Jason Cort

Welcome to 2022 and our first of 3 releases this year (Yes! Only 3 releases from now as Salesforce has brought the SFMC release frequency into alignment with the CRM Platform), the optimist within me is hoping that this means we’ll get some bigger and more complete features as a result of this change. That said, the cynic in me wonders if the reason the release schedule has been reduced is because there’s not going to be as much coming out. But, let’s be optimistic!

Reporting

As many of us will be aware, Discover reporting is going away (you’ve only got a few weeks now. 1st April and it’ll officially be retired), so if you’re someone with Datorama for Marketing Cloud in your org, make sure you’ve got your reports migrated. The delta between Datorama and Discover reporting capability is getting smaller again with this release. Key changes are some new measures have been added to bring closer parity between the two reporting tools and finally email activities that have been configured to be suppressed from reporting are actually suppressed from reporting!

MobilePush / In-App Experiences

MobilePush and its SDK has had some new capabilities in the new release. But, before getting into the details of the SDK, the whole thing has had a rebrand. It’s no longer the MobilePush SDK, it is now the Engagement SDK. The change is as a result of the merging of the MobilePush/Salesforce CDP SDK. The aim for this is to streamline implementation with universal methods between the two.

In-App and Push both get a range of new Journey Builder capabilities. You’re now able to trigger journey entry for either of these activities. You’ll be able to listen for events on up to 10 Push/In-App Messages to bring someone into a journey. There is also the option for using these events as journey exit criteria, this is going to be rolled out throughout March so don’t worry if it’s not in your org already!

A couple of other developments to call out

• In-app is brought in line with Push with the wait until event flow control option
• Android 12 Deep Linking App Link Verification is available for configuration in Setup

Cloud Pages

We’ve had a few releases with Classic Email Studio web tools being retired and the schedule around that. You have until June 2022 to get your content migrated and become familiar with the new tools. If you’re in an org with Classic Editor pages you should see these moved to Content Builder and the legacy experience has been removed with all cloud pages moved to the new Cloud Pages experience.

There has been some quality of life changes in the new Cloud Pages experience including:

• Code resources now being created with Content Builder and can be unpublished
• Advanced Settings & Unpublishing is now available in the gear/cog menu with the page details
• After much frustration, when publishing a Cloud Page the new page URL is now clickable immediately rather than needing to copy and paste it
• Display and sorting preferences now persist
• It’s now possible to unpublish a Microsite

Einstein

Einstein is getting a few nifty features and consistencies between Journey Builder and non-Journey Builder sending. For those who are using Send Time Optimisation in Journey Builder, you’ll have this feature available to you in Automation Studio Send Email Activity. So if you’ve not been enticed to Journey Builder for some of the Einstein capabilities, little by little they’re moving into non-Journey Builder options.

Momentum analytics is a nice feature to see for Email Engagement Scoring. Seeing how your contacts are performing over time is helpful, previously if you were interested in this you could do that with Journey Builder + Update Contact Journey Activities to track this over time. So, it’s nice that it’s now something you can see at an aggregate level without additional effort. Along with the momentum analytics the model card has been updated to share additional insight to how Einstein is making its decisions.

Content tagging and selection gets some attention including multiple criteria and multi asset attribute values spotlighting with the Einstein Content Selection content builder block. So you’ll be able to make your spotlight more broad with OR logical operators or more specific with AND filtering. If you’re using Einstein Content Tagging, you’ll be pleased that you can add some nested tags. In order to enable this, an admin will need to disable current Einstein Content tags, delete them and then it may take up to 24 hours to complete - then reactivate. If you’re using Einstein Content Selection for anything, make sure you check out the API that now includes the Daily Log reporting endpoint.

Other changes

There’s a few things that are worth calling out but don’t really fit into other categories and aren’t necessarily huge changes to warrant a whole topic. But,

• SMS is getting some new Status Codes in the MobileConnect API. You can check them out here
• Email Form Shared Items are no longer available in response capture options. There were reports of inconsistent behaviours between different stacks, so the decision made was to remove that capability.
• Javascript Web Tokens are now able to be generated with AMPscript and work within the context of OMM rendering engines (so you’ll be able to use it in messages and landing pages). It feels a bit odd to put this in the list of small changes, but there is so little documentation about this yet to add much more!
• Enhanced Personalisation flow for Quick Sends from Sales/Service Cloud, various additional attributes are appended and available for the Journey Entry Source when using Case/Opportunity/Lead records as the source.
• Package Manager will now allow you to update existing assets rather than create new assets each time. You’ll have the choice when deploying a package.
• S3 File Locations config has some changes to bring parity between naming SFMC and AWS.
• File Locations REST API will now allow you to change S3 and External FTP credentials as well as your usual creating/managing and deleting file locations for file transfers.

Summary

Overall, this release includes some interesting new capabilities but it feels like the product managers could do more to highlight the capabilities. For example, the opportunities with JWT could be pretty significant but all we have in the release notes is less than 45 words and it doesn’t link through to any other documentation or use cases. This is brand new to SFMC and should enable all kinds of interesting examples of what can be done. So if there’s anyone on the product team who would be interested in sharing some additional information for use cases, ideas from internal use cases etc. do reach out to us!

For the first release of 2022 and the first of the 3 releases per year vs 5 per year, it feels conservative in nature. I hope the release in June pushes the output a little harder!