Salesforce Marketing Cloud Release April 2021

The next release for Salesforce Marketing Cloud is rolling out from April 10 – April 17.  Watch out for some interesting and exciting new features! We’ve highlighted some of these below, and the full release notes can be found here.

Release Highlights

 

Event-Based Wait Until Activity Arrives to Journey Builder

Introducing the first event-based activity to Journey Builder!  You can place a hold on a customer mid-journey to allow an external event to trigger.  Depending on the event outcome, you can use configurable filter criteria to guide the customer through a customised experience.

Available to all customers using Marketing Cloud Journey Builder.

View Recent Contact History for Any Activity In Journey Builder

The contact count below non-wait journey activities has undergone a major makeover; it is now clickable and shows a summary of contacts processed for the past 30 days.  From this summary view, you can drill down into the details and gain valuable insights into customer success or error trends, which speeds up troubleshooting and problem resolution.

Marketing Cloud Package Manager

You can use the new Marketing Cloud Package Manager to export and import fully configured automations, content, data models and journeys from one Marketing Cloud instance to another.  This is a clear win for faster scalability, as this can accelerate onboarding of new business units or geographies.

Available from April 19, 2021 for Marketing Cloud customers.  Access will be limited to administrators only, but more permissions are planned for a future release.

Send Product Data Using Streaming Updates API Via HTTP POST

This is an important change for security reasons: while Marketing Cloud can send product data using streaming updates, it does so using the Collect Tracking Code JavaScript library.  Because this is an open API, this could theoretically allow unauthorized changes to recommendation data.  The change to using HTTP POST avoids this scenario, bolstering the reliability of the recommendations data.

Note that streaming updates using the Collect Tracking Code JavaScript library will continue to work, but there are future plans to deprecate streaming updates using the Collect Tracking Code JavaScript library.

 

Additional Features on this Release

 

Clickjacking Protection is Automatically Enabled

Clickjacking protection is now automatically enabled for all Marketing Cloud accounts.  In prior releases, a security option had to be toggled to gain this protection.  With this release, malicious pages will no longer be able to load in the background of trusted Marketing Cloud pages.

Can Now Import Amazon S3 Data

You can now specify an Amazon S3 bucket as a file location source to import data into Marketing Cloud.  This feature is included in all Marketing Cloud editions. 

Contact Delete Default Suppression Period Change

The default suppression period for contact deletion is changing from 14 days to 2 days.  This is in line with how most customers adjust this setting, and is closer to the best practice recommendation of 0 days.

Journey Builder will not send WhatsApp messages to opted-out contacts

In the January 2021 release, the ability to create and send WhatsApp messages was introduced to Journey Builder.  However, contacts who may have opted out of receiving WhatsApp messages who were injected into a journey continued to receive messages out of turn.  The new release addresses this, so that Journey Builder automatically removes them from the audience source and doesn’t send a message to them.

Important Information

Retirement of the Marketing Cloud Connector V2

The retirement of V2 Marketing Cloud Connect takes effect from March 31, 2021.  Customers who are still using V2 need to make use of the upgrade options to continue using Marketing Cloud Email Studio from Salesforce.  These options are described here.