What is Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition?

Small businesses have always had to do more with less. Fewer employees, tighter budgets? Check. Sky-high expectations and stiff competition? Also, check. Earlier this year, Salesforce launched the Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, a version of our product that is designed with the challenges and goals of small businesses in mind. At Dreamforce 2024, we took another step forward with the launch of Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition, which will be available in November 2024. 

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition expands on the capabilities of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, giving small business marketers more advanced AI and automation capabilities as they look to scale personalization with trusted data, create more efficient workflows, and optimize their outreach. They are the same product but with different tiers of functionality.

So what exactly does Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition do? Here’s what you need to know.

What you will learn in this blog

• What is Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition and how does it differ from Growth Edition?
• What new functionality do you get with the Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition?

What is Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition and how does it differ from Growth Edition?

Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition is the next tier of functionality found in Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. 

As a refresher, Growth Edition is the first edition of Marketing Cloud with Salesforce Data Cloud as a foundation. It was built to help  small businesses:

• Connect marketing, sales, service, and commerce teams and drive revenue on one platform
• Deliver campaigns and content faster with trusted AI
• Personalize customer relationships with data from across your organization

Advanced Edition is perfect for small businesses that are interested in Growth Edition, but want additional functionality and scale. Advanced Edition has all the same functionality as Growth Edition, plus additional features that help small businesses reach customers faster, optimize their journeys, and better understand their customers with predictive AI. More on that below.

Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced Editions (launch date Nov ‘24) are available in North America, Latin America, and Europe, with additional regions coming soon. 

What new functionality do you get with the Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition?

• Get more out of SMS messaging. Unified Conversations for SMS allows brands to bring together conversations across Marketing, Service, and Commerce so customers can have a two-way dialogue with your business using a single SMS number.
  
  For example, a telecom company can use Advanced Edition to keep their Sales and Service teams informed of their customer’s actions throughout the churn campaign using data-triggered workflow automations. They can use SMS to renew a customer’s contract and onboard them to the latest features with Service in the loop.

Marketers can also use responses to gain new customer insights, such as demographics, affinities, and purchase intent. 

Note that the Digital Engagement SKU and SMS add-on are required for this capability.

• Test your journeys in real-time. The Path Experiment feature helps you understand how your customers can interact with different, personalized paths in Salesforce Flow – allowing you to measure or optimize your customer journeys.
  
  You can randomly assign individuals to different paths, which ensures unbiased results. You can also customize how individuals are distributed to different paths when testing journeys.

• Use predictive AI to send fewer, better messages. One of the cardinal rules of marketing is to never inundate your customers with too many messages. However, this can be challenging when you are running multiple automated journeys at the same time.
  
  With Advanced Edition, marketers in small businesses can use Einstein Engagement Frequency to automatically remove customers who are getting too many messages – and add customers to journeys if they need more outreach.
  
• Use predictive AI to find your most interested customers. Scoring is key to understanding how engaged your customers are with your marketing. However, maintaining scoring rubrics can be a highly manual process. With Einstein Engagement Scoring, small businesses can use predictive AI to understand which customers are ready to buy and which customers need additional nurturing. This takes manual analysis out of the equation so marketers can just act.
  
  The capabilities we are building in Advanced Edition help marketers target their most interested customers with highly personalized, localized content when they’re most receptive to it. And they expand marketers’ reach beyond the traditional marketing funnel and into sales and commerce scenarios. 
• These new features are just the start when it comes to the innovations we are building out in Growth and Advanced Editions. Be sure to check out our release resources for the most up to date information.