Maintain Your Marketing Cloud Email Specialist Certification for Spring ’24

Learning Objectives

After completing this module, you’ll be able to:

Get to know the latest generative AI features for Marketing Cloud.
Explain how to refine messages with Brand Center setup.
Create subject lines and body copy with Einstein generative AI features.
Design on-brand content with the Typeface Content Block.
Create error messages for CloudPages custom domains.
Restore deleted content in Content Builder.
Optimize journey performance with the System Optimization Dashboard.
Review configuration recommendations to create better journeys.
Recognize recent productivity enhancements to Journey Builder.
Review data management enhancements in Contact Builder.

Maintain Your Certification and Improve Your Email Marketing

If you hold the Marketing Cloud Email Specialist credential, keep in mind that you need to complete this module by the due date to maintain your certification. Another important part of maintaining your credential is ensuring that your Trailhead and Webassessor accounts are linked.

Interested in learning more about getting certified? Check out the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist credential.

While anyone can earn this badge, this module is designed for those who hold the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Specialist credential.

Protect the Integrity of Your Certification

The quality of our certification exams and the value our credentials provide are our highest priority. Protecting the security and confidentiality of our exams is essential to providing our customers with credentials that are respected and industry-leading.

As a participant of the Salesforce Certification Program, you’re required to accept the terms of the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement. Please review the Salesforce certification exam-taking policies in the Salesforce Credential and Certification Program Agreement and Code of Conduct Salesforce Help article for more details.

Salesforce introduced great feature enhancements over the past year. Let’s take a look at some of the more important ones.

Generative AI for Marketing Cloud

Enable generative AI in your Marketing Cloud instance to create brand-customized content tailored to your audiences. Project your company’s voice and style without adding hours to your content creation schedule.

Enable Einstein generative AI features to create subject lines and body copy in Einstein Copy Insights and Content Builder. In Einstein Copy Insights, you can test, copy, and download your generated copy. In Content Builder, use the features to create content to populate your messages. Or use the Content Builder and Typeface integration to add image generation to the mix.

When you use Einstein generative AI instead of a generally available service such as OpenAI, you’re protected by the Einstein Trust Layer. The Einstein Trust Layer lets customers benefit from generative AI without compromising their data security and privacy controls.

Enable Einstein Generative AI

To use Einstein generative AI features, enable both Einstein Copy Insights and Einstein generative AI in Marketing Cloud Setup. Follow the steps outlined in Set Up Einstein Copy Insights, and then turn on Einstein generative AI features.

Refine Messages with Your Organization’s Brand Identity

In Einstein Copy Insights Setup, use the Brand Center to define your organization’s brand identity. Add personalities to use when generating tailored content, such as the out-of-the-box Professional or Casual. You can create up to 10 more custom personalities for different uses in your organization. Then use Einstein generative AI features throughout Marketing Cloud to create effective messages targeted to your audience. Setting up the brand identity and personalities is a key way to ground your generative AI prompts.

Create Subject Lines and Body Copy with Einstein Generative Features

When you enable Einstein generative AI features, you gain access to subject line generation and body copy generation in both Einstein Copy Insights and Content Builder. In Einstein Copy Insights, you can test, copy, and download your generated copy. In Content Builder, use the features to create content to populate your messages.

First, enable the Einstein generative features in Einstein Copy Insights setup. Next, enter a key message of up to 200 characters, choose a brand personality, and optionally type in a sample subject line or copy. Five subject lines or body copy options are created at a time. Select up to three to test, copy, or download. The Einstein Trust Layer is behind every generation to protect against bias and toxicity, while data masking prevents the exposure of personally identifiable information. Plus, your data is never stored.

Design On-Brand Content with the Typeface Content Block

Create on-brand content at scale for multichannel campaigns by using the Typeface generative AI content platform. Use the Typeface Content Block to create assets in the flow of your work in Content Builder. The Typeface generative AI is trained on your brand assets and guidelines rather than generic models.

With AI-based image editing, quickly add text to your graphics, swap backgrounds, and position products without needing a complex design tool. With a few clicks and natural language prompts, you can apply filters, extend images, and replace objects.

Generate creative variations for each audience and deliver targeted campaigns with localized content. Conduct multivariate testing to improve performance within each campaign and audience segment.

This feature is available for Salesforce Marketing Cloud with Content Builder. To use the Content Builder Typeface block, you need a Typeface account and the Typeface app from AppExchange.

Create Error Messages for CloudPages Custom Domains

CloudPages custom domain users can create friendly error messages when customers enter the wrong URLs or try to access unpublished or unrendered pages. This change allows marketers to use better error messages that guide their customers through potential issues.

Restore Deleted Content in Content Builder

Content Builder users can better manage content by sending recoverable content to the Recycle Bin. This feature allows you to restore recycled content items without a call to Support.

Who: To use the Content Builder Recycle Bin, users need Delete permission, which is included in the Marketing Cloud Admin role. Only the user who owns the content can recycle it.

Optimize Journey Performance with the System Optimization Dashboard

The new System Optimization Dashboard shows journeys and configurations that can affect overall system processing speed. You can use this dashboard to strategize and answer system performance questions such as:

Which journeys should I optimize?
- Which journeys have a high account impact due to size of audience or number of activities?
- Which journeys are configured inefficiently?
Why is this journey running slow?
What can I do to improve the speed of this journey?

The dashboard monitors running journey versions and generally shows data within 10 minutes of contacts flowing through the activity or configuration. Specific inefficiencies are identified, and the dashboard displays analytics and recommendations. In the journey canvas, you can view recommendations for journey or activity configuration improvements.

How: Ask your Marketing Cloud admin to enable a new permission called Adjust System Priority in Marketing Cloud Setup. Marketing Cloud admins can adjust the system priority for journeys to adjust journey speeds relative to one another.

Journey Builder system processing should improve. However, it’s not a guarantee that send time improves. Other factors, such as AMPscript complexity or multiple sends going out at the same time, can also impact send speeds.

Review Configuration Recommendations to Create Better Journeys

As part of journey validation functionality, Journey Builder proactively surfaces recommendations about configurations that can impact your journey. These recommendations now also include recommendations for first activity configuration and lack of messaging activities in both draft and running journeys. These warnings don’t prevent you from activating your journey.

Recognize Recent Productivity Enhancements in Journey Builder

Expandable and Collapsible Paths in Journey Builder

In running journeys, you can now expand or collapse all journey activities at once. Collapsing activities (Decision Splits) also updates the journey canvas size to allow you to zoom in on certain sections of the canvas to review configuration builds or troubleshoot.

Enhanced Exit and Goal Criteria

You can now use Journey data and Contact data together as part of Exit and Goal criteria instead of using unnecessary Decision Splits. Compare dataset attributes and streamline use cases, such as monitoring whether a contact’s status or lifetime value has changed since entering the journey.

Stop Multiple Journeys from the Journey Dashboard

Manage your journeys more easily from the Journey dashboard. You can select up to 10 journeys at one time and choose to stop the current version or all versions. You can still stop journeys and versions from the canvas or the version dashboard.

Throttle Email in Journey Builder

Throttle email sends in Journey Builder by separately specifying the delivery window and hourly threshold for an email activity. For example, to implement a burst send during a specific time frame, define only a delivery window. This feature was previously available only in Email Studio and Automation Studio.

Review Data Management Enhancements in Contact Builder

Restore Deleted Data Extensions in Contact Builder

You can now restore data extensions that are in the Recycle Bin up to 30 days after deletion.

Review New Data Retention Improvement in Contact Builder

Use the two new columns in Contact Builder to get more information about your customer data. The dashboard now shows which data extensions have data retention and the date data extensions were deleted. The maximum row limit to apply to retention in a data extension is raised to 500 million.

Review Total Distinct Count Updates for Marketing Cloud

Marketing Cloud stores a contact record in one of several different locations.

Contact Builder All Contacts list
Email Studio All Subscribers list
Populations, formerly known as root data extensions, including these examples:
- Contacts involved in custom activities via Journey Builder
- Contacts added via queries, filters, data extracts, or other data-intensive operations

Different data sources can include duplicate contact records, but contacts count only one time. Marketing Cloud automatically deduplicates multiple instances of a contact across all locations based on the Contact Key value.

Total Distinct Contact counts are now more accurate since the Marketing Cloud update in the June 2023 release.

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