Salesforce Marketing Cloud Release July 2020

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud July 2020 release will be rolled out between July 25 through to August 1, 2020. The team have picked out some of the most interesting parts of the release, if you wish to review the full release article it can be found here.

Re-Engaging Online Shoppers

Abandoned Browse and Abandoned Wishlist triggers enable you to send personalised emails to subscribers who have dropped off your site and encourage them to return. Utilising your abandoned cart messages in content builder, the behavioural triggers content block can dynamically add and display a subscriber’s abandoned items into the email. These behavioural triggers are available in Journey Builder and you should use the behavioural trigger data extensions as the entry source to your journey.

Push Notification Send Time Optimisation

The Einstein STO activity in journey builder will, based on your users past engagement patterns with MobilePush determine the best day or time of day they are most likely to open a push notification.

Transactional Send Email Journeys

The transactional API can now be configured through the journey builder interface, which include the same features as multi-step and single-send journeys are available. Great way to expand the reporting available via GA360 and adding additional touch points to transactional emails.

Pre-populate Interactive Email forms

Making a form quicker and easier to fill in is always a bonus. So in order to gather new information as painlessly as possible, you can now pre-populate inputs in the Interactive Email form with known subscriber data.

New Cloud Pages Experience

This is a customer preview of the upcoming new CloudPages app and in the July release you will now be able to update your SSL selection after a page has been published and view the page URL in the editor. Both CloudPages versions utilise the same content so you can toggle between the two and keep in mind that the new experience will be replacing the current CloudPages experience later this year.

Multi-Factor Authentication

As of August 2020 Marketing Cloud will be rolling out support for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). It is highly recommended that in order to ensure both confidentiality and integrity of your data that all customers implement MFA . If you are already using Single Sign-On to handle logins you can still enable MFA as an additional safety measure

Error notifications with Alert Manager

Located at Marketing Cloud Setup > Settings > Company Settings, Alert manager can be used to send emails to recipients relevant to any critical system alerts. This first release is specific to email send and triggered send errors. Previous to this release, the send would be attempted up to three times. If the last attempt failed, the send would be cancelled and support would contact the account administrator.

Goodbye IE11

As any developer will tell you, the bane of their existence will always have been trying to support Internet Explorer! Salesforce have announced that on December 31 2020, that access to Marketing Cloud using IE11 will cease. Customers are advised to use one of the other supported browsers for access moving forward

Marketing Cloud Connect A/B Test Feature Is Retiring January 2021. 

Marketing Cloud Connect A/B test email sends rely on email studio classic content which is being retired in January 2021 and this it will no longer be available. It is recommended that you use sycnchronised data sources to bring your data into Marketing Cloud and use A/B testing in Email Studio.

Daily Automation Enhancement in Audience Builder

Audience Builder will now exclude any data loaders you are not using from the daily automation to improve performance. It will inform you when you are using an out-dated or inactive dimension. You will need to save or publish an audience in order to turn the data loaded back on. Your data for the new dimension will then be available the next day (after the automation runs again)

MobilePush Auth Key for iOS Update Extended to September

As part of updates and improvements to security Apple is removing support for current .p12 APNs certificates and requires all customers to use .p8 Auth keys for their apps. The original date for this update was set as July 2020 but to allow more time for the changes, this has been extended to September 14, 2020.