Explore Setup, Reporting, and Compliance
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Locate setup, builder, and reporting features within the Salesforce org.
- Explain how international regulations impact your channel marketing strategy.
Find Tools on the Core Platform
One of the most significant advantages of Marketing Cloud Next is that it lives entirely on the Salesforce Platform. This means you don’t log into a completely separate website, memorize a distinct user interface, or manage separate user logins. Everything your marketing, sales, and IT teams need is right where they need it to be. Let’s review how you can perform your tasks by using the Salesforce standard tools.
Setup and Configuration
You manage system-wide marketing settings directly in the standard Salesforce Setup menu. From here, administrators can manage user permissions, configure channel activations, such as connecting your corporate WhatsApp business account or provisioning short codes for SMS, and manage Data 360 configurations.
There is no separate Marketing Cloud Next Setup portal to hunt for; it is unified with your standard Salesforce Setup administration.
Builder Tasks
In Marketing Cloud Engagement, you had separate canvas tools like Journey Builder or Automation Studio. In Marketing Cloud Next, you use the immensely powerful, native Salesforce Flow Builder. Flow Builder is the exact same automation engine that Salesforce admins use to automate business processes across the entire platform.
When building marketing campaigns, you will primarily use two specific types of Flows.
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Segment-triggered flows: These flows initiate when a customer falls into a specific audience segment defined in Data 360. For example, if Data 360 calculates that a customer has not made a purchase in 90 days, they enter the Lapsed Customer segment. This triggers a flow that automatically sends them a reengagement email and a targeted SMS offer.
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Event-triggered flows: These flows react instantly to real-time behaviors or data changes. For example, when a user submits a lead generation form on your landing page, an event-triggered flow can instantly text them a link to download a whitepaper.
For web channels, landing pages are constructed using Experience Builder, using standard content management system (CMS) components, allowing you to drag and drop elements to create beautiful pages without writing a single line of code.
Reporting and Analytics
Forget about exporting CSV files to external reporting tools because your marketing data lives alongside your sales data. You can access the data through the Marketing Performance App and Analytics tab.
The Marketing Performance App is the dedicated analytics and reporting application built natively within Marketing Cloud Next. It’s designed to give marketers comprehensive, real-time visibility into how their campaigns and content are performing across various channels. It’s available as a tab in the Marketing Cloud Next app.
Here are some of the key features of the app.
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Embedded campaign reporting: Get detailed reporting embedded directly within your individual campaign records.
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Comprehensive dashboards: Get out-of-the-box, customizable dashboards that track overall marketing insights, trends, and ROI.
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Cross-channel analytics: Monitor email deliverability, segment intelligence, and multi-channel campaign performance all in one place.
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Business unit filtering: Configure the app to provide detailed, isolated analytics for specific business units within a larger enterprise.
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Flow performance analytics: Analyze the execution paths of automated flows such as, segment-triggered or event-triggered journeys to troubleshoot and optimize the customer journey.
The app represents the Salesforce shift toward unified data, relying on two core architectural components.
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Data 360: Because Marketing Cloud Next is built on the Salesforce Platform, the app pulls from the same unified Data 360 customer profiles used by Sales and Service teams. This ensures your marketing metrics perfectly align with sales pipeline data.
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Tableau Next: The actual data visualization and analytics engine powering the dashboards is driven by Tableau Next. It provides deep, intuitive data exploration without needing a dedicated BI analyst.
While the Marketing Performance app provides the prebuilt dashboards, the Analytics tab is your interactive workspace for modifying, analyzing, and drilling down into that data.
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Dashboard customization: Navigate to the Analytics tab to open, edit and customize a dashboard by rearranging widgets, changing data labels, or adjusting the layout.
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Data filtering: Apply up to five specific data filters per dashboard to isolate exact metrics such as filtering a global campaign dashboard to only show performance for a specific regional business unit.
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Creating custom views: Use the Save As function to save your highly customized and personalized dashboards as brand-new dashboards that’s specific to your business needs.
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Granular flow element analytics: When viewing a completed automated flow, click the Analytics tab directly on a single flow element such as a specific email send step. This opens a deeply granular, individual-level view of how that exact step performed, rather than the campaign as a whole.
You can use both the Marketing Performance App and Analytics tab seamlessly. Start with the Marketing Performance tab to review the overall health of your monthly campaigns. If a specific segment is underperforming, transition to the Analytics tab to filter the data, edit the widget parameters to isolate the issue, and save that tailored view for future tracking.
Global Compliance and Regulations
Great power comes with great responsibility. When you are marketing globally across multiple channels such as email, SMS, WhatsApp, and Web, you must respect a complex web of international privacy laws and communication limits. Failing to do so can result in massive financial penalties and severe damage to your brand's reputation.
Here are the key awareness considerations that can impact your international marketing plans.
Consent and Data Privacy
Globally recognized privacy frameworks, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), dictate that you cannot track web behavior or send marketing communications without explicit, informed consent. In Marketing Cloud Next, consent data is not an afterthought; it is securely managed within Data 360’s robust Consent Data Model. If a user does not accept your site’s consent banner, their website engagement data will simply not be tracked, keeping you automatically compliant.
Email Regulations
When sending commercial emails, regulations like the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) act of US and Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) strictly require you to include clear, immediate opt-out mechanisms and physical mailing addresses in your message footers. Marketing Cloud Next provides native preference centers that help you manage these opt-outs easily. If a customer clicks unsubscribe, that preference is instantly written back to the core platform, ensuring sales reps and automated flows immediately cease sending commercial emails.
Messaging Opt-Ins
Direct messaging channels like SMS and WhatsApp have incredibly strict, explicit opt-in requirements that are heavily monitored by mobile carriers and Meta. You cannot assume consent just because a customer provided a phone number during checkout. You must capture a specific, documented opt-in for that exact channel. Sending unsolicited text messages can result in your phone numbers being permanently blocked by telecom carriers.
Data Residency and Sovereignty
Many countries and regions have strict laws requiring that their citizens’ data be stored on servers physically located within their borders. This is known as data residency. Salesforce is continuously expanding its global availability for Marketing Cloud Next, actively launching local data residency regions such as instances in Tokyo, Sydney, and São Paulo. This ensures global enterprises can maintain strict compliance with local data sovereignty laws while still running unified global campaigns.
By keeping your data centralized and leveraging a unified data model on the core platform, Marketing Cloud Next makes it much easier to respect customer preferences, manage consent universally, and maintain strict regulatory compliance across all touchpoints worldwide.
Wrap Up
In this badge, you explored the future of omnichannel marketing on the core Salesforce Platform. You learned how Marketing Cloud Next breaks down historical data silos by seamlessly unifying your marketing, sales, and service data. You explored powerful, dynamic channels like Email, SMS, WhatsApp, Mobile App Messaging, and Web, and discovered exactly where to build journeys using Flow Builder. Finally, you learned how to report on these experiences while maintaining critical global compliance.
Now it's your turn. Think deeply about your current marketing technology stack. Where are the data silos slowing your team down? Which of your current static, one-way emails could be radically transformed into dynamic, two-way conversations using Agentforce and Data 360? Whatever your answers, you now have the foundational knowledge to build the next generation of marketing experiences.