Zeinab Khreiss – February 23, 2023
If you've been a Salesforce user for a while now, you know Salesforce typically holds three major releases of new features and functionality each year. The Marketing Cloud Spring '23 release began on February 18th and will run through March 10th. This release provides new features, specific updates, and improvements in Marketing Cloud Connect (the integration between Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud), which is significant.
The Digital Mass Salesforce Marketing Cloud development team gathered before the release to dive into the release notes. Below we'll highlight several updates and uncover what they mean for users.
If you have any further questions or want to connect with our Salesforce Marketing Cloud team, please contact us here.
Marketing Cloud Spring ‘23 Release Highlights
Engagement: WhatsApp Business Messaging - Direct Integration
The messaging experience on Whatsapp feature is exciting since Whatsapp is the most used global messaging app. Now, users can build messaging experiences on Whatsapp using the Whatsapp business API.
This means that users can now send personalized session messages, create accounts, channels, and submit Whatsapp templates directly in Mobile Studio and send these messages via Journey Builder.
Cross-Cloud: Marketing Cloud Connect Workflows Converted to Flows
After this release, the Marketing Cloud Connect package will stop using workflows and start using Flows. This is a great change because Workflows were becoming antiquated. Now that they’re being converted to Salesforce Flows, they’ll be much more powerful for users.
Prior to this change, there were concerns that Workflows wouldn't automatically deactivate. With this update, deactivation will be automatic for the following workflows: BackupWorkflow, ScheduledSend, ScheduledSmsSend, BackupSmsWorkflow, and BackupTriggeredSendWorkflow.
Note for Salesforce Administrators: Salesforce will be doing a mass deactivation, but after April 1st, 2023, Salesforce Admins should double check that Workflows are deactivated in their org to ensure there is no possibility of two emails being sent instead of one.
Cross-Cloud: Marketing Cloud Connect Individual Email Results Expanded
Email marketers will be excited to know that one of the new features being released will allow individual email results to be expanded in Marketing Cloud Connect.
Emails sent from Marketing Cloud are already represented in Sales Cloud as individual email result records, but now with this update to Marketing Cloud Connect, it will be much easier to track individual results within a dynamic journey, link to individual email results, and increase the usefulness of these records by adding more helpful identifiers like SubscriberID, JobID, BatchID, and ListID.
Journeys: Improved Journey History Dashboard
This release has significant quality of life updates for Journeys, starting with an improved journey history dashboard.
With this update, users will be able to view information about a specific contact, the contact status history, journey, and journey version. Users will feel this update when they see a simplified filter list and dropdown tool in Journey Builder.
Journeys: Streamlined Journey Navigation with Collapsible Paths
Another great quality of life update coming has to do with streamlining journey navigation with new collapsible paths.
Now, when users have multiple email touchpoints with decision splits that branch out, information can be hidden so that they can focus on a specific area.This will be particularly helpful for users working in a complex, active journey, increasing the the ease of navigation, investigation, and making troubleshooting in Journey Builder easier.
We only scratched the surface in our recap of the new features and functionality being released in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Spring ‘23 Release. All of these updates will provide great quality of life improvements for Salesforce Marketing Cloud users and our team is excited to begin using them to improve our clients' experience.
For additional information on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Spring ‘23 Release, please reach out to our team here, or browse the Salesforce documentation: