Prepare Your Org for Email Sending

Learning Objectives

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

• Enable Marketing Cloud Next.
  
• Assign permissions.
  
• Prepare customer data for segmentation and personalization.
  

Equip Your Org for Email Sending

Isabelle Givens, the digital marketing manager at Northern Trail Outfitters (NTO), is getting ready to send trusted, personalized email using Marketing Cloud Next. She knows what she wants to say and which customers she wants to reach. Your role is to make sure everything behind the scenes is ready so the email goes to the right audiences—reliably, securely, and powered by customer data NTO already collects.

To support Isabelle’s work, you enable Marketing Cloud Next, assign permissions, and connect customer data.

Sign Up for a Developer Edition with Data 360 and Marketing Cloud Next

To complete this badge, you need a special, limited-time custom playground that contains Data 360 and Marketing Cloud Next.

1. Click Create Playground at the top of this page.
   
2. Your new org is automatically attached to your Trailhead account.
   
3. Make note of your org's expiration date and complete this badge before then.
   
4. Take the steps that we’ve flagged as “Important” to pass the challenges at the end of the units.
   

Turn On Marketing Cloud Next

When you turn on Marketing Cloud Next, you activate the tools your team uses to design email, connect customer data to messages, and measure results. After it’s enabled, you can open the Marketing app to build campaigns, manage audiences, and review performance.

Here’s how to turn on Marketing Cloud Next.

Note: We’ve already enabled Marketing Cloud Next for you in the special playground for this badge, so you do not need to take these steps in the playground.

1. Click and then select Setup. A new window or tab opens.
   
2. Enter Marketing Cloudin the Quick Find box and select Basic Settings.
   
3. Review the prerequisites; these are the tasks you must complete in your org before you can enable Marketing Cloud Next.
   
4. After you complete all prerequisites, select Enable.
   
5. Wait for confirmation. Provisioning can take up to 15 minutes. When the setup finishes, you can open the Marketing app from the App Launcher.
   

Once provisioning is complete, you can access the Marketing app, and your org is ready to support trusted, data-driven email sending.

Assign Permissions with Purpose

After you turn on Marketing Cloud Next, it’s time to decide who gets access and what each person can do. Use permissions to control who sets up the system, who prepares customer data, and who builds and sends campaigns. Clearly defining user access helps people work confidently and keeps the org secure.

Marketing Cloud Next email sending typically involves three roles, each focused on a different part of the process: Marketing Cloud admin, Data Cloud architect, and Marketing Cloud manager. Here are some more details about each role.

To assign permissions follow these steps.

1. From Setup, in the Quick Find box, search for and select Users.
   
2. Search for and open your own user record.
   
3. Select Permission Set Assignments and then Edit Assignments.
   
4. Assign permission sets to yourself based on your role and what you do in Marketing Cloud Next.
   
5. Save your changes.
   
6. Repeat the steps to assign permission sets to your teammates.
   

Team size shapes how you divide this work. In smaller teams, one person may cover multiple roles. In larger teams, responsibilities are often split across specialists. What matters is that each responsibility is clearly owned so that email sending works as expected.

Use Data for Segmentation and Personalization

Email sending involves more than content. You need to prepare your customer data so that you can build segments—groups of customers based on shared traits or behaviors—and personalize messages with confidence. This involves bringing data into one place through data streams, consolidating records that belong to the same people with identity resolution, and connecting more complex related information in email using data graphs. Let’s take a look at each process.

Use Data Streams to Bring Customer Data into One Place

Data streams are ongoing flows of data from systems you already use, like Salesforce CRM. Use them to make customer and activity data available in Marketing Cloud Next through Data 360. Data streams keep this data flowing continuously, so your marketing data stays current and consistent.

When setting up data streams for email, decide:

• Which systems to connect
  
• Which customer records to include, such as contacts and leads
  
• Which activity data to include, such as email sends and clicks
  

To get started, you connect a source system, choose the objects or data kits you want to include, review the fields, and deploy the stream. Once deployed, the data continues to update automatically as changes occur in the source system.

With data streams in place, customer information stays current and consistent across Data 360 and Marketing Cloud Next. This makes it easier to build audiences, apply consent, and personalize messages using the same data across campaigns.

To speed up setup, start with a data kit. Data kits group commonly used customer and engagement data for marketing, so you don’t have to choose every object and field from scratch. You can adjust what’s included after you select a kit.

Use Identity Resolution to Create One Profile per Person

Identity resolution is the process of setting rules that link records in different sources that belong to the same person. The end result is a single, consistent customer profile for each person in Data 360. It’s important to do this before sending email so that your team avoids sending customers duplicate email, applies consent correctly, and views each customer as one person.

Once you unify customer data, you can manage consent and subscription preferences for compliant email sending. More on this later.

To set this up, define an identity resolution ruleset, which you use to group the matching rules you want to use for email. Within that ruleset, you choose shared identifiers—such as email addresses—that show which records belong to the same person.

Here’s how to do it.

Important: Take these steps in your Trailhead playground to pass the hands-on challenge at the end of the unit.

1. In the Marketing app (be sure the app is called Marketing, not Marketing CRM Classic), select the Identity Resolutions tab, which may appear under More.
   
2. Select New, then Create a New Ruleset, and Next.
   
3. Select Individual in the Primary Data Model Object dropdown list.
   
4. For Ruleset ID, enter MKT and click Next.
   
5. For Ruleset Name, enter Marketing and click Save. It can take a few minutes for the ruleset to save.
   
6. Under Match Rules, click Configure. Review instructions and click Next.
   
7. Click Configure under Match Rule 1, select Fuzzy Name and Normalized Email, click Next, then click Next again.
   
8. Click Save. It may take a minute or so for the ruleset to publish.
   
9. Check that the Last Job Status field says ‘In Progress’ after you’ve published the ruleset. If it does not, click Run Ruleset.
   

As your data improves over time, you can expand your matching logic—for example, adding a phone number or a birthdate.

If you notice a warning sign under Last Job Status, even if the status is ‘Succeeded’, find the Individual section under Reconciliation Rules, scroll down and click on Individual Id and toggle the Default Reconciliation Rule tab to Disabled. Then, under Field Reconciliation Rule, select Source Priority and Save.

Use a Data Graph When Your Email Needs Related Data

You and your team can also reference a data graph—a defined set of relationships between customer records—to further personalize your email. Data graphs make related data appear correctly in messages, even when that data lives in different records for the same customer.

You only need to reference a data graph when an email uses more than one type of record. For example:

• A welcome email that uses a customer’s name and email address does not need a data graph.
  
• A product follow-up email that includes recent order details does need a data graph, because that information lives in a different record.
  

A single, strategically built data graph can power many personalization scenarios. We recommend starting small–including data that can extend across use cases, then adding on as needed.

If you need to reference a data graph, here’s how to prepare one.

1. From the App Launcher, search for and select Data Cloud.
   
2. Select the Data Graphs tab, which may appear under More.
   
3. Click New to create a new graph, or use the dropdown in the Data Graph list view to select Edit if one already exists in your org.
   
   • If you create a new data graph:
     
     • Select Start from Scratch and click Next.
       
     • Enter a data graph name in the Data Graph Name field. This populates the Data Graph API Name.
       
     • Select a Primary Data Model Object from the list and click Next.
       
     • In the search bar above your selected DMO, search for and add related objects—such as Account or Opportunity—based on the fields you want to use in personalization.
       
   • If you open an existing data graph, review the relationships between objects and add or adjust any that are required for your personalization needs.
     
4. Save and activate the graph.
   

After a data graph is active, Marketing Cloud Next can access related data efficiently.

Let’s Recap

You’ve prepared your org for email sending by enabling Marketing Cloud Next, assigning permissions, and organizing customer data for segmentation and personalization. Next, use this foundation to build audiences and move into campaign creation.

Resources

• Trailhead: Marketing Cloud Next Setup: Quick Look
• Salesforce Help: Getting Started with Marketing Cloud Next Setup
• Trailhead: Data 360 Basics for Marketers
• Salesforce Help: User Permissions in Marketing Cloud Next
• Salesforce Help: Data Streams in Data 360
• Salesforce Help: Create a Data Graph
• Implementation Guide: Marketing Cloud Next (Spring ’26)