Marketing Cloud Growth Edition: The Future of Smart Marketing for SMEs and Startups

A few weeks ago, Salesforce unveiled the Marketing Cloud Growth Edition, a powerful tool originating from the very core of CRM: the Einstein 1 platform. Taking as precursors the existing Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly ExactTarget) and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), the question arises, how innovative is this solution?

So far, we understand that it is designed for small businesses and startups, offering unified customer data profiles and integrated management of their operations. Additionally, marketing, sales, service, and commerce teams can leverage the capabilities of generative AI and Data Cloud to reach customers swiftly. Let’s get to the point: Let’s dive into Marketing Cloud Growth Edition!

What is Marketing Cloud Growth Edition?

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition represents a fresh iteration version of Marketing Cloud, based on Data Cloud and integrated into the Einstein 1 platform. It targets specifically small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and B2B organizations. This automated marketing platform seeks to drive growth through CRM, AI and unified data, all in one place. Consequently, it enhances the efforts of marketing specialists by taking advantage of the connection with data from various organizational domains. Essentially, it is another native offering from Salesforce, reinforcing its dedication to the comprehensive notion of Customer 360º.

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition Features

The Marketing Cloud Growth Edition fosters a user-friendly and intuitive marketing experience, leveraging the native elements of Salesforce to amplify benefits and streamline marketing operations. Among its standout features are:

1- Marketing campaign management

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition offers enhanced campaign management using Flow Builder for emails and registration forms. This empowers marketers to easily create and execute campaign-focused marketing initiatives.

With Flow Builder, users can design automated and intuitive processes, defining workflows for each stage of the campaign, spanning from lead capture to conversion.

2- Advanced segmentation

A pivotal feature of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is its capability to perform advanced audience segmentation. This edition takes advantage of integration with Data Cloud, allowing users to target their audiences more effectively. Marketers gain access to a wide range of customer and prospect data, enabling the creation of highly specific and personalized audience segments. Such advanced segmentation significantly improves the relevance and effectiveness of marketing campaigns, thereby increasing response and conversion rates.

3- Integrated consent management in CRM

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition streamlines integrated customer consent management, allowing businesses to efficiently manage their audiences’ communication preferences and subscriptions. Harnessing Einstein’s artificial intelligence, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition enhances various aspects of digital marketing. Einstein AI automates tasks, generates insights, and facilitates data-driven decisions. Some notable features include:

• Einstein Co-Creation: Enables the generation of campaign summaries and messages more effectively, leveraging historical data and current trends. Einstein AI assists in creating relevant and engaging content for the target audience.
• Send Time Optimization: Einstein analyzes past customer behavior to determine the optimal time for sending emails. By identifying the periods in which customers are most likely to interact with content, it boosts the open and response rates of campaigns.

• Einstein Segment Creation: Einstein AI enables the creation of highly accurate and relevant audience segments. By analyzing demographic, behavioral and interaction data, Einstein identifies patterns and clusters customers into segments that share similar characteristics. This empowers marketers to deliver personalized and targeted messages to specific groups of customers, thereby improving the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

4- New unified content creator

A standout feature of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is its new unified content creator, which combines various emails, landing pages, and form functionality into a single tool. Built on Salesforce CMS, this content creator provides an intuitive and flexible experience for creating marketing content. Users can easily design and customize emails, landing pages, and forms, all from the integrated platform, with easy drag-and-drop actions.

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition Accessibility

While Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is only a few weeks old, it’s already available for use by companies. However, there are some issues worth noting.

Pricing: Starting at $18,000 per organization per year, Marketing Cloud Growth Edition offers an option for small and medium-sized businesses seeking for advanced digital marketing tools. This includes:

• 180,000 email sends per organization per year.
• 10,000 profiles unified through Data Cloud.
• 10,000 activation and segmentation credits to use with Data Cloud.
• SMS is available at an additional cost of $10 for every extra 1000 sends.

Depending on the requirements of individual companies, it will be feasible to purchase additional credits for any of the aforementioned options. Initially, this edition will be available in North America. However, Salesforce intends to expand to Europe and the Middle East at the end of the year with plans to gradually extend to more regions.

Benefits of the Marketing Cloud Growth Edition architecture

The new Marketing Cloud Growth Edition architecture offers several significant advantages:

• Focus on SMEs and agile teams: Designed for small businesses with simple B2B use cases, addressing their specific needs.
• High design flexibility: This potentializes its applicability for B2C marketing as well.
• Full integration with Salesforce: Seamlessly integrates with the Salesforce ecosystem, ensuring a cohesive user experience as well as data synchronization with other CRM tools and processes.
• Leverage Data Cloud: Harness Data Cloud for advanced segmentation and more effective management of customer data, enhancing the accuracy and relevance of campaigns.
• Powered by Einstein: Constructed at the core of the Einstein 1 Platform, it leverages AI to maximize its capabilities.
• Enhanced Automation with Salesforce Flow: Marketing Cloud Growth Edition automation is powered by Flows, with a simplified interface that allows marketers to efficiently create and execute their campaigns.

• Streamlined creative process: Introduces new builders based on Salesforce CMS that consolidates various functionalities, thus simplifying the content creation process.
• Integrated consent management: Assists companies in complying with privacy regulations and maintaining customer trust.
• Advanced reporting and analytics: Provides analytical reports and dashboards generated from the Data Cloud, offering a more complete view of campaign performance and facilitating informed decision-making.

This new product appears to have made a promising debut. However, it does not mean that it will replace Salesforce’s other marketing products. Nonetheless, it is worth monitoring its development closely. Ultimately, Salesforce has shown strong commitment to the advancement of Marketing Cloud Growth Edition and may unveil further surprises. If you want to know a little more about this new Salesforce product, you can contact the SkyPlanner team at hello@theskyplanner.com For those interested in learning more about this new Salesforce product, feel free to reach out to the SkyPlanner team at hello@theskyplanner.com. It will be a pleasure to assist you!