TOP 3 Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features – January Release

Salesforce is ready with its latest set of features to be included into Marketing Cloud in January 2021. Before we get into my top 3 features that I’m looking forward to, here are the important release dates for your reference.

• Marketing Cloud release occurs on January 30, 2021 through February 6, 2021
• Some features are made available to your instance within a week of the release.
• Join this webinar on February 11, 2021 at 12:00 PM EST!

AMP for Email

We can add new interactive elements to the emails by sending AMP messages through the Marketing Cloud. We can now include AMP components inside messages to bring more web-like experiences to the inbox. Send messages with real-time data like appointment scheduling, responding to events, leaving feedback, completing surveys and order status updates etc

Preview of the Feature

Note: 

• Secure and integrated with Content Builder creation tools will be available support sending of the AMP emails.
• AMP emails are supported in Gmail, Yahoo, and Mail.Ru mail clients.
• Because AMP emails expire in 30 days and some clients don’t support them, AMP emails require an HTML fallback. Access to AMP can be disabled via Content Builder Admin.
• Learn to code AMP here – Build your AMP Email

WhatsApp Chat Messaging

A new chat messaging feature allows us to send transactional and session messages to the customers with WhatsApp. WhatsApp Chat Messaging makes the channel and message creation process easy. Create two way communications by capturing keywords and sending automated responses.

Note:

• Ask automated questions to your users, store and reuse responses for personalization details.
• Create and personalize your message in Content Builder. Choose from your approved template messages or create session messages.
• Use Journey Builder to send your WhatsApp messages.
• Drag the WhatsApp activity onto the canvas and configure the rest of the customer journey. To send session messages, add the new Inbound Chat entry source to the beginning of the journey.
• You can view your message delivery rate in Journey Builder and get bounced message reports in Automation Studio.

• Template Messages:
  • WhatsApp requires explicit consent from your contacts for template messages.
  • Template messages require WhatsApp approval to ensure that promotional content isn’t sent.
  • To send transactional messages, create template messages in the Chat Messaging Setup App.
• Session Messages:
  • Session Messages don’t require approval.
  • Session messages are free-form responses to user-initiated conversation.

New MobileConnect Data View Values

Before this release, it wasn’t possible to know which sends were related to a given activity. Now we can join _SMSmessagetracking to other views using the 2 new fields that are added in this release.

JBActivtyID and JBDefinitionID are the 2 new values that have been added to the Automation Studio _SMSmessagetracking data view.

Note:

Just add the JBDefinitionID and JBActivtyID fields to the data extension you want to query and run it against the _SMSmessagetracking data view.

Conclusion

There are quite a lot of other features released. Check out the complete release notes here – https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=sf.mc_rn_january_2021_release.htm&type=5