The tl;dr of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Spring ‘24 Release

Justin Kasbohm – February 7, 2024

The release notes from the Marketing Cloud Spring ‘24 have arrived, and as usual, they’re packed with new functionality, improvements and important information for developers, marketers and other users.

But, the notes are also really quite a lot to absorb. 

Don’t worry, though. We’ve got you covered. As always, we recommend taking a full read through of all of the notes, but here are some headlines:

  1. There have been some improvements to Distributed Marketing! Salesforce increased the personalization capabilities of Distributed Marketing emails and added more dashboards to monitor campaign effectiveness. Furthermore, continuing the work from a previous release, Process Builder processes used by Marketing Cloud Connect are still being automatically migrated to record-triggered flows.
  2. Journey Builder can now send more emails to more people faster (aka. High-Throughput Sending)! Also, an update to Engagement Split activities, you are now able to enter any URL to track for path evaluation.
  3. Quick potentially important update on data management. The length of sendable fields in sendable data extensions has been limited to 254 characters to improve send performance. That's already the max length of a standard email address, but if you're using some other SubscriberKey that happens to be longer, that would now cause errors.
  4. In Automation Studio, scheduled automations will now run 62% more on-time, and you can now see who last paused a given automation. Also, support has been added for 17 more REST API endpoints (and their documentation has been improved as well).
  5. Some updates to Einstein and Analytics include Einstein Metrics Guard (EMG) and Einstein Segment Creation (ESC). EMG is just the new name for what was originally called Einstein Probabilistic Opens, but its purpose is still to discern a bot open from a subscriber open. ESC is a new Data Cloud segmentation tool where you describe your target audience and it generates that list for you.
  6. For those of us sending push notifications to Android users, you'll need to make sure you update your “google-services.json” file in MobilePush by June 1, 2024 to comply with the new authentication pattern for Android apps.

One thing that could be relevant for users with a more global footprint, is the continued expansion of WhatsApp capabilities. There's a new WhatsApp Transactional API for sending transactional WhatsApp messages outside of Journey Builder, and Salesforce has added a new set of WhatsApp reports to Intelligence Reports.

We’re able to walk you through the changes, if you’re looking for a Marketing Cloud partner. Contact us if you’re interested in Digital Mass becoming your release notes translator and maximize the impact of your marketing efforts.