Salesforce Marketing Cloud Release August 2019

There is nothing more exciting than reading through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud release notes and seeing what new features are included. The August 2019 release is going live on Saturday, August 24th with some exciting additions and we have picked out some of our favourites, but you can read the full official release notes here.

Send time optimisations

The holy grail for marketers, being able to select the best time window to communicate with your customers.

Marketing Cloud Platform Extensions/Upgrades

With major platform add-ons/upgrades like Setup Assistant to help set up your new account, copying your contact model into a different account or business unit with Deployment Manager, and more:

• Removal of v1 request authentication whilst creating packages for integration.
• Add CC and BCC recipients to transactional send definitions using the messaging/v1/messages/definitions REST resource.
• If the standard tabs in Content Builder don’t meet your needs, you can add custom tabs using the Content Builder Block SDK.
• Too many support tickets? As part of a new provisioning request, you might see features pre-loaded to your new account.

Automation Studio revised

For everyone who has tried to query the unsubscribes from a Child Business Unit this feature is on its way for Enterprise 2.0 accounts and will make your life much much easier. In addition, to help you troubleshoot SQL queries the automation log will include a more detailed error messages.

Social Studio and Mobile Studio revamped

Get ready for some social action with the ability to:

• Register Facebook Ad accounts and promote Facebook posts.
• Single Sign-On capability to access Social Studio.
• Register Google My Business accounts in Social Studio and see the review content from location pages in Engage and more.

Furthermore, Mobile Studio has some key enhancements like:

• Associate campaigns with SMS messages, and shorten URLs in your SMS messages in Journey Builder and Content Builder with the click of a button.
• New Android MobilePush SDK hosted on https://salesforce-marketingcloud.github.io/MarketingCloudSDK-Android/

Limitless Content Builder and Email Studio

Content builder now has more content than ever:

• Users who want to be more intentional about when edits are saved can now disable Email Autosave.
• For better email experience content builder will show a warning in Preview and Test for messages larger than the 102-KB. Note: This warning does not prevent sends.
• Finally, you can now upload files into Content Builder with a new limit of 5MB either via UI or REST API.

Email Studio updates include:

• Ability to include source and publication list-level opt-outs when using a transactional send classification during A/B Tests.
• Fallback value to populate when unverified address is found during the validation check using the AMPscript for dynamic sender profiles.

Distributed Marketing tweaks

For anyone who uses the power of Distributed Marketing (DM) within the Salesforce ecosystem, this release will bring appealing features to the tool. These features are scheduled to be released to non-production environments on August 25, 2019, and Production environments on October 23, 2019.

• Use Quick Send to send a single message to up to 75 contacts, leads, or person accounts at once in Sales, Service, or Financial Services Cloud.
• For users with Person Accounts, the contact key can now be mapped to AccountId or PersonContactId as the unique identifier in Marketing Cloud.
• The approval process is simplified by allowing the marketers to approve distributed marketing sends only under certain conditions (target audience criteria, approval upon modification of content).
• With the ability to add custom character limit on the rich text and plain text blocks, the sending and savings will be disabled upon exceeding the limit by the business users.

Wait, there is more…

Apart from above, there are some key honourable mentions:

• Use Facebook Advanced Match in Journey Builder’s Ad Audience Activity: Facebook Advanced Match which expands the number of attributes to improve match rates and achieve a higher return on advertising spend is available to all clients with an Advertising Studio license and Journey Builder.
• View Google Analytics 360 Email Activity Metrics in Journey Builder: View goal metrics, such as site usage and ecommerce activity related to individual email activity.
• Marketing Cloud Connect API Compatibility: Objects that are available in the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud API version 46.0 are now available to Marketing Cloud Connect, Data Sync, and Journey Builder.