Spring 16 for Marketing

Campaigns

Campaigns got Lightning-afied in this release, which just means they now work in the new UI; you can view and interact with Campaigns as you would normally without jumping around between interfaces. You also get a neat little donut chart on the campaign page of member statuses, and, very importantly, Campaigns are now searchable in Lightning. I can’t say any of this is rocking my world, but it will rock yours if you’ve been having to switch back and forth between Lightning and Classic just to use Campaigns. Also, this is now being called beta, so proceed with caution.

The release notes also seem to put a lot of emphasis on utilizing the Import Wizard with Campaign Members, which has been made slicker and easier with upgrade to the modern “universal” Wizard, links to it all over the Lightning version of Campaigns, and (regardless of Lightning) the ability to import Contacts and Person Accounts, not just Leads, as Campaign Members. If you’re thinking for the latter “hmm, could that result in data quality issues?” well, so am I, but then again, did the previous option as well? Yup. I’ll take the productivity gain and mercy to the Person Account users out there.

Duplicate Management

If you work with an integrated marketing application, you know that dirty Salesforce data gets in the way of optimal performance for marketing tools, and especially, of the almighty goal of attribution. With Spring 16, new orgs have Salesforce’s standard Duplicate Management rules already on. Now that’s what I call setting off on the right foot. For those of you unfamiliar with Duplicate Management, it’s a simple but flexible prevention and reporting tool (not a merge tool) released in Winter 16.

Pardot and Marketing Cloud

There is zero mention of Pardot in the Spring 16 release notes, but Pardot users, do not fear! It startled me at first, but really it’s a good thing, because Pardot has been pushing updates rapid-fire over the past few months with no sign of stopping, and they are making a big difference in usability and quality of integration. For example, the improvement to email reports from November literally made me jump up and dance. Maybe in the next release, we’ll see a nice little section for Pardot like the Marketing Cloud gets, with links to its separate release notes. Unfortunately, the last Marketing Cloud release was October so not much to say but I expect big things next time!

Overall, not the biggest release for the marketing crowd, but as marketing becomes more and more intrinsically tied to CRM, I expect to see features that support sales and marketing together continue to blossom.

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