Hello experts,
We're starting to plan our move from Marketing Cloud Account Engagement to Marketing Cloud Next, and I would love to hear from teams who are a few steps ahead. :)
What's the recommended approach to migrate and what key considerations should we keep in mind around data, consent, automation, and running both platforms in parallel? Any lessons learned from teams who've been through it would be really helpful. Also any supported process documentations would be helpful as well.
Our current setup:
- Account Engagement Enterprise Edition, Connector v2, a single production business unit, and a 2M+ prospect database.
- Engagement Studio, scoring and grading automation rules and External Activities are core to how we operate today.
- Data 360 and Agentforce are already enabled and configured, so we aren't starting from zero on the data foundation.
- Connected Campaigns is only partially enabled.
- Marketing Data Kits Still needs an upgrade
Thank you so much in advance! :)
Lakshit,
What you read matches what I've found. To ensure deliverability you do not want the same domain authorized in 2 different systems with different DNS records. So I'd plan on authenticating a second sending domain in Next. I am using a new subdomain. The IP is a separate question from the domain. Next starts you on shared IPs and moves you to dedicated ones automatically as your volume grows, so I wouldn't count on your MCAE IP reputation coming with you either.
Before you commit to a plan, I'd get your AE and a Salesforce deliverability specialist to confirm in writing what's possible for your exact domain. Then run both side by side for a while. Keep MCAE sending the way it is, stand up Next on its own subdomain, start with your most engaged people, and ramp up slowly. Grab your current bounce and complaint numbers first so you have a baseline to compare against.
Regarding your mention of "partial connected campaigns" What do you mean by partial? I believe only necessary if you want to retain the campaign history. If you some campaigns are old and do not matter, no need to make them connected now.
I would
- List the unconnected campaigns and sort them: keep, merge, or ignore (old tests, duplicates).
- Connect the keepers. A few can be done by hand; many can be matched in bulk
- Check campaign record types, since campaigns with a record type that isn’t set to sync won’t come across.
- Then decide on “Use Salesforce to manage all campaigns,” which makes Pardot campaigns read-only. The prerequisites page doesn’t list this setting as required for Next, so I’d treat it as recommended, not mandatory.
I'm working through Next alongside Account Engagement right now, so I'm happy to compare notes if that would help.
