The latest Marketing Cloud release is live! This time Marketing Cloud has come with so many exciting updates. In this article, we will explore the top features of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s August 2021 release. Let’s deep dive into some of the key innovations a little further.
Self-Serve SSL Certificates for Custom Domains
The long-awaited feature announced even last year is finally available. Now, you will be able to secure custom domains directly from the MC Setup. Previously, for provisioning SSL Certificates you had to reach out to your Account Executive or Marketing Cloud support to begin the process of installing an SSL certificate to your Marketing Cloud domains. On average it took between 4 and 6 weeks.
The new self-serve SSL lets you secure custom domains easier and faster. In just less than 10 days you can have your domains secured.
How to secure domains?
You can secure your domains in the “Domain SSL Certificates” section of Setup in Marketing Cloud. There, you will see a list of all domains created with Sender Authentication Package (SAP) or private domains for CloudPages. You can only secure domains that have delegated DNS status by clicking on the arrow next to a domain, then selecting “Secure this Domain”
Wait Until Push Message Engagement
This month Salesforce released a new Journey Builder activity, available in Corporate and Enterprise editions.
Before this feature was introduced, a workaround was needed to determine whether a user opened a push message. In order to use push engagement data in decision splits you had to query data views and link a result Data Extension to the contact model. This month, Salesforce introduced a very exciting new flow activity you can drag onto the journey builder canvas and listen for open events in real-time and send customers to different paths based on whether they open a push notification within a specified timeframe.
“Wait Until Push Message Engagement” activity has a mandatory split into two paths: for customers who open a push message and for customers who don’t, which allows you to create customized experiences for all contacts.
With this new flow activity, you can listen to engagement open events from Push messages that you have sent. This activity allows you to keep contacts in a wait step until a specified engagement with a particular mobile push message happens and only then you can move the contact forward in the journey. If the specified engagement does not happen within a predefined time frame, the contact will take an alternative path and can also be contacted via another channel. Wait Until Push Message Engagement” activity can follow only push notification, not inbox or in-app messages. The maximal time for wait duration is 7 days.
There are multiple use cases for this kind of activity, for example, a bank sends a push message to customers promoting a new offer for Saving Account. If customers open a push message, they will see an in-app message providing more details about the offer. If they don’t interact with a push message, a bank is sending them an email introducing the offer for Saving Account.
Self-Serve – Journey Builder Clearing a Queue
As you might know, Journey Builder email activity uses MC triggered sending framework to send emails. This means that you can manage some operations of an email activity through email studio triggered send, such as publishing content updates.
An audience for a Journey Builder may have some incorrect data (bounces, unsubscribes, incorrect email address) that cannot be processed by the email activity. When the email activity cannot process the data after a certain number of attempts, the triggered send for that email activity will stop processing messages. However, all other segments of the journey will continue to run. This means you will get a large queue of people sitting in a Journey Builder email send activity. To clear that queue, previously, you had to raise a support case.
With this new feature, you can search for your journey version, click on “View Queue” and you’ll have the option to clear the queue.
Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) Enforcement
Beginning February 1, 2022, all Salesforce customers are contractually required to use MFA in order to access Salesforce products. To speed up the adoption of MFA, now, Marketing Cloud admins can enforce MFA for all users.
To require all users in your tenant to register a verification method, navigate to the Multi-Factor Authentication section of Setup, and select Require Multi-Factor Authentication. This setting forces them to register their verification method the next time they log in.
And that’s not all the new features. You can check the complete list in the official release notes.
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