Moving to Marketing Cloud Next? Tips from a Salesforce Meetup

The best way to migrate is a question that comes up in my work with clients using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE, formerly Pardot). They want to see what the new platform can do while keeping their day-to-day campaigns running and avoiding any downtime.

My advice after the session is to check what your Salesforce licence gives you access to, then test one campaign in Marketing Cloud Next while the rest of your marketing carries on as usual. That first campaign will show you how your data and automations work in practice and give your teams a better idea of what a wider move would involve.

1. Review your requirements and data before rebuilding anything. Trace how your campaigns work right now and decide which rules, data, and customisations you still need.

2. Agree how marketing and Salesforce developers will work together. Use a sandbox to work out who can build, review and activate flows, and what training each team needs.

3. Start with a single campaign and decide what to move based on what you learn. Set a clear goal for the pilot and use the results, costs, and gaps to plan the next six to twelve months.

Before you set up the pilot, trace how your chosen campaign works today. Where does the data come from? Which scoring or routing rules does it rely on? What happens when someone opts out?

Marketing Cloud Next runs on the core Salesforce platform and uses Data 360 to bring together the data that feeds audience segments. If the same customer appears in several systems, or if different teams record consent in different places, agree how you’ll handle that before you send anything.

If you decide to move beyond the pilot, plan the wider migration as a new implementation. I’ve seen tight deadlines push teams into migrations before they’ve worked out what needs to come with them. Copying a workaround can feel quicker than finding out why it exists, especially when there’s a launch date looming.

• Audit your workflows. Include lead capture, scoring, routing, and follow-up, and note where those processes differ by brand or region.

• Review each customisation. Ask what it does for the business today, whether it will work in the new setup and whether a built-in feature can now do the job.

Salesforce Flow is part of building campaigns in Marketing Cloud Next, whether you’re sending an email after someone fills in a form or setting up a longer nurture. For marketers who’ve spent years working in Engagement Studio or Journey Builder, that changes how you build and test campaigns. It also means your Salesforce developers need to understand which changes marketing will make regularly and which could affect other Salesforce processes.

Build the pilot together in a Salesforce sandbox so both teams can see how campaign flows work and agree who can build, review, and activate them before anything goes live. A couple of questions are worth working through on the campaign itself.

• Could the campaign owner update a follow-up email and test it themselves?

• If they need to change who enters the campaign or add a step that updates a Salesforce record, who should review it?

The answers will help you give marketing enough access to make routine changes, agree when developers need to be involved, and see where either team needs training.

I’m more inclined to suggest a pilot than I would have been a year ago. Marketing Cloud Next now covers more of what Engagement and Account Engagement teams rely on, and some customers can try it through their existing agreement. It’s still a newer platform, so I’d use the pilot to check how it handles the work your team already does.

What can you access on your current Salesforce licence?

If you use Account Engagement, you may already have access. Ask your account executive to confirm what’s included, particularly if your order form has an older edition marked ‘-LP’. You’ll also need to check your Data 360 setup, user permissions, and available credits before you can run a campaign.

If you use Marketing Cloud Engagement, Salesforce recommends Engagement+ as the route to Marketing Cloud Next alongside the journeys and campaigns you already run. If you’re on an earlier Engagement edition, ask your account executive what an upgrade or renewal would involve.

When you budget for the pilot, include the time your team will spend setting up, testing, and learning the new platform while they keep existing campaigns running. Check your expected messaging and Data 360 usage, too. It’s easier to estimate the cost of running both platforms once you know which audience, channels, and data the pilot needs.

• For Account Engagement teams, an event follow-up is a sensible first test. Start with one event and one audience, then follow a registration through to the email, the Salesforce campaign record, and any handover to sales.

• For Engagement teams, try a post-event email for one brand or region. Check whether you can build the right audience and respect the same subscription preferences.

In either case, set up the brand and preference page you need for the pilot, then check that the same person can’t enter both the existing automation and the new one.

For the first campaign, I’d be happy if the marketing team could build, test, and run it in Marketing Cloud Next, explain who received it, and show that the handover worked as expected. That gives you something concrete to take back to the people funding the migration, along with what it cost, what gaps you found, and what training the team still needs.

At six months, you might be ready to roll out the same process across several campaigns. At twelve, you could be using data from a Salesforce custom object to run a cross-sell campaign and measuring its contribution to pipeline. How far you go depends on what the pilot shows about the work you want to move.

If you’re weighing up what to move first, MarCloud can help you check what your current setup supports and scope a pilot. Request a call to discuss your migration.

I first shared my takeaways from the October Salesforce Marketer Group meetup on LinkedIn. Read my original recap.