I’m currently working on Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next in a sandbox environment and I’m trying to understand the best approach for moving the entire setup and configuration to a UAT environment. My questions are:
- Can this be automated using VS Code + Salesforce CLI / metadata deployment?
- Which types of configurations and assets can be migrated automatically, and which ones need to be recreated manually?
- Are there any best practices for promoting configurations from sandbox → UAT → production in Marketing Cloud Next?
I’d also love to hear how you approached this in real projects and what tools or processes you used for deployment and version control.
Thanks!
@* Marketing Cloud Growth & Advanced * @* Salesforce Developers *
Yes, you can automate part of the Sandbox → UAT → Production promotion, but I wouldn’t treat Marketing Cloud Next as a “deploy the entire org with one metadata package” scenario yet.
My approach would be:
- Use Salesforce CLI / VS Code + source control for components that are exposed through Salesforce Metadata APIs and are supported for deployment.
- Keep all deployable metadata in Git and promote the same version through Sandbox → UAT → Production rather than rebuilding it separately in each environment.
- For Marketing Cloud Next-specific assets/configurations, first verify whether that particular component is exposed as deployable metadata. Some configuration, connections, credentials, environment-specific settings, and certain marketing assets may still require manual configuration or a separate API/process.
- Maintain an environment configuration checklist for anything that cannot be source-controlled, especially authentication, endpoints, integrations, permissions, and environment-specific IDs.
- After deployment, run validation/smoke testing in UAT before promoting the same release to Production.
For a real project, I’d structure the pipeline roughly as:
Dev Sandbox → Git/PR → Validate Deployment → UAT → Functional Testing/Approval → ProductionThe important part is to inventory the Marketing Cloud Next components first and classify each one as
Metadata API deployable, API deployable, or manual/environment-specific. That prevents surprises when trying to promote the complete setup.
I’d also be interested to hear if anyone has implemented a fully automated CI/CD pipeline specifically for
Marketing Cloud Next, particularly which newer MC Next assets they’ve successfully managed through Salesforce CLI/Metadata API.
