I’m getting the question again and again – we want to implement Marketing Cloud, can you help us? And they we go into the rabbit hole of the needs, all the different versions (and products) of Marketing Cloud, the capacity organizations have in the marketing team and so on and so on just to scratch the idea completely because they might find just enough time to send monthly newsletter and will struggle even with that.
That was the main driver to organize a user group about the marketing topic, to give Salesforce admins the feeling of what is on the market, what is possible, what to think about and much more. Ekat, Salesforce Marketing Champion, has been voluntertold to run the session and when I prepared the abstract she told me I put way too much in. My response was prompt – stay high level, it will be more than enough for us anyway.
And the evening came, twenty of us gather around the table to go through the 144 slides long presentation (actually most of them in appendix, so you might want to check the whole presentation) and get some feelings for the marketing. At the end I’m not sure we know enough about the topic, but we definitely have some feelings.
- Radian6, ExactTarget, Pardot, Datorama, Krux, Evergage, Genii and so on – the list is long, I already forgot about some of those acquisitions Salesforce did a long time ago and at the same time I’m still surprise the marketers use „ExactTarget“ when they want to specify the edition/product of Marketing Cloud;
- core or not core? Salesforce tries to pretend all the marketing products are closely aligned, but the real-life experience is, that the integrations are pain, maybe just a bit smaller than with 3rd party products;
- Marketing Cloud Engagement (aka ExactTarget) can do emails, SMS, WhatsApp, Mobile API, push notifications, website integration, paid Ads and is typically used for B2C, still the most mature product;
- Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (aka Pardot) is typically used in B2B and email is the typical channel for communication complex lead scoring;
- Marketing Cloud Growth is running on Core (and needs Data 360) speeding up the time to market, relaying on Flows for automation rather than Journey Builder and forcing marketers to upskill as they need to know Data 360 as well;
- Marketing Cloud Advanced is the advanced edition of Marketing Cloud (Growth) and is full of AI and this Agentic vision, conversational SMS and more included;
- Marketing Cloud Next is not a single product but kind of all those previous products together so you don’t have to migrate (if you already have one of those) but can also use the others for some additional usecases (don’t ask me why would you do that);
- MailChimp, SmartEmailing – mainly emails, some automation included as well, not integrate but the current Beaufort 12 (for MailChimp) looks finally like a tool which really works (but is paid), for SmartEmailing I wrote the initial integration, not managed by Clouderia;
- SendGrid – rather transactional emails;
- Salesforce Foundations – free to enable, 2000 (trackable) emails/month, template builder, landing pages & forms, send time optimization included (which might be a big win), NPC/EDA ready;
- while the new Marketing Cloud products utilize flow, those aren’t really the standard SF flows, these have different actions one can use, segment and event triggered flows added as well, path experiments, wait until event (link click for example);
- the generative AI to create segments looks super awesome and I can imagine people will be tempted to use it – who knows why it created the segment it did, as long as it works!
- content creation AI to have it directly in SF and no need to go to external systems looks like a quick big win as well, at the end when I know how much time is spent on tweaking and approvals I’m not sure it is such a big benefit;
My Take-aways
Now the whole situation is still clear as a mud to me, it is obvious that Marketing Cloud Growth/Advanced (based on the features you need) is the way to go for the future. For the small clients the version included in Foundation might be enough and also probably better to use than MailChimp/SmartEmailing as it is on the platform and you get some emails „for free“.
There is no migration path from MCE/MCAE (ExactTarget/Pardot) and it probably doesn’t even make sense as your processes changed/you might want to take a fresh look on how you approach the marketing. Speaking about interaction data you might want to migrate (opens, clicks) there isn’t a way for it as well, but it probably doesn’t really make sense – why would you care whether they opened an email three years ago?
Upskill is a must and Data 360 (aka Data Cloud) won’t go away. Even if the product is „on the platform“ it still utilizes and need Data 360 – but it doesn’t neccessary means you need to pay for it.
From the architect perspective having the Data 360 in the picture might mean additional discussion about where to store which data and how to integrate them, but might mean we don’t need to push something really „into Salesforce“ but having it in the Data 360/zero copy external systems might be just it.
And great relevant atricle from Mateusz Dąbrowski.