by Sarah Kelleher 
There’s a new kid on the Marketing Cloud block and it’s causing quite a stir! Salesforce have publicly announced Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, available in some regions from today.
This marketing automation capability is designed for small businesses with simple B2B use cases and leverages core Salesforce platform and Data Cloud functionality. If you’re wondering why we need a whole new Marketing Cloud when Salesforce already has two great marketing automation platforms, you’re not alone. So let’s break it down…
Avid Trailblazers have been sifting through the Spring ‘24 release notes to see what’s coming to their org. And the most eagle-eyed will have noticed a new addition to the notes… Marketing Cloud. Not to be confused with Marketing Cloud Engagement or Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Okay, so first up, what is the difference between these three products?
- Marketing Cloud Engagement: formerly known as ExactTarget or Messaging & Journeys. This is essentially the centrepiece of the Marketing Cloud suite, mostly for B2C customers.
- Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: formerly known as Pardot. This is a marketing automation tool tightly integrated with CRM, mostly used by B2B customers.
- Marketing Cloud Growth: this is a new offering from Salesforce, built entirely on the core platform. It is currently designed for simpler B2B use cases and leaner marketing teams
In this article, we’re going to be talking about this new product, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition.
What is Marketing Cloud Growth Edition?
The new Marketing Cloud capability is available as part of a new SKU called Marketing Cloud Growth edition. The product is specifically targeted at small businesses. It takes some of the principles of Salesforce Starter and brings to life a marketing experience that is easier to set up, easier to use and, crucially, all built right within the Salesforce platform (with a sprinkling of Data Cloud).
What can Marketing Cloud Growth Edition do?
The capability of this new experience looks pretty exciting. And, because it’s built right into Salesforcce, it leverages some of the platform’s most powerful parts in a marketing context.
Campaign Management
The relationship between marketing campaigns and Salesforce Campaigns has always been a minefield. For Account Engagement, the arrival of Connected Campaigns in 2018 made this easier but they are still separate objects under the hood.
In the Marketing Cloud Growth edition, Campaigns will now be “re-imagined” to be the hub for executing your marketing initiatives. Users can manage content and create journeys using Flow Builder for single emails, multi-stage email journeys and sign-up forms.
Segmentation
Data Cloud is the talk of the town in the Salesforce ecosystem right now, and for good reason. There are now Data Cloud connectors for Marketing Cloud Engagement and for Account Engagement to help marketers use their data more effectively to target their audiences.
But Marketing Cloud Growth edition doesn’t need a connector because it’s built right into Data Cloud already. This is the start of actually achieving the Customer 360 that Salesforce talks about all the time. And I believe there is huge potential for where this can go in future.
Consent Management
There are out-of-the-box tools for consent management with both Engagement and Account Engagement, but they don’t always play nicely with each other and with Salesforce. However, it looks like Marketing Cloud Growth edition will have consent management baked right into CRM with preference pages and communication subscriptions available via the new Consent tab.
Einstein
Would it be a 2024 blog if we didn’t talk about AI?! Salesforce has launched a tonne of new AI features this year and Marketing Cloud Growth is going to make the most of them:
- Co-create with Einstein allows marketers to use generative AI to create campaign briefs with KPIs, audiences, and content, including email subject lines, copy, and preheaders.
- Use Einstein to generate Segments and build more relevant audiences using your data attributes.
- Einstein Send Time Optimization (currently available in other Marketing Cloud products) will help marketers to reach audiences at the most relevant time, based on historical engagement data
- Einstein Metrics Guard will help reduce the impact of bot activity, by filtering out suspicious activity while maintaining legitimate interaction
New Content Builder
Another one?! Yes, there’s a new content builder in town. If you’re an Account Engagement customer this means you now have access to three different email builders. But there’s a good reason for this. Salesforce is pulling together the best bits of their various content builders and pouring all of that into one great, new builder. It’s still early days for this tool and there’s a lot more to come, so we’re looking forward to a future of being able to craft all emails, landing pages, forms and SMS all with the same functionality!
Who can buy Marketing Cloud Growth Edition?
This first release is only available in the Americas region and has a limited feature set. Marketing Cloud Growth will be available in EMEA with the June release, when many more features are due to be added. So watch this space!
Marketing Cloud Growth is aimed at B2B organisations with simple marketing use cases or small marketing teams. A lot of functionality is out-of-the-box, with limited options for customisation or extensibility. So, for those using existing Marketing Cloud products, it would likely be a step down in terms of capability.
Pricing for this new product starts at at $18,000 per year and comes bundled in with enough Data Cloud credits for 10,000 unified individuals (similar to the standard Account Engagement offering of 10,000 mailable prospects). The bundle also inclused Segments and Activations for Data cloud, something not included in the “free” version of Data Cloud.
What does this mean for existing Marketing Cloud customers?
Right now, not a lot. This is a brand new product and does not replace any existing functionality for Account Engagement and Engagement customers. Account Engagement customers will be able to get their hands on the new Content builder in February. But they won’t get access to the rest of this new product for now. And key features like Dynamic Content and A/B testing are missing, so it’s unlikely that a switch would be a good idea for now.
But, looking forward, this release shows Salesforce’s commitment to the Customer 360 and that Data Cloud is going to be the key to connecting all of these business functions.
It also shows that marketing is still a really important part of that Salesforce tech stack. We should all be thinking about how we can align across our whole customer journey using data and AI. So, now’s the time to start planning your data strategy to make sure you’re ready to take advantage of what’s sure to come in the next few releases!