As someone who primarily focuses on B2B and Account Engagement, I’ll admit I was a little lost the first time I approached the topic of SMS and Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. SMS was just not regularly part of my Marketing world, so trying to figure out the difference between Long Code and Short Code, go through the provisioning process, and advise others on which code is right for them felt overwhelming. However, thanks in large part to my B2C and Marketing Cloud Engagement focused co-workers, I now have a good handle on this topic and want to make sure others in the community can too! 

Long Code versus Short Code

The first thing to make sense of is the two types of SMS codes within Marketing Cloud on Core, their provisioning process, and which type is right for you.

Note: For some countries only one type of SMS code is currently supported (for example, only Short Code is available for Canada). If you are outside of the US, ensure you check the SMS Rate Card to see which SMS Codes are currently supported for your country.

Long Code

Long codes are a good choice for businesses that want to send messages to a smaller number of customers or create a more personal touch. Long Code SMS is also

• More cost-effective and take less time to set up
• Needed for International SMS
• Needed for Conversational SMS
• Has a longer send time (roughly 1 sec per message per recipient)

In summary, if you are sending delivery updates, appointment or event reminders, customer service communications etc. Long Code is likely the better choice. 

Long Code Provisioning

Long Code Provisioning takes between 4-6 weeks and is a multi-step self-service process. 

Step 1: Request a Brand

You’ll need to compile some basic info about your company for this form and then wait roughly 5 business days for the Brand to be approved (aka verified). 

Step 2: Request a Campaign

After your Brand is “verified” you can then request a Campaign. This step is a little more complex and you’ll need to provide some sample SMS messages for the form. Campaigns take roughly 10 business days to be approved (aka registered).

Step 3: Request a Code

Once your Campaign is “Registered” you can complete the final step of requesting your Long Code. This step should only take 2 business days to complete. 

Short Code

Short codes are the preferred method for organizations sending high volumes of SMS and expect very fast delivery times.

Short codes are also country-specific. A short code is only able to send messages to and receive messages from, same-country phone numbers. US short codes can only send to US phone numbers on US carrier networks that have approved that short code.

Short codes are the better choice if you intend on sending promotional messages to a large audience, such as sending limited-time offers and discount codes to all your current customers.

Short Code Provisioning

Short Code Provisioning takes an average of 12 weeks to set up and can only be done through a Mobile Approved Partner. Each partner has their own fees for Short Code Provisioning, but you can expect anywhere between $8k-$15k for this process. 

That was a lot of information, could you put it in a chart?

You got it!

SMS Credits

Both Short and Long Code SMS require Salesforce Messaging Credits to send SMS. Credits are consumed differently based on their multipliers (which can change so ensure you check the multipliers page for the most up to date info). For example, US Short Codes currently have a multiplier of 4 and Long Code a multiplier of 5. Based on 15K text sends, Short Code US requirement will be 60K of Credits , Long Code: 75K of Credits.

SMS and Consent

Consent for SMS channels can’t be imported until after the SMS Code has been provisioned. Once provisioned you can proceed with importing existing consent records to tie opt-ins and opt-outs to your unified individuals. Ensure your phone numbers use the E164 format in your consent files!

What’s next?

After your SMS code has been provisioned and you’ve imported your Consent Records there are a few additional setup steps you’ll want to tackle before you start sending:

• Create a Branded Domain – This allows you to shorten URLs sent via SMS into personalized links.
• Vet your SMS Brand – Improve your sending reputation by validating your identity.
• Set up Analytics – Ensure you’ve installed the SMS Analytics packages

Original article: SMS Provisioning and Marketing Cloud on Core

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post SMS Provisioning and Marketing Cloud on Core appeared first on The Spot.

Marketing Cloud on Core (also known as Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced Edition) can now track how marketing efforts contribute to revenue! With the Spring ‘25 release, Salesforce introduced Opportunity Influence, helping businesses connect marketing engagement to pipeline and revenue. But how does it work, and what’s the difference between Opportunity Influence and Campaign Influence? Let’s dive in!

Opportunity Influence vs. Campaign Influence: What’s the Real Deal?

Before we break down how to customize and report on Opportunity Influence, let’s clarify how it differs from Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s Customizable Campaign Influence. While both models aim to connect marketing efforts to revenue, they function in distinct ways and serve different use cases. 

Important Note for Account Engagement Users

You cannot use Opportunity Influence alongside Customizable Campaign Influence. If your team already relies on Account Engagement’s Campaign Influence Models, keep this in mind when deciding which model to use.

Additionally, Account Engagement users cannot activate Opportunity Influence as it does not currently integrate with Account Engagement’s Campaign Influence model. If your organization currently tracks marketing-driven revenue using Campaign Influence reports, you’ll need to continue using that model. However, if you’re considering a shift to Marketing Cloud on Core, Opportunity Influence could offer enhanced multi-touch attribution and engagement tracking.

Battle of Influences: Campaign vs. Opportunity – Which One Wins?

Let’s say you’re running a B2B software company and you’ve executed multiple marketing campaigns using a variety of platforms, including ads, email, an e-book, and a webinar, to engage your prospects.

• Campaign Influence: A prospect attends the webinar, clicks on an email, and downloads the e-book before being transitioned to sales as a marketing-qualified lead. These interactions are recorded under a Salesforce Campaign and can be manually associated with the Opportunity when created based on the Opportunity Contact Role and Campaign Member. You can assign influence weight based on your customized rules.
• Opportunity Influence: Marketing Cloud on Core automatically tracks all marketing engagement, including the ad view and click, webinar attendance, and e-book download. These touchpoints are automatically associated to attribute influence based on the predefined model and associated to the Opportunity upon creation.

If Campaign Influence were a fine-dining experience, it would be a chef-curated meal—meticulously crafted with manual customization to fit your exact taste. You decide which interactions get the most credit, but it requires hands-on effort. On the other hand, Opportunity Influence is like an all-you-can-eat buffet with an expert chef behind the scenes. It automatically dishes out credit across touchpoints, giving you a full spread of marketing influence with minimal effort. If you love precision and control, Campaign Influence is for you. But if you want a seamless, automated view of your entire marketing impact, Opportunity Influence takes the crown.

How to Set Up Opportunity Influence

Setting up Opportunity Influence requires configuration in Sales Cloud to ensure marketing engagement is properly attributed to revenue-generating activities. To fully connect marketing efforts with sales outcomes, ensure that contacts engaging with marketing campaigns are linked to Opportunities. This allows for accurate tracking of marketing interactions that influence deals.

Enabling Opportunity Influence

1. Navigate to Salesforce Setup > Opportunity Influence
2. Enable Opportunity Influence
3. Select an Attribution Model
   1. First-Touch: Gives full credit to the first marketing engagement that led to the opportunity. It’s ideal for understanding which top-of-funnel efforts drive initial interest.
   2. Last-Touch: Assigns full credit to the last marketing interaction before the opportunity was created. It helps measure the final push that converted a lead into an opportunity.
   3. Even-Distribution: Spreads credit evenly across all marketing interactions that occurred before opportunity creation, giving a balanced view of multi-touch engagement. This approach is ideal for businesses with long sales cycles and/or multiple high-value touchpoints.

Going Beyond Activation

Customization is key to maximizing Opportunity Influence. Marketers should align influence models with their sales cycle, ensuring critical marketing touchpoints, such as email engagements, paid ads, and automation journeys, are correctly captured. Because Opportunity Influence consumes Data Credits, it’s essential to be strategic when enabling multiple models to avoid unnecessary credit usage.

Making Sense of Your Data: Reporting on Opportunity Influence

Once Opportunity Influence is enabled and tracking data, you can start reporting on marketing’s impact. The key to unlocking valuable insights is leveraging Salesforce’s Reports & Dashboards to tell a clear story about how marketing drives revenue.

Your Treasure Map to Salesforce Reports & Dashboards

• Head over to Salesforce Reports and search for Opportunity Influence Reports. This is your go-to hub for seeing which marketing touchpoints are helping close deals.
• Get specific with your insights! Use filters to refine reports by timeframe, campaign, or opportunity. Want to know which emails led to the most revenue? Adjust your filters to see the impact.
• Create Salesforce Dashboards to visualize Opportunity Influence. Need a quick snapshot for your leadership team? Build an easy-to-read chart that shows exactly how marketing is fueling revenue.

The Ultimate Guide to Opportunity Influence Report Types

Salesforce provides several built-in report types to help you analyze how marketing efforts contribute to revenue. Here are the key report types you can use:

• Opportunity Influence Summary Report – This high-level report shows how marketing engagements are influencing revenue across all opportunities. Use it to track overall marketing impact.
• Opportunity Influence Detail Report – A more granular report that breaks down individual touchpoints per opportunity, allowing you to analyze which specific marketing interactions played a role in closing deals.
• Influence Attribution Model Comparison Chart – Compare first-touch, last-touch, and even-distribution models side by side to see which one provides the best insights for your marketing strategy.
• Marketing Touchpoint Analysis Report – Identifies which marketing channels (email, ads, website visits, etc.) are contributing the most to opportunity creation and pipeline growth.

By setting up and analyzing Opportunity Influence reports, marketing teams can gain deeper insights into which touchpoints matter most, optimize their strategies accordingly, and confidently demonstrate their return on investment.

Why Opportunity Influence is a Game-Changer

Opportunity Influence is a must-have tool for any marketing team looking to measure true revenue impact. No more guessing which emails, ads, or landing pages are driving pipeline – Opportunity Influence connects the dots, giving you a clear picture of how marketing fuels business growth. With built-in attribution models, you can customize insights based on what matters most to your strategy.

Whether you’re aiming to prove marketing ROI, optimize your campaigns, or align better with sales, Opportunity Influence provides automated, data-driven attribution that simplifies reporting and enhances decision-making. If you want better visibility into marketing’s role in revenue generation, this feature is your new best friend!

Next Steps:

1. Check your org to see if the new update is available.
2. Test Opportunity Influence tracking before rolling it out company-wide.
3. Monitor data service credit usage if you’re using multiple attribution models.

Want to learn more? Check out the full Spring ‘25 release highlights or dive into the official release notes.

What are your thoughts on Opportunity Influence? Drop a comment below, and let’s discuss!

Original article: Cracking the Code: How Opportunity Influence Connects Marketing to Revenue

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Cracking the Code: How Opportunity Influence Connects Marketing to Revenue appeared first on The Spot.

Autonomous AI is transforming the way organizations operate, and Salesforce’s Agentforce is at the forefront of this revolution. The product was made generally available by Salesforce in October 2024. Whether you want to streamline case management, enhance lead nurturing, or delight customers, Agentforce empowers businesses to accomplish more with fewer resources. In this post, we’ll share five practical tips to help you successfully implement and use Agentforce. 

Feeling anxious about diving all in with Agentforce? Contact the Sercante team for an Agentforce readiness assessment. That way, you can be sure you’re getting set up for success before you implement Agentforce in your org.

Understanding Agentforce

Before diving into the tips, let’s take a closer look at what Agentforce is.

Agentforce enables autonomous AI agents to perform tasks without human intervention, acting as digital workers within Salesforce or external customer channels. These agents enhance productivity by automating routine tasks and assisting with complex ones. With tools like Agent Builder, you can customize agents using pre-built topics and actions or create entirely new ones tailored to your organization’s needs.

Agentforce integrates seamlessly across the Salesforce platform, leveraging Data Cloud for reasoning and learning. Out-of-the-box agents include Service Agents for case deflection, with more capabilities to be released in December 2024, such as SDR and sales coaching agents.

Unleashing the Power of Agentforce: Five Steps to Get Started

Follow these five steps to get started on the right foot when you dive into Agentforce.

Tip 1: Identify Use Cases

Start by identifying where Agentforce can deliver the most value in your organization. Ask yourself:

• How are you using your CRM today?
• What are the current pain points in your processes?
• Are there routine tasks that could be automated to free up team capacity?
• Are there new processes you’ve avoided due to resource constraints?

Examples of use cases include automating FAQ responses for service teams, generating campaign briefs for marketing, or assisting sales reps with lead prioritization and moving deals faster.

Then for each use case, think about what would be needed to transition to an agent:

• What job should they do?
• What actions will they need to take?
• What actions should they NOT take?  (This is just as if not more important to make sure you have defined the lane where an agent should operate within that use case)

Your responses to those questions are going to help you to understand the level of effort involved in use case. This in turn is going to help you to prioritize based on the level of effort and potential value

Tip 2: Define Success Metrics

To gauge the success of your Agentforce implementation, establish clear goals and KPIs. 

Questions you can ask:

• What does success mean? How will we know we have addressed our problem? 
• What metrics are we tracking today that we want to see improvement on?
• Are there additional metrics that will let us know we are seeing success?

For example:

• Reducing average case handling time by 20%
• Improving lead response times
• Increasing campaign ROI by automating content creation

Ensure you have baseline data for comparison and that the necessary measurement tools are in place to help you track success.

Tip 3: Assess Your Data

Your AI agents are only as good as the data they access. For the use cases identified, evaluate your data readiness:

• What data do need? 
• Where is it located? Is it in your CRM, Data Cloud, or other external systems?
• Is it accessible from your CRM? If it’s stored in an external system, do you have APIs in place to get that information?
• Is the data clean, accurate, and up-to-date?
  • Follow this blog post for tips on how to keep your imported Pardot prospect data clean.
• Do you have a single view of the customer across systems?
  • Get tips for creating that single source of truth in this blog post that covers marketing asset reporting, and this blog post that covers customer data platform reporting.
• Lastly, are knowledge bases and metadata structured for easy access? 
  • Agents need knowledge to inform how they will operate and answer questions. This is all of the background configurations your agents actions will rely on — flows, prompts, and Apex for example — they need to also be clearly identifiable and accessible. 
  • When you add actions to your topics, it uses the descriptions to help fuel the instructions. The naming conventions of your resources will also make it easier to determine what the inputs and outputs need to be.

Data and metadata are the backbone of AI performance, so this is an important area to pay attention to.

Tip 4: Start Small

After completing the previous steps, you may have more than one great use case to start with. Here’s where you ask yourself: What are the quick wins that we can get started on that can move the needle and that we can expand on as we mature?

It’s really easy to get caught up on how this can solve ALL the things. There are many challenges to starting a complex process all at once. If a lot of effort is required to get the data in place or to get the actions set up, it will be more difficult to roll out, not to mention making it potentially disruptive and prone to issues 

Avoid the temptation to tackle complex processes right away. Instead, focus on a simple, high-impact use case to pilot Agentforce. There are many out-of-the-box topics and actions that make getting started easier. For example, automating a single FAQ response or generating summaries for sales reps.

Starting small helps build confidence, momentum, and organizational buy-in, and it also reduces the risk of missteps.

Tip 5: Nail Down Clear Instructions

When designing agents, clarity is key. Use the Agent Builder to create and test well-defined topics and actions:

• Topics – Include precise instructions for classifying user requests, setting guardrails, and outlining scope.
• Actions – Clearly define what the agent should do, including required inputs and expected outputs.

Salesforce Agentforce Topic Instruction Best Practices

Instructions are the foundation for grounding how agents perform. They set the guardrails for how the agent should behave and give the agent the context it needs to do its job. 

Here are a few best practices for writing Agentforce topic instructions:

• Start simple
  • Start with the main use case first to ensure the agent is performing as expected. Then, add in more detail to address edge cases. Be sure to test existing instructions for any conflict. You don’t want to confuse the agent! 
• Use plain language
  • Use concise natural language to describe what your action does. Keep it to 1-3 sentences, and it can include the goal of the action, any use cases, and the objects or records it uses or modifies. 
  • In general, the more relevant detail you include in your instructions, the easier it is for the agent to differentiate between actions. Also, be sure to vary the words you use. For example, use a mix of “Get,” “Find,” “Retrieve,” or “Identify” for actions that will query records.
• Avoid industry or company jargon
  • Write like you are instructing someone who doesn’t know your business. Even terms like ‘qualified lead’ could mean something different from one organization to another. Give context where necessary, and reference clear criteria using the data it will have access to. 
  • For example, instead of vague terms like “qualify lead,” specify conditions such as “lead status equals MQL.” 
  • The agent isn’t not going to know your business processes either, so be explicit about the sequence of instructions or any conditions a conversation must meet for an agent to apply an action.
• Think of all the paths
  • You want to go through every possible permutation to determine the actions required. For example: a customer reaches out because they didn’t receive their order. 
  • First think about the order status ( Order Shipped, Delayed, Not Found, Processing). If the status is Shipped then there could be different tracking statuses (In Transit or Delivered for example). If the order is showing as Delivered, was it delivered to the customer’s correct address? Was it stolen? …and so on.
• Remember the Guardrails
  • Keep the Agent in its lane by providing clear instructions on what the agent should not do to prevent unwanted responses. In cases where the agent is customer-facing, be sure to also give clear direction on when an interaction should be routed to a human.

Test these instructions thoroughly in the Agent Builder’s testing environment to ensure your agents behave as expected.

Ready to Explore Agentforce?

Agentforce offers an exciting opportunity to enhance productivity and streamline operations. By identifying the right use cases, preparing your data, and starting with manageable projects, you can set your organization up for success.

Want to learn more? Check out Salesforce’s Agentforce Trailhead and virtual workshops to get hands-on experience. Need expert guidance? Contact the Sercante team for an Agentforce readiness assessment.

Original article: Five Tips for Getting Started with Salesforce Agentforce

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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The Salesforce Winter ‘25 Release Notes are out! Let’s dive into what’s new in the Winter ’25 Release for Marketing Cloud Growth Edition.

Streamlined Setup

First things first. Salesforce is working to make Marketing Cloud Growth (aka MCG) easier to manage and keep updated as additional features and functionalities are added. With the Winter ’25 release, users with the Marketing Cloud Admin permission set can now access the setup assistant for easier implementation of MCG. All Data Kits can also be updated with the click of a button on the Marketing Data tab. 

Some Data Kits do require you to then deploy the update within Data Cloud’s ingestion data streams. See this help article for guidance. 

Dynamic Content

I love seeing my favorite Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) features show up in MKG! With this release, MCG users can now build Dynamic Content for email subject lines, email preheaders, and email components and even use Einstein Co-Pilot to help with the copy. 

While in the Email Builder, users can create content variations and determine the logic for when a variation is shown.

Event-Triggered Campaigns

A new Campaign template is coming to MCG that will enable Marketers to easily send event-based email messages to their audience. This new campaign can be used when a prospect or client performs an action, such as making a purchase. MCG can then personalize the email with event data. For our “making a purchase” example, the email could contain the order confirmation and details about said order. 

Einstein Co-Pilot

Einstein Co-Pilot continues to expand across Salesforce applications to not only deliver a consistent user experience, but also answer questions and generate content that is grounded in your unique data. Einstein Co-Pilot is generally available for MCG as part of the Winter release and can assist in generating campaigns and copy. If you have already implemented MCG and are currently using Einstein Co-Create, you will need to make some changes to switch to Co-Pilot. Steps to make the switch are coming soon. 

Brand Tone and Identity

Marketing Cloud Growth’s Brand Guidelines are being extended to include Brand Identity and Brand Tone. These brand details help Einstein Co-Pilot better generate content that matches your unique brand and allows you to quickly revise content using a different tone when needed. 

Opportunity Influence

Similar to Campaign influence, Opportunity influence will assist marketers in identifying which campaigns were impactful for opportunities. First-touch and last-touch attribution models will be available as part of the Winter release, allowing marketers to report on which campaigns are most effective during the different stages of the customer’s journey. Opportunity influence will require some backend setup and configuration for accurate reporting, so stay tuned for a more detailed blog post once this feature is available!

And more!

• Einstein Data Prism helps generate more accurate segments by enriching the Data Cloud schema with semantic descriptions. 
• Easily share content across workspaces. This addition is especially helpful if you are using Salesforce CMS for multiple applications, for example MCG and MCAE Lightning Builder. 
• Designate images as decorative for screen readers and other assistive technologies. 
• Give subscribers the ability to manage their SMS preferences as well as opt-out of SMS messaging.
• Create more complex scoring rules by grouping or combining scoring rules. Read more about the scoring capabilities of Marketing Cloud Growth in our previous blog post. 

That is a LOT of updates, and I’m happy to see it! What is your favorite feature coming to Marketing Cloud Growth in the Winter ‘25 release? Let us know in the comments.

Original article: Salesforce Winter ‘25 Highlights: Marketing Cloud Growth Edition

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Salesforce Winter ‘25 Highlights: Marketing Cloud Growth Edition appeared first on The Spot.

Event marketing is a fantastic way to connect with your audience, build brand awareness, and generate leads. However, managing event marketing activities can take time and effort. That’s where Account Engagement can help — in more ways than you probably thought!

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (f.k.a. Pardot) can streamline your event marketing efforts from initial promotions and registrations to post-event follow-up and nurturing. In this post, we’ll explore how you can use Account Engagement for event marketing to ensure a seamless and impactful experience. We’ll show you which out-of-the-box tool(s) we recommend using at what time during the event process so you can maximize your efforts.

Using Account Engagement for Event Marketing: Planning and Promotion

A marketing event is only as good as the planning that goes into it. Ensuring you have your campaigns and other assets created in advance with a clear goal and structure in mind will dramatically improve the organization of your initiatives and enable consistent reporting down the road.

Here’s how to do that.

Set Up Your Event in Account Engagement (Pardot)

If you’re using Connected Campaigns, start by creating a campaign (or hierarchy of campaigns) in Salesforce for your event. This will help you track all marketing activities and ROI related to the event. You’ll then associate all your event assets (emails, landing pages, forms) with these campaigns later.

If you’re not using Connected Campaigns, then we highly recommend you read this blog post to understand the advantages of Connected Campaigns and how to enable the feature. Then, reach out to Sercante if you’re unsure of your next steps.

Create Your Campaign Structure

These are the steps to create your campaign structure:

1. Navigate to Campaigns and click on + Add Campaign.
   • Name your campaign using your organization’s standard naming conventions.
   • Set default and/or custom fields, like cost, start/end date, and type.
     • If it is a child campaign, select the appropriate parent to create your hierarchy
   • Ensure your campaign is marked “Active” so it can sync with Account Engagement via Connected Campaigns.

Design Event Registration Forms

Now it’s time to design your forms to collect attendee information such as name, email, job title, and company.

1. Under Content  > Forms, click + Add Form.
   • Ensure your form includes fields that are crucial for segmenting and personalizing follow-up communications.

Develop Event-Specific Landing Pages

Create engaging landing pages to capture registrations. These pages should highlight the event’s benefits, speakers, and agenda, and include a clear call-to-action (CTA).

1. Navigate to Content  > Landing Pages and click on + Add Landing Page.
   • Choose a layout template that fits your event’s branding.
   • Customize the page with relevant content and images.
   • When prompted, select the form you created in the previous step.

Promoting Your Event

Develop Email Marketing Campaigns

After all, Account Engagement is an email marketing platform! Let’s use that core functionality to promote our event. Next, you’ll create a series of emails to promote your event. 

Your campaign will include some form of the following emails:

• Invitations
• Reminders
• Last-chance registration prompts
• Follow-up correspondence with attendees

Some emails may be used as List Emails, while others may be automated sends using email templates.

I always recommend my clients have a comprehensive, universal email template on hand in their org. What I mean by that is a repeatable template that has lots of different sections for all types of emails. You’d clone this template, remove the sections you don’t need, and save.

On the right is an example of a Sercante Ultimate Email Template the team built for The Spot. It’s a common request our clients bring to us, so drop us a message if you don’t have a universal email template and want to get one.

Sending One-Off List Emails

If you’re sending a one-off List Email, follow these basic steps:

1. Navigate to Account Engagement Email > List Emails and choose one of your published Email Templates.
   • Modify your sections accordingly, while keeping consistent branding.
   • Craft compelling subject lines and body content that convey the value of attending your event.
   • Include a call to action, depending on the needs of the event.
   • Make sure to always test before you schedule or send your emails. There’s a handy QA checklist in this blog post so you can hit the send button confidently.

Segmentation and Targeting

Use Account Engagement’s segmentation features to target specific audience groups with tailored messages.

1. Go to Prospects > Segmentation Lists and create lists based on criteria such as past event attendance, industry, or engagement level.
   • Use dynamic lists for criteria-based segmentation (i.e. location, job title, CRM status).
   • Use static lists for manual segmentation (i.e. adding individual prospects to an invitation list).

Want to go a step further? Use social media connectors

Tap Account Engagement’s social posting capabilities to promote your event on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.  You’ll need to set up your social media connectors under Account Engagement Settings > Connectors and log in to connect your social media accounts with Account Engagement. 

Under Content > Social, you can create, manage, and schedule social posts. To complete the circle, you can insert CTAs in your posts that link back to your event landing page.

Managing Marketing Event Registrations with Account Engagement

Tracking Registrations

Forms

Use Forms to ensure all data flows into Account Engagement seamlessly. There’s a handy form style generator here you can use to customize your forms to match your branding.

1. Navigate to Content > Forms and click + Add Form (or clone one you already have!)
   • Map your fields to capture all necessary registration information.
   • Ensure you customize your Completion Actions for autoresponders, assignments, campaign membership, etc.

Automation Rules for Registration Management

If Completion Actions don’t offer the functionality you’re looking for, consider creating Automation Rules to manage registrants. 

Automation Rules allow you to automate actions such as adding them to a list, sending confirmation emails, or notifying your sales team when hot prospects or accounts are actively engaging.

1. Go to Automations > Automation Rules and click + Add Automation Rule.
   • Set criteria (i.e. form completion) and corresponding actions (ie. add to list, send email, update campaign member status).
   • Once you’re ready to run it, make sure you “unpause” the automation rule.

Confirmation and Reminder Emails

For this, we highly recommend using Account Engagement’s automated nurture engine: Engagement Studio. This powerful tool comes out of the box with all MCAE editions.

Under Automations > Engagement Studio, you can create intelligent nurture programs to automate follow-up, update records and act immediately on interactions with your prospects.

Sending Confirmation Emails

Ensure that every registrant receives an immediate confirmation email with event details. 

Reminder Emails

Schedule reminder emails leading up to the event to keep registrants engaged and reduce no-shows. Create a series of reminders — starting a week before the event, a day before, and a few hours before the start.

Event Marketing Doesn’t End There. Keep it Going!

You’ve made it to the day of your event! While your pre-event promotion is over, and your email invitations and reminders have all been sent, you can still use Account Engagement to engage with your prospects during and after the event, and throughout the sales process.

During the Event

Engaging Attendees with Personalized Content

Use Account Engagement’s dynamic content features to personalize the content displayed to attendees based on their profiles. 

1. Navigate to Content > Dynamic Content and create content blocks that change based on prospect data (i.e. industry, job title, location).

Real-Time Data Collection

Use Account Engagement’s tracking capabilities to monitor attendee interactions during the event, such as session attendance and engagement with event content. You can also implement tracking codes on event-related pages and materials to capture real-time data.

Feedback Forms

Create and send feedback forms immediately after each session to gather attendee insights and improve future events. This is a crucial step that will help your team continuously improve and build stronger relationships with your audience.

Post-Event Follow-Up

Analyzing Event Performance

Generating Reports

Use Account Engagement’s reporting features to analyze event performance, including registration numbers, attendance rates, and engagement metrics.

1. Navigate to Account Engagement Reports to view detailed reports on your event’s asset performance (forms, landing pages, emails, etc.).
2. You can filter and export data, or use other tools like Salesforce Lightning Reports or B2B Marketing Analytics for more advanced reporting and data visualization.

ROI Analysis

Calculate the ROI of your event by comparing the costs associated with the event to the revenue generated from leads and opportunities. 

1. Use Account Engagement’s ROI reporting tools under Reports > Marketing Assets.

Nurturing Leads

Follow-Up Emails

Create a series of follow-up emails to thank attendees, share event highlights, and provide additional resources. Use Engagement Studio to automate these follow-up emails for timely and relevant communication.

Lead Scoring and Grading

Update lead scoring and grading models based on attendees’ behaviors during the event.

• Go to Account Engagement Settings > Scoring to adjust scoring rules, and use this updated data to prioritize leads for sales follow-up.

Re-Engaging Non-Attendees

Post-Event Outreach

Don’t forget about those who registered but didn’t attend. Reach out with recorded sessions, summaries, and key takeaways to keep them engaged. Use segmentation lists to identify non-attendees and create a specific follow-up campaign for them.

Surveys and Feedback

Send a survey to non-attendees to understand why they couldn’t attend and gather insights to improve future events. 

1. Use Forms to create and distribute these surveys, and analyze responses to enhance your event strategy.

Planning Future Events

Reviewing Your Feedback

Incorporate feedback from attendees and non-attendees into your planning for future events to continuously improve the experience. 

1. Use Account Engagement Reports > Forms to analyze the feedback forms you’ve sent after previous events, and make data-driven decisions and adjustments to your approach.

Early Bird Promotions

Start promoting your next event early with exclusive offers and early bird discounts to previous attendees. 

1. Use Account Engagement Email to create and send promotional emails, and leverage Dynamic Content for personalized offers.

Now you’re an Account Engagement event marketing pro!

Using Account Engagement’s powerful features and capabilities, you can streamline every aspect of your event marketing activities, from initial planning and promotion to post-event follow-up and long-term nurturing. This ensures a seamless and impactful event experience and maximizes your marketing ROI and strengthens your relationships with prospects and customers.

Utilizing Account Engagement for event marketing can lead to more organized, efficient, and successful events, ultimately driving more meaningful interactions with your customers.

Wanna take a deeper dive into event marketing with Salesforce? Check out this blog post, 5 Event Marketing Best Practices To Implement For Your Next Campaign, which is a roundup of insights from seasoned event marketing professionals.

Original article: Using Account Engagement for Event Marketing: From Planning to Follow-Up

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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In February 2024, Salesforce released Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, its first marketing automation platform built fully on the Einstein 1 Platform (a.k.a. “On Core”). Marketing Cloud Growth Edition has been rapidly evolving and expanding the features of this new solution ever since, and Account Engagement (f.k.a. Pardot) users are about to get a taste of it.

Update! In the Dreamforce ‘24 Marketing Keynote, Salesforce announced that all Account Engagement orgs can get Marketing Cloud Growth provisioned at no additional cost. Previously, this offer was only for orgs with Growth Edition Account Engagement, but it now includes all orgs with a current edition of Account Engagement. A banner notifying all Account Engagement orgs that they can now get access to Marketing Cloud Growth Edition was published on October 15th. This blog has been updated to reflect the most recent news around this offering.

In this post, we’ll cover how to take advantage of the offer and use Marketing Cloud Growth alongside Account Engagement.

A Note on Naming

Now the naming of this new tool has caused quite a bit of confusion in the Salesforce community as it seems to change on a weekly basis. When launched, this new solution was referred to as “Marketing Cloud Growth Edition” or “Marketing Cloud on the Einstein 1 Platform”. During Dreamforce, Advanced Edition was announced, so this solution became “Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced Edition” or “Marketing Cloud built on Data Cloud”. Finally, during the Winter ‘25 release, this tool started showing up in Salesforce documentation as just “Marketing Cloud” or the “Marketing Cloud App”, much to the chagrin of Marketing Cloud Engagement users. Now, if you are using Marketing Cloud Growth with Account Engagement, it is being referred to as “Account Engagement on Marketing Cloud” but also “Account Engagement powered by Data Cloud”.

Confused? Yes, me too. But all this is to say there is one new Salesforce Marketing tool that is built on core to bring users a truly unified marketing experience. For simplicity, we will continue to refer to this tool as “Marketing Cloud Growth” for this blog post.

What Account Engagement Users Need to Access Marketing Cloud Growth Edition

1. A current instance of a Marketing Cloud Account Engagement
   This includes Growth, Plus, Advanced, and Premium editions of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE). Your MCAE Admins can view your Edition by going to the Account Engagement Settings tab.

2. Data Cloud
   Data Cloud not only unifies customer data for use within Marketing Cloud Growth, but also ensures data continuity between Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Growth. Free Data Cloud is available for orgs with Enterprise and Unlimited Edition Salesforce customers. If you have a lower edition of Salesforce, check out more information on provisioning and access here.
   
   If you are brand new to Data Cloud or don’t have a Data Cloud Architect at your disposal, don’t fret! Marketing Cloud Growth comes with Data Kits that help map your Marketing and CRM Data to Data Cloud. The free Data Cloud SKU + Marketing Cloud Growth’s out of the box data kits will cover everything most orgs need to get started, but if you’d like assistance with additional Data Cloud Data Streams or want to dive into more advanced Data Cloud use cases, we’re happy to help!

Data Cloud Credits

Marketing Cloud Growth uses Data Cloud’s credits to fuel its activities. So, although MCAE users will get Marketing Cloud Growth at no additional charge, orgs still need to purchase credits to fuel Marketing Cloud Growth. Think of it like you’re being given a car, but you still have to purchase the gas to make it run.

If you’re new to Data Cloud’s consumption model, our previous blog post and this Trailhead module will help give you an idea of how this works and the different types of credits available. If you’re using the Free Data Cloud SKU to get started, note that this does include some credits to fuel data ingestion and unification. However, orgs will need to reach out to their AE to purchase the credits that fuel sending emails, sending SMS, compiling Segments, and using Einstein.

You don’t necessarily have to purchase these credits before implementing Marketing Cloud Growth for testing purposes, but you may be limited in the features you can play around with without them.

Getting Started

Here are a few things to keep in mind as you start using Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Growth side by side.

Understanding Consent and Subscriptions

Consent works a little differently between the two systems. 

Account Engagement has a permission-based marketing policy, meaning that although there is no default “Opt-in” field, users must certify that they only contact prospects who have expressly consented to receive marketing communications. 

In Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, consent is a bit more rigid. To send marketing communications, each prospect must have a Consent Record comprising of:

• The Contact Point (email or phone number)
• The Marketing Channel (Email, SMS, etc.)
• The Communication Subscription (Webinars, Events, Product updates, etc.)
• The Date and Time the prospect opted in

More considerations for Consent and Subscriptions are available in this Salesforce Help article. 

Import Consent Data

Before you import consent data, make sure the contact point exists in Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. A consent import can update consent information for existing contact points, but it can’t create new leads or contacts or update other fields (at least as of the Winter ‘25 release).

First, export your list from Account Engagement:

1. In Account Engagement, navigate to Prospects > Segmentation > Segmentation Lists
2. Locate and open the preference list you would like to import into Growth
3. Select Tools
4. Select CSV Export

You’ll need to format your export before importing it into Growth, see this help article for guidance. 

Start Your Import

1. Within Marketing Cloud Growth, navigate to the Consent tab
2. Ensure you are on the Consent Imports tab, then select + Import

3. Select your Channel, Communication Subscription, and whether this list is opted in or opted out

4. Select Next
5. Upload your CSV, select Next
6. Review the import preview and select Import
7. Select Done

Send Account Engagement Images to CMS

Use images in both Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Growth by enabling “Copy to CMS”.

1. In Salesforce, navigate to Marketing Setup > Copy to CMS
2. Use the dropdown menu next to your Account Engagement business unit to select Enable
3. Repeat for additional Account Engagement business units

This will create a CMS Workspace named, “Content Workspace for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement – Copied Content – [business unit name]”. To avoid issues, do not change the workspace name or remove the B2BMA Integration user as a contributor. 

Copy Images from Account Engagement to the Growth Edition CMS Workspace

Next, you’ll need to copy the images from Account Engagement to your new CMS Workspace. 

1. In Account Engagement, navigate to Content > Files
2. Use the checkboxes on the left-hand side to select the files you would like to move. Once selected, use the dropdown menu at the bottom of the table to select Copy to CMS 
3. Select Go

Use the New Growth Edition Email Editing Experience

Now you can build emails that are available in both Account Engagement and Growth Edition. When creating or editing Email Content in the Lightning Email Builder, select New Email Experience to use Marketing Cloud Growth Edition’s editor.

Account Engagement Campaign Considerations 

Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Growth Edition cannot currently share campaigns, so you’ll want to have distinct naming conventions to easily identify which campaigns belong to each platform. You can also keep Marketing Cloud Growth’s campaigns from syncing to Account Engagement by creating a new campaign record type for Growth. 

Read more about Campaigns for Marketing Cloud Growth in this help article. 

Using Account Engagement & Growth Edition Together

Current users of Account Engagement probably have long-standing engagement studio programs that are set up to run on a recurring basis. Account Engagement thrives in this situation and provides flexibility for enrolling prospects and ensuring that the marketing journey you want to happen actually happens. Let’s look at instances where you can use this existing functionality with all the bells and whistles Growth offers.

Use cases for combining the two platforms

1. SMS functionality. In Account Engagement, You may have a pre-existing engagement studio program set up for every event your company puts on, thanking attendees for joining and sharing pertinent details. If you want to send a reminder text message to people who have registered for the event, you can now take advantage of native Marketing Cloud Growth functionality to do so.

2. Using cross-object personalization. Say you have a recurring monthly email sent out to your customers letting them know their account status, YTD savings with your company, and other information pertinent to the customer on an ongoing basis. If this information is stored within custom objects, it’s difficult to populate an Account Engagement email with those details. With Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, users can create Data Graphs for cross-object personalization, allowing marketers to personalize emails with data from any object. 

3. Custom processes for post-form-fill actions. Another great example of how you can use Marketing Cloud Growth Edition alongside Account Engagement is when you want to implement a custom process when someone submits a form.

Since Growth uses Flow for automation, the actions taken after a form is completed can be customized to each unique need. For instance, you can standardize field values or send data to several objects within Salesforce before the Lead/Contact record is updated. 

There you have it

You are now ready to start experiencing Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. The future of Salesforce marketing is bright and evolving every day.

Stay tuned for Growth’s next iterations. In the meantime, use these resources to get started:

• Prepare for a New Campaign Experience with Marketing Cloud Growth
• Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: Landing Page and Form Builder
• Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: Creating Brand Guidelines
• All the FAQs on Marketing Cloud Growth Edition

If you need help implementing or learning how to use Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, send us a message!

Original article: Big News! Account Engagement Users Can Access Marketing Cloud Growth Edition

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Big News! Account Engagement Users Can Access Marketing Cloud Growth Edition appeared first on The Spot.

As an SMB marketer, you’re required to wear a lot of hats. From lead generation and aligning with sales and service teams, to creating content, emails, and personalized customer journeys you’re pulled in a lot of directions – and frankly that can be tough. Cue – artificial intelligence!  Gain insights and considerations for how you can use AI to help your marketing efforts

Supporting your day-to-day tasks 

One of the main benefits of AI  is in the area of efficiency. AI allows small teams to do more with less/fewer resources – which according to some marketers – they expect AI will save them 5 hours per week – that’s over ½ a day you get back!

 Examples of this include 

• Content creation – from minutes to seconds
• Customer segmentation – reducing the manual effort and technical skillset commonly required

AI can also lead to better experiences for customers – which in reality is what it’s all about. By giving you the ability to get content out quickly, AI can also increase your opportunity to personalize customer experiences such as send times – waiting to send until someone is most likely to engage.

How it’s done

But before we go much further – let’s level set: AI can be categorized based on its functionality and the specific tasks it performs. Two common categories are Generative AI (as described above) and Predictive AI. Here’s how they differ:

• Generative AI focuses on creating new content, such as text, images, music, or even entire datasets. These systems generate data that mimics the patterns and structures of the input data they were trained on – leveraging user feedback such as thumbs up or down as part of their internal feedback & learning loop.
• Predictive AI focuses on analyzing existing data to make forecasts or predictions about future events. It identifies patterns and trends in historical data to predict outcomes. Examples include:
  • Sales Forecasting: Predicting future sales based on past sales data and market trends.
  • Customer Churn Prediction: Identifying customers likely to stop using a service.

As marketers to date – much of the focus/application of AI has been focused on GenAI but its only a matter of time before predictive AI becomes more commonplace.

Tools at your disposal

When it comes to AI tools  – what you use is based on what you’re trying to achieve. And like most things, there are free and paid options.

Popular Free tools

ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot, and Google Gemini are three of the most popular chatbots to answer any question or generate text. Jasper is an AI copywriting assistant specializing in marketing content, and Quillbot paraphrases and improves written content, while, DALL-E 2 is great for generating images from text prompts.

While these are popular and free – marketers should keep in mind that they may many times lack control over quality and security. TDLR – don’t put personal, private, and/or confident data into these AI tools as they aren’t entirely secure.

Getting an assist from AI

As we continue to be asked to do more with less, make sure you don’t leave yourself vulnerable either. 

Considerations for using AI as a marketer

• Be mindful of the information you input -what would happen if there was a data breach? 
• Check for plagiarism – is the AI-generated content pulled directly from another source?
• Consider the reliability & accuracy – did you fact-check? How good/specific was your input? What limiters did you apply if any?

How SMBs can tap AI through their marketing automation platforms

Our Guide “Selecting a Marketing Automation Vendor that Packs a Punch for SMBs” delves deeper into how top marketing automation platforms like Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Salesforce are innovating for SMBs. These platforms offer AI-driven features that can significantly enhance your marketing efforts, making them more efficient and effective.

Download the whitepaper now to explore how these vendors are revolutionizing marketing automation for SMBs and how you can leverage AI to stay ahead of the marketing trends.

Original article: How AI Can Help SMB Marketers

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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Personalized marketing can make a significant impact on customer engagement and business growth. According to a recent study, personalized marketing can boost ROI by up to 20%.

One of the most effective ways to achieve this personalization is by scoring leads and contacts based on their engagement and fit with your ideal customer profile. This approach allows marketers to prioritize high-value prospects and create targeted campaigns that resonate with specific audience segments.

By understanding and implementing engagement and fit scoring, you can enhance your marketing strategies, improve customer relationships, and drive business growth. This blog provides valuable insights and practical steps to get you started effectively scoring leads and contacts in Marketing Cloud Growth Edition. 

Understanding Engagement and Fit Scoring

By combining Engagement and Fit Scoring, businesses can create a comprehensive scoring model that prioritizes leads and contacts based on their level of interest and their potential value to the company. This dual approach ensures marketing efforts are focused on the most promising prospects, leading to more effective and efficient campaigns.

What is Engagement Scoring?

Engagement Scoring evaluates how actively and positively leads and contacts interact with your marketing efforts. It quantifies the level of interest and involvement a prospect shows, helping you identify the most engaged individuals who are likely to convert into customers.

Key Metrics Used in Engagement Scoring

When configuring rules, utilize data from the available attributes. Ensure the specified values are exact and case-sensitive. Many attribute values are unique to your organization or vary based on the lead or contact. To identify the correct values, review your data model objects in Data Explorer.

What is Fit Scoring?

Fit Scoring assesses how closely a lead or contact matches your ideal customer profile. This scoring method evaluates criteria to determine the potential value and suitability of a prospect for your business. Fit helps prioritize leads that are not only engaged but also align well with your target market characteristics. Currently, the default fit model only includes “Contact Point Address.” However, you can customize your fit model by adding additional attributes.

Criteria Used to Determine Fit

1. Demographic Information: This includes age, gender, income level, education, and other personal attributes that help define your ideal customer profile.
2. Firmographic Data: For B2B businesses, this includes company size, industry, revenue, and other business characteristics that indicate a good match with your products or services.
3. Behavioral Patterns: This involves analyzing past behaviors and actions, such as purchase history, product usage, and interaction patterns, to predict future behavior and fit.
4. Geographic Location: The physical location of a lead can be crucial, especially for businesses with regional sales strategies or location-specific products.
5. Technographic Information: For tech-related businesses, understanding the technology stack a prospect uses can indicate their compatibility with your solutions.

Customizing Engagement and Fit Scoring

Leads and contacts are scored according to the rules you establish. You can use the default rules provided by Marketing Cloud Growth or customize them to your specific needs.

Base  Model

How to Create a Customized Model

1. Navigate to Setup > Scoring Rules
2. Next to Unified Individual DMO Name, click Select
3. Select Score On Unified Individual
   
4. Select Save
5. Edit, Delete, or Add rules as needed. Keep in mind that you are limited to 30 rules of each type (Engagement and Fit)
6. When you are done editing your rules, select Save
7. Select Publish

• The rules are immediately applied to records that are related to the target object you selected.
• After you publish scoring rules, you can’t unpublish them.
• After you publish rules for the first time, you must publish them again to save any further changes.

Combining Engagement and Fit Scoring

The overall marketing score is a comprehensive metric that combines both engagement and fit scores. The engagement score measures how actively a prospect interacts with your marketing efforts, while the fit score evaluates how closely they match your ideal customer profile. By integrating these two dimensions, you can prioritize leads that are not only highly interested, but also highly relevant to your business.

While engagement and fit scores will be a sum of points, the Overall Score will always be between 0 and 100. Out of the box, the Overall Score will consist of 50% of the engagement score and 50% of the fit score. However, this can be customized per org.

By maintaining a balanced scoring approach, you can ensure your marketing efforts are directed toward leads that are both highly engaged and closely aligned with your ideal customer profile. This holistic view enables more effective segmentation, targeted content delivery, and higher conversion rates.

Combining engagement and fit scores into an overall marketing score provides a nuanced understanding of each lead’s potential. By carefully balancing these scores, you can optimize your marketing strategies to focus on the most promising prospects, leading to more successful and efficient marketing campaigns.

Personalized marketing is the future

In conclusion, personalized marketing is essential for standing out in today’s highly competitive digital landscape. Research shows that businesses using advanced personalization techniques see a 10-30% increase in sales and customer retention rates. This underscores the importance of understanding and meeting customer preferences.

With the insights and practical steps outlined, you are now equipped to optimize your lead-scoring methods. Embrace this dual approach to prioritize your most promising prospects, ensuring that your marketing efforts are both efficient and effective. By doing so, you will position your business for sustained success in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

More Marketing Cloud Growth Edition Resources

1. Announcing Marketing Cloud Growth Edition
2. The Marketing Cloud That Broke the Internet (& 5 Key Takeaways)
3. Data Cloud No Cost Edition: Get Ready First
4. What Marketing Cloud Growth Edition Means for Your Career
5. Evolving Your Skills as a Marketing Cloud Engagement Practitioner
6. Evolving Your Skills as an Account Engagement Pro
7. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: Creating Brand Guidelines
8. All the FAQs on Marketing Cloud Growth Edition
9. Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: Landing Page and Form Builder
10. How to Create Campaign Assets with Marketing Cloud Growth Edition

Original article: Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: A Guide to Fit and Engagement Scoring

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

The post Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: A Guide to Fit and Engagement Scoring appeared first on The Spot.

In the Summer ‘24 Release, Salesforce launched the beta version of Einstein for Flow, which is a generative AI tool that helps Salesforce admins, regardless of their programming experience, to easily create functional Salesforce Flows via natural language prompts. 

New to Flow? Check out An Introductory Guide to Salesforce Flow for Marketers

How Einstein for Flow works

Einstein for Flow is a generative AI tool that helps Salesforce admins, regardless of their programming experience, to easily create functional Salesforce Flows via natural language prompts. You simply describe your flow requirements in plain text instructions, and Einstein does its thing to interpret those instructions and generate a draft flow for you.

Salesforce Einstein for Flow Requirements

To take advantage of Einstein for Flow, you’ll need to ensure:

• Your org supports Einstein for Flow. This feature is available with:
  • All Einstein 1 Editions
  • Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions with the Einstein for Sales, Einstein for Service, or Einstein for Platform add-on.
• Users who will use Einstein for Flow must have permission to use Manage Flows.
• You also need to make sure you have enabled Einstein Generative AI in your org.
• You will also need to opt in from the Einstein for Flow (Beta) setup screen.

Creating a Flow with Einstein for Flow

1. When you click New Flow, select Let Einstein Help You Build and click Next.

2. Enter a prompt with instructions on the flow you want to build.

• In the Instructions section, describe the task or process you want to automate. Provide as much detail as possible to try to get better results.
• 
• Not sure how to write your instructions? Expand the Get Started with Sample Instructions section.
• 
• For more tips on how to craft your prompts, see the Prompt Tips section below.

3. After a few seconds, the flow is created, and a feedback modal is included on the canvas.

• See the Helping Einstein Improve section below.
• You’ll also notice that ‘This flow was created by generative AI.” banner is located at the top of the page, so that it’s clear how this flow was built.

Tips for Building a Great Prompt

When writing your prompt instructions, there are some guidelines for getting started:

• Start the instructions with “Create a flow.”
• Effective instructions include:
  • The type of flow to create
    • for example, “Create a record-triggered flow that….”
  • When the flow starts or if it has screens.
    • for example, “…that starts when a lead is created…” 
  • The names of objects and fields to use for criteria and actions.
    • for example, “… create a task for the Lead Owner” instead of  “..create a task for the sales rep”
  • The actions you want the flow to take.
    • for example, “…send an email to the Lead owner…”
  • The criteria and logic to use to identify specific records.
    • for example, “…accounts with an annual revenue over $500,000…”
• Provide as much detail as possible.
• Start simple and expand from there. Stick to basic instructions that the resulting flow needs a small number of elements to implement. Confirm the resulting flow is built as expected before adding more complexity to your instructions.
• Don’t forget to use proper grammar and spelling!

Helping Einstein Improve

Einstein for Flow is still learning how to build accurate flows. Some flows created by Einstein for Flow won’t be built the way you expected. Here’s how you can give feedback:

• Start Over – If the output doesn’t meet your expectations, you can generate a new output by starting over. You can use the clipboard icon to copy the previous prompt if you want to tweak it in the next version. The generated output from the previous attempt isn’t saved and the new output replaces it.
  
• Provide Feedback – You can also give your feedback about what’s wrong with the flow. That helps Einstein for Flow continue to improve and build increasingly accurate flows.
  

Einstein for Flow Considerations

• Flow Types supported include:
  • Screen Flow
  • Record Triggered Flow
  • Schedule Triggered Flow
• Support building flows that include:
  • Standard and custom objects & fields
  • 3-6 custom objects
  • Create, Update, and Get Records, Screens and Send Email
  • Record variables, formulas, email templates
  • Fault paths
• Einstein for Flow uses their CodeGen model for its natural language processing. 
• Keep in mind that this is feature is in beta and as a generative AI tool it’s still learning. It’s a good idea to review all aspects of your flow to ensure accuracy. Check for things like field names and dates are correct, for example.

Additional Resources to check out:

• Video: Get to Know Einstein for Flow
• Let Einstein Build a Draft Flow for You (Beta)
• Einstein for Flow: Using Generative AI to Assist Your Flows 

The Future is Bright

While this is still in its early stages, the potential looks to be awesome as a tool that can: 

• Help those who are less technical or new to Flow get up to speed more quickly
• Give more advanced admins a starting point that they can run with instead of starting completely from scratch

And the possibilities don’t end there. Imagine a world where we had a genAI tool that could:

• Scan a flow and summarize what it does. As a new admin, how amazing would it be to scan the flows in your new company’s org to get up to speed more quickly!
• Evaluate a flow against best practices. Think of how much easier it would be to find and resolve hardcoded IDs or DML elements in a loop!
• Creating tests for the flows built

(*these are my opinions only and not tied to Salesforce’s roadmap for this tool, although I hope the Flow team keeps this wishlist in mind .)

What has you most excited about this tool? What would you love to see this feature do in the future? Let us know in the comments.

Original article: Getting Started with Einstein for Flow

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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The Salesforce Summer ’24 release notes have arrived, and with them, the delivery of one of the most highly sought-after Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE/Pardot) features ever requested. In fact, sending operational emails in Engagement Studio functionality has garnered the fifth most points in the Account Engagement category on the IdeaExchange.

What is an Operational Email?

An operational email is informational and is distinct from a marketing email. Erin Duncan has written a great article that goes in-depth about the differences between the two and when it is appropriate to use each.

When an email is marked as “operational,” it bypasses the recipient’s opt-in status and will send the message even if the subscriber has opted out. You must only use operational emails for their intended purpose, as this can affect your sending reputation and put you on the wrong side of the CAN-SPAM Act.

How Do I Enable Operational Emails in MCAE?

1. Navigate to Account Engagement Settings 
2. Click Enable Operational Emails
3. Review the restrictions associated with sending operational emails and confirm your selection 

Keep in mind that only Account Engagement Admin users and custom user roles can send operational emails.

Sending Operational Emails with Engagement Studio

Previously, operational emails could only be sent from list sends. This required selecting an audience, building email content, and manually sending at a single point in time. Now, users can send operational emails directly from Engagement Studio, where recipients are enrolled based on user-defined criteria and emails are automatically sent based on your parameters.

Let’s put this into practice. Imagine you are a SaaS company and need to deliver communications regarding your product’s planned system outages. Instead of setting up multiple operational list sends, you could create an Engagement Studio program to automate the outage and issue-resolved notifications to your selected audience.

Another example could be letting your customers know that their product’s license is about to expire. You could create an Engagement Studio program that could send notifications to let them renew their product on a more time-based cadence. Once the Engagement Studio is set and running, you do not need to reconfigure manual email list sends.

Other use cases could include:

• Renewal or expiration reminders
• Order updates
• Event registration reminders
• Internal employee onboarding

As with all effective communications, using operational emails in engagement studios will take planning. You will need content to create your emails, data to ensure that the right emails are being sent to the right person, and, most importantly, compliance with the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Permission Based Marketing Policy.

What are the limitations?

Salesforce has provided a list of limitations for using operational emails in Engagement Studio:

• If a program is running and the Operational Email setting is disabled, operational emails aren’t sent. Prospects skip those steps and proceed to the next one.
• If a program with a Send Operational Email card is paused and the account setting is disabled. To restart the program, remove the steps or re-enable the Operational Email setting.
• If a program with a Send Operational Email card isn’t running and the account setting is disabled, the program can’t be started or resumed. To start or resume the program, you must re-enable the setting or remove the step.

One Small Step for Email Marketing, One Giant Leap Forward for Efficiency

This is a huge improvement in saving marketers time and improving customers’ experiences with your brand. It ensures that customers can receive mission-critical information at the right time without having to manually and tediously configure the email sends.

How do you plan on using Engagement Studio to send operational emails? Let us know in the comments.

Original article: The Wait is Over: Send Operational Emails from Engagement Studio

©2025 The Spot. All Rights Reserved.

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