorama Reports
01:11 MIN
Chat Messaging for WhatsApp
03:30 MIN
Datorama: Email to Web Conversion App
01:01 MIN

Speaker 1: Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. In The Clouds is a Marketing Cloud podcast powered by Lev, the most influential marketing- focused Salesforce consultancy in the world. Lev is customer experience obsessed and podcast hosts Bobby Tichy and Cole Fisher have partnered with some of the world's most well- known brands to help them master a meaningful, one- on- one connection with their customers. In this podcast, they'll combine strategy and deep technical expertise to share best practices, how- tos and real life use cases and solutions for the world's top brands using Salesforce products today.

Bobby Tichy: Welcome to the In The Clouds podcast. This is the Bobby Tichy along with Cole Fisher. Cole, I have some breaking news for you.

Cole Fisher: All right. Let's have it.

Bobby Tichy: This is the first time I'm announcing this. No, this is breaking news. I wish I had that breaking news noise, that doot- do doot- do. We are going to update the Lev In The Clouds podcast intro music to be, instead of In The Ghetto by Elvis Presley, it's going to be In The Clouds by Lev.

Cole Fisher: And it's going to be sang by you, correct?

Bobby Tichy: (singing). That doesn't really rhyme the same way or it doesn't flow as well as In the Ghetto does, but-

Cole Fisher: Well, at least we have you recorded singing it, though.

Bobby Tichy: Oh boy, we might have to re- record this. Thanks, everybody, for joining. So what we wanted to talk through today is the January release highlights from Salesforce Marketing Cloud that came out the last week of January. So a couple of big items that came out that especially those who are familiar with Datorama will like. Also, a couple of updates on the Customer 360 audiences pieces and then we'll fly through a couple of the middle tier as we describe them for some of their release pieces. But one thing that was interesting about these highlights was they were including Customer 360 and Pardot within these release notes. So I wonder if going forward, they're going to try to bucket more of Salesforce for marketing release notes altogether, which is something that I don't think I've seen that they've done it in the past.

Cole Fisher: Yeah, getting away from the regular cloud umbrellas into just more of the service itself of just marketing. Pretty wild.

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, I actually liked it. It was helpful, especially because a lot of folks have multiple or some people, or a lot of people at this point, are starting to evaluate Customer 360. So I think it's helpful to know what's coming out and how it relates to Marketing Cloud in general, so I really enjoyed it. But anyway, jumping into the highlights of what we would think of as the high tier or the high value releases was the first one was the Datorama Reports from Marketing Cloud.

Cole Fisher: So Datorama Reports is it's basically, so you can actually access it from Analytics Builder and just select Datorama Reports now. It's basically comprised of three components: dashboards, scheduled reports and pivot tables. So pivot tables just function the same way they do, say, in Tableau or something like that. Scheduled Reports are actually like retrievable, viewable and shareable detailed analysis. Those are either done through Excel or CSV or they can be visualized in PowerPoint, PDF or PNG and then shared and sent to whomever. So you can actually facilitate who you want to receive those and if they want to be ongoing and then as well. So like those pivot tables, for instance, you can manipulate, visualize, share the pivot tables, grant access to whomever and then those dashboards in Scheduled Reports, that's the kind of stuff we use for viewing comparisons, trends, patterns in the data and the ability to filter, sort, summarize, so basically, interactive dashboards for reporting. So a little cooler than what we'd had previously, which is just like that static export of a sample dashboard or something like that. So it's actually already been provisioned as of mid- February, so if you need more actual information, you can contact your AAE or your Marketing Cloud account rep to learn more about access.

Bobby Tichy: I think this was something that we were all hoping, after the announcement of Datorama happened from Salesforce, that it would happen sooner for sure. But it's nice to at least have this because one of the main questions we always get are," How is the reporting capability in Salesforce Marketing Cloud?" Granted the standard reports for email engagement are just fine, they're pretty run of the mill. But I think what's nice is this allows you to harness the power of Datorama, at least a little bit of a light level, so to speak, without having to purchase the full license of Datorama.

Cole Fisher: That's always been the caveat. It was like," Oh, well, what do you think about the reporting?" Or it was like," Well, if you need anything beyond your standard KPIs, this is really a messaging and marketing tool, not a reporting tool." That, at least, gets the glimpse into what that can be now, obviously, full- blown with Datorama, but at least you have that glimpse into that with Datorama Reports accessible through Analytics Builder now, so pretty cool.

Bobby Tichy: For sure. The next one is around Customer 360 audiences. A couple of enhancements that I think will really start to, I think, make the difference between Customer 360a being a feature and now starting to turn into a product, especially as we start thinking about multiple different types of data sources. So three main updates within Customer 360 audiences: one, being able to define data with calculated insights. So essentially what that means is we're able to start leveraging SQL to generate audiences. So for those of you who have seen some of the demo videos or a demo from Salesforce on Customer 360, it'll show you this drag and drop functionality where you can select a sales and service cloud or Marketing Cloud or S3 bucket as a data source, which is great, because we can stitch those data sources together in a way that we weren't able to, at least not as easily before. Now, we're also able to use SQL to generate some of these audiences as well. So for folks who are more comfortable in SQL or for those who want to be able to define data or calculate specific metrics or specific values within these audiences, you're now able to do that within Customer 360a. The other nice piece of that, too, is not only if you're generating an audience in SQL, but if you're just generating an audience in general, you're not able to validate that data, so there's a new feature called the Data Explorer crosstalk But I like that name, by the way, though. So, but what Data Explorer allows you to do is any audience that you're rendering or that you're outputting, you're able to see the first a hundred rows of that data. So almost like how in Marketing Cloud proper and a data extension you can view that data, the first 25 rows or so. You're able to do something similar now in C360 and then, you're also able to download that data. So those hundred rows, if you wanted to output it and analyze it or QA it a little bit outside of 360a, you're able to do that, so a couple of nice elements there. The third one I'm most excited about 360a are match rules. So what we're able to do now is configure these different match rules of how we want to unify records. So a couple of key things here is the whole purpose of this is to be able to say," I have five different data sources. I want to be able to match these records based on a particular field or fields based on that and that way, we have more of a unified record across these different sources." So I'm not going to go into all of the different ones in detail, but with the match rules, you can use email, phone number, name and email, address, name and phone number, device, so based on advertiser ID, for example, and then party ID as well. So for that party ID option, you can unify records based on external identifiers like customer IDs. So if you've got your Marketing Cloud subscriber key, maybe a sales and service cloud ID is different, but maybe across all three or in your data warehouse you've got a customer ID or a unique ID that you utilize. You can use that as well to just start bringing things together across some different sources. Then lastly, is what's called Marketing Cloud, a unified individual. As many of you might know, because Marketing Cloud data bundles represent subscriber data across each of the different channels, like Email Studio, Mobile Connect and Mobile Push. There's multiple individual records that can be created from the source information, so Cole, you could have a record in Email Studio that has a different unique identifier in Mobile Connect and the same for Mobile Push. But now with this unified individual feature in 360a, you can ensure these records are appropriately joined as a single, unified profile so that way, you're able to see that unified record instead of the three different records across the three different channels.

Cole Fisher: Very cool. I got to jump to my next update here because I feel like we've had customers asking for this for a long time. It's chat messaging for WhatsApp now available in Marketing Cloud, so this is-

Bobby Tichy: Yeah, because we built a couple of these for customers-

Cole Fisher: Exactly. So finally get rid of the custom activities in Journey Builder and all the Dev work that goes into facilitating what's that messaging? So Salesforce has finally partnered with a company called Cinch, so it sounds like they're the B2B API provider for WhatsApp, so they're an official WhatsApp solution provider. So they're leveraging this API to tie into Content Builder and Journey Builder where you could actually build the messages themselves. So to give you a little background, there's two types of messages that WhatsApp allows to facilitate from business users. So one is a session message, which is just responses to messages that are user- initiated conversations. So these are usually about services or things like that, that are very one- off. The other are template messages, which is, essentially, anything that's a transactional message, so like order, shipping or loyalty, abandonment, booking or events, things like that, or anything like account balance or finance- related. So there's a couple of caveats, so my suggestion would be not to go into this blind, but to either rely on a partner or your Salesforce rep or somebody to step through what this looks like. There even appears to be some IP warming concept with WhatsApp where a new business user has to start up with limited volume that they're allowed to send until these are checked out. It's essentially the same type of almost a deliverability monitoring that happens with a new IP, right? So WhatsApp goes through approval processes and they have to make sure that all of the templates that you're sending out don't contain promotional content. So if you're trying to use this as solely a marketing tool for marketing promotional messages, you're going to get into trouble. They do want to make sure that that the messages are approved, and so if you actually get started up, the first step of the process is creating a WhatsApp account. If you've already done that and you've already linked it with Business Manager, then that's probably going to save you a couple of days of WhatsApp approval, as well as creating your channels. So those are the actual brand channels that you will create in WhatsApp, those also take like two or three days to approve via the WhatsApp team. But once you actually have that established, you can create message templates. Those also need to be approved by the WhatsApp team, so very tight in terms of what is allowed in business- to- consumer correspondence, but a really cool step in allowing the facilitation of transactional messaging via WhatsApp because so many of our customers have end users that rely heavily on WhatsApp, especially internationally, that they basically have to either leave off the table for current Marketing Cloud and Journey Builder capabilities or they're building custom activities, which we've had to do several times in the past where there's a very heavy, upfront workload that's done to get access to those WhatsApp APIs in order to tie those into your journey messaging. So really cool stuff and there's also some data analysis and things like that that are going to be facilitated within this first release, so this is a really exciting update.

Bobby Tichy: To your point, a lot of folks over the years, too, have even shied away from Marketing Cloud because it didn't have an integration like this that was built out. So I think it's a big value add for folks who especially focus a lot internationally, to your point. The next one was around Datorama and so a couple of total connect enhancements, easy for me to say, around the integration pieces. So number one is a new user experience so there's a more simplified way of ingesting data into the platform, so that way you're able to scale a little bit better with some additional data streams. So with the Datorama, the great thing about it is the over 110 + native integrations that it already has with a number of different marketing platforms. But for being able to ingest other pieces of data like your own data warehouse or proprietary system or a situation where there's not that product guide's integration, they've come out with some nice automated data refresh capabilities, either through email or SFTP, so it can be a CSV or an Excel doc or anything like that. But what's nice is if you're doing that upload within the platform, you'll get a auto population of the preview of that data in real time. Then you can automate the refresh of that data, like I said earlier, from either emails or through SFTP. The other nice thing about that is as we're uploading that, so for example, let's say we're uploading a CSV file for the first time, Datorama has a new feature called intelligent suggestions where it will actually provide recommendations for the data mapping of the file you're bringing in or the data that you're bringing in and then the data in the model that you already have within Datorama, so hopefully, reducing the amount of errors of mapping that data together and also reducing the amount of time spent managing that data and that model within Datorama. Then also, the last piece is what's called a built- in data mapping guide. So it'll give you data previews and step- by- step guides to help you in that data integration process if you do want to have that automated data refresh if you're not utilizing one of the product guys' connectors.

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Cole Fisher: So really quickly, I'll touch on AMP for email. So this is a new open source standard for email that's going to allow customers to interact directly with messages in the inbox, think interactive email, where they're not actually leaving for landing pages or RSVP- ing for events, things like that. So a lot of the common use cases right now are like confirmations, the double opt- in browsing and research like booking or confirming appointments, things like that. So basically, I'll point this out. One thing is, you're going to want to test this so AMP for email is not supported in some email clients. So it's supported in things like Yahoo and Gmail and some of those larger carriers, but you are going to want test them. The other caveat is so, as great as the tool is, this is going to be a really fantastic tool for just general preference management and feedback surveys and order status updates and things like that. But the one thing that you're going to want to notice is there's a 30- day limit on when AMP emails will expire. So some of those email clients won't support them because of that, so they will fall back to an HTML if it's not a supported email client. So that's just one thing to keep in mind, but this is, as of March 1st, is available for ALLPRO corporate and enterprise Marketing Cloud editions. I'm excited to see a lot of customers actually leveraging this. In fact, I just got off a call before this talking with a customer about simplifying the process for feedback surveys and preference management and explicit preference gathering where instead of sending their end subscribers to a second page or cloud pages or having them jump through the hoops of leaving the email, this makes it so much easier on the customer and to facilitate the marketer with data like this. So this is actually really exciting. Just keep in mind that the 30- day limit and some of the, probably, hopefully, just initial hiccups with some email clients. Like I said, Gmail, Yahoo and the big ones are fine, but you're going to want to test emails like this before they go out.

Bobby Tichy: For those who aren't super familiar with the AMP for email, if you are familiar with the interactive email feature within Content Builder of Marketing Cloud where you can fill out forms and that sort of thing, it's a similar technology. So just like with those, you've got to have an HTML fall back like you will with AMP emails, so just really building off of that interactive email that I know a lot of Marketing Cloud customers have gotten a lot of use out of for getting preferences and getting more data on folks so that way they don't always have to go out to another page or anything like that. Like we mentioned at the beginning, they've included that Customer 360 as well as Pardot in the new release notes. One, we wanted to call out, specifically with Pardot, was around campaign cloning. The reason being is this one's hit home for me because of my time at Marketo where in Marketo, if you build out a campaign, you can quickly duplicate that entire campaign to all the assets relating to it, so landing pages, forms, all that good stuff. So with this new feature within Pardot, you can now clone a campaign and all the assets relating to it. So for those of you who are considering," Should I move from Marketo or another marketing automation to Pardot or Marketing Cloud," is the big one, for sure. So you'll have the ability to clone the campaigns and the assets within them, including campaign member status, landing pages, forms, links, snippet assignments, et cetera. So one other thing here I wanted to mention is that Pardot also came out with, essentially, a multi- org connector is a good way of thinking about it, so where you can have multiple Pardot instances and multiple sales cloud instances connected to one another. So in the past, we were just working on this with another company where they wanted to integrate the two sales cloud instances because they had multiple instances within their organization to manage leads and have Pardot talk to both instances. Now Pardot does that out of the box as a piece of functionality, so another key piece of thing to keep in mind. Boy, that was a really poor way of saying that, but another cool feature that they released with Pardot.

Cole Fisher: Very cool. I think that's a huge time save for a lot of those that spend every day in Pardot creating and recreating campaign assets. So that's going to be a pretty big update, so that's pretty cool. Another change here is what's called the email- to- web conversion app within Datorama. So this is actually a package solution that's an app within Datorama that connects email messaging and journeys from Marketing Cloud or Pardot into Google Analytics. So assuming you, as a customer, already have Google Analytics, this ties the two together and creates this interactive visualization of the customer conversion funnel. So it's pretty neat in the fact that it'll allow campaign level or email level variables to be targeted and measured and so you can look at things like subject lines, audience segmentation, individual content performance or relevance, like how relevant the content is, or other KPIs just to see how it's impacting overall performance. So from a standpoint of a marketer where this is a really good high level to medium level insight on where are the best campaigns right now? Where are the really low- performing campaigns and of those campaigns, what are the elements that can tweaked and optimized to either better replicate the better performing campaigns or do we just prune things? So this is just a really good, I almost call it the executive level, but it's a little more tactical than that. It's where I can just see the day- to- day high level and say," This is what's working. This is what's not and here are the quick actions that can be taken precisely on those campaigns and emails." Then the app actually also comes with a templated dashboard for some more advanced insights. So that's where you could have customizable inputs and maybe non- standard KPIs. So this would be a little bit more geared towards the advanced users or to teams that may have really high- volume campaign creation or need pretty heavy feedback loops for their campaigns, so another pretty cool innovation for Datorama. So pretty neat to see how Datorama, as a product, is evolving really quickly.

Bobby Tichy: This is also a great win for those who wish to have better conversion tracking with Marketing Cloud. Marketing has that native, old conversion tracking that hasn't been touched in probably a dozen years or so and really relies more on your Google Analytics to be able to track that and it'll automatically bring that data into a really nice dashboard, I think, will help a lot of folks out as well. Just a couple of other quick highlights we wanted to mention and things to keep in mind for those of you who are utilizing Marketing Cloud or considering it. For those of you who are using it, and I'm just keeping in mind that they did announce they're going to discontinue support for Internet Explorer 11. Probably not many of you, since there's only about a 1% usage share for all browsers for Internet Explorer, but if you are one of the, the legacy folks on IE make sure that you migrate over to Chrome, Safari or Firefox here shortly. For those who do have an integration to Salesforce CRM, sales or service cloud, just keep in mind that the Marketing Cloud connector V2 is retiring on March 31st, so you want to upgrade to V5 as soon as possible. The Discover Reporting Tool is scheduled for retirement in all Marketing Cloud accounts on April 21st, 22nd. I'm sorry, April 21st, 2022, so you still got about a year, but Datorama Reports will ultimately replace Discover, so they're going to continue to build out the enhancements there and retire Discover as a tool. Then we talked a little bit about it earlier, where Cole mentioned WhatsApp, but there is now a new channel in Contact Builder. So you'll have the ability to send transactional session messages through WhatsApp from Marketing Cloud and be able to also manage that as a data source within Contact Builder. Then you're also to send a user to Journey Builder upon segment join. So essentially what that means is when, especially as we're thinking about Interaction Studio, whenever we're listening through the web or mobile or an API or anything like that, we're able to grab those folks. I'm going to update existing segments and Interaction Studio, then we'll add them to a new segment in Journey Builder in real time. So this essentially means you can use segments to add customers to those journeys within the moments of that data changing now, which will be a really nice upgrade for those who are using Interaction Studio in Journey Builder or if you're considering Interaction Studio, it'll be a nice win.

Cole Fisher: Bobby, this one comes up a lot, I feel like, with customers that they've got certain thresholds in mind or a lot of times, there's a data analysis that says," I notice when somebody hits a product four times that they're X percent more likely to convert within the week," or something like that, where they can build triggers and thresholds around that type of behavior. Because I feel like as marketers, we always have one in mind, but this allows us to not only take advantage of it, but test it as well. So this one is really exciting to me.

Bobby Tichy: For sure. Then the last piece was just a couple of updates to the Mobile Connect Data View. So for those of you who are working in data or you're a data analyst or sharing any of this data back to your data analysis team or your data science team, there's two values in the Mobile Connect Data View, so JB Activity ID and JB Definition ID. So as you're sending text messages from Journey Builder, I'm going to provide a little bit more detail into that, so that's included automatically in the SMS message tracking Data View within Automation Studio and create activities. So we'll go ahead and pivot. Thanks for listening today. Jumping right into completely unrelated and most re- watchable movies.

Cole Fisher: So this is like the movie where you flip on the TV and you can't turn away from it because even though you've seen 100 times, every scene you're like," Oh, this scene, oh, this is the one." My first one, actually, just came on this past weekend. I'm probably going to expose my IQ at this point, but Dumb and Dumber is one of those movies, for me, where every scene you're like," Oh, this part's a riot. I got to watch this," and so I end up just never changing the channel.

Bobby Tichy: We've had a few folks recommend that we change the name of the podcast to Dumb and Dumber. Although, it begs the question, which one of us would be Dumber?

Cole Fisher: Oh, there's no debate, Bobby. I got to at least take Dumber.

Bobby Tichy: I was hoping you were going to say there's no debate and then just leave it out there and then I was going to say," Yeah. You're right. There is no debate." There's a couple of movies like this and I think what I find hilarious is the ones that I find that I always want to re- watch are the ones that my wife hates the most like Roadhouse and Pure Country-

Cole Fisher: Classic.

Bobby Tichy: The other one, too, The Equalizer, she's a fan of that one. But gosh, Roadhouse, the ending is a little gruesome, but man, when he becomes the cooler at the Double Deuce, that middle hour of that movie is just awesome.

Cole Fisher: It's got Sam Elliott who was just as awesome in Tombstone. I would put that in there, but that's just too long of a movie to make it that re- watchable. But Roadhouse is an awesome movie. I've never seen Pure Country, but I'm going to take your word for it. I feel like if you and I had a Venn diagram of our favorite movies, there would be almost no overlap except for Roadhouse right there in the middle.

Bobby Tichy: I completely agree. How do you stand on Face Off?

Cole Fisher: Face Off, that was the Van Damme Stanley Cup, hockey, like, eh, I haven't seen that in a long time, but-

Bobby Tichy: Oh no, no. I'm talking John Travolta and Nicholas Cage.

Cole Fisher: Oh, no, no, Face Off. Never mind. I'm thinking of Sudden Death. Face- off with John Travolta and Nicholas Cage, right? Yeah. That one's a little weird. That one's a little weird on me. It's not my most re- watchable-

Bobby Tichy: Oh, it was terrible.

Cole Fisher: It was weird because even watching that as a kid, I was like," Wait, how do they replicate the bone structure and the gate and the normals?" Everything about this just makes no sense to me." If you're just taking someone's crosstalk If it's just a-

Bobby Tichy: I always loved thinking about Nicholas cage acting like John Travolta acting like Nicholas Cage. Like," Who are the two worst actors we could get to then have to act like each other, acting like the other? John Travolta is such an awful bad guy. It's so bad, it's good.

Cole Fisher: I got to throw my last one in there is, which you never actually finished, but Point Break, all time.

Bobby Tichy: Everyone told me the first 85 minutes were the best, but I didn't get to see the last five minutes.

Cole Fisher: All time. Point Break.

Bobby Tichy: We got to get you to watch Pure Country, George Strait, horrible actors across the board.

Cole Fisher: I appreciate that.

Bobby Tichy: It's got great music, though. You can't go wrong with George Strait. The tour manager, for anybody whose mom and my wife, Joanie, listening, since those are our listeners, if by far the worst part of that movie is George Strait's tour manager. She is the worst actress and she's so annoying in that movie. Oh, just awful.

Cole Fisher: You're really doing a good job of selling it, Bobby.

Bobby Tichy: But it is really good. All right. Thanks, everybody, for listening. As always, you can reach out to us at intheclouds @ lovedigital. com. We're really excited for the upcoming podcast. We've got a couple of series that we'll be rolling out this year, including an Innovation series as well as the Change Management series. So stay tuned for those and we'll talk to you soon.

DESCRIPTION

Hosts Bobby and Cole breakdown the highlights from Salesforce's January 2021 Marketing Cloud updates, which include:


  • Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud
  • Customer 360 Audiences Enhancements
  • Chat Messaging for WhatsApp
  • Datorama: TotalConnect Enhancements
  • AMP for Email
  • Pardot: Campaign Cloning with Related Assets
  • Datorama: Email to Web Conversion App


And, be sure to listen until the end for a "Completely Unrelated" where they discuss their most re-watchable movies. (HOT TAKE: Roadhouse may be the glue that keeps this hosting duo together.)