4 Things to Know About Marketing Cloud Growth Edition

To be clear, this is not a new edition of Marketing Cloud Engagement. It’s a separate product offering that can complement the existing Salesforce marketing tools available, or be purchased as a standalone product.

Salesforce has always been clear about its goal to bring everything onto one platform, so this is a big move in that direction. However, it doesn’t mean the current Marketing Cloud products are being replaced! Salesforce has expressly said they will continue to roll out updates for Marketing Cloud and existing Marketing Cloud customers remain unaffected; the release emphasises the importance of Data Cloud, AI, and marketing in the Salesforce tech stack.

Besides, in its current state, Marketing Cloud Growth edition is highly targeted to specific audience and their typical use cases.

In a nutshell, Marketing Cloud Growth is for small businesses with simple B2B use cases.

Aimed at B2B organisations with simple marketing needs, the product focuses on an easy setup process. Being built on the Salesforce platform, it’s not reliant on connectors. However, Marketing Cloud Growth certainly doesn’t have the capabilities of Marketing Cloud Engagement or Account Engagement (Pardot). 

For enterprise businesses, it won’t do the job in its current state. Dynamic content and A/B testing, for example, aren’t included and neither are Business Units.

Moving forward though, it’s likely that existing Salesforce customers using Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement will eventually gain access to Growth functionality, which can only be a good thing as this will enhance your existing accounts.

Given this is the first iteration of Marketing Cloud Growth we can expect to see more features added but right now, it includes:

• Campaign management

• Segmentation

• Consent management

• AI integration (Einstein GPT)

• A unified Content Builder.

The product also utilises ‘Flow’ for automation (think along the lines of Marketing Cloud Engagement’s Journey Builder and MCAE Engagement Studio), plus Einstein GPT for generative insights.

A first look at Marketing Cloud Growth reveals a guided email builder, landing page builder, and drag-and-drop form builder, plus a generally clean and intuitive interface. For newbies to the Salesforce ecosystem, this tool is going to be pretty straightforward to implement and manage.

Reporting-wise, the way Marketing Cloud Growth uses Data Cloud functionality means email and SMS analytics and dashboards can be accessed within the platform, on the ‘Analytics’ tab.

Lastly, when it comes to scoring and grading, which are essential features for B2B companies, Salesforce has gone with a slightly different approach for Marketing Cloud Growth. With this product, ‘Engagement Score’ is a blend of both scoring and grading, aimed at providing an overall score for lead and contact records. 

Our first impression is that setting custom grading models is not possible and the scoring system is simpler but more restricted - again emphasising the product as better for SMBs with simple marketing needs.

Right now, Marketing Cloud Growth is only available in North America and with limited features. Pricing starts at $18,000 per org, per year and with specified limits and add-on options.

According to Salesforce, this new product won’t begin expanding to Europe and the Middle East (EMEA) until June 2024, although this is tentative and we’ll likely see reduced features. 

As a UK-based partner, we’ll be shouting about the release of Marketing Cloud Growth in this region as soon as we’re able to! Sign up to the MarCloud newsletter to receive direct updates on Salesforce marketing platforms.

No. Whilst Marketing Cloud Growth is exciting thanks to the way its built on the core Salesforce platform, as of right now it’s of little direct relevance to existing customers using Marketing Cloud Engagement and Account Engagement for two main reasons.

1. It’s only available to customers based in North America.

2. For Account Engagement users, MCG doesn’t compare feature-wise.

As things progress and the functionality of Marketing Cloud Growth becomes more available to customers with existing accounts, we can start to have discussions about how to tap into its features. And we agree, they’re very promising! Marketing Cloud Growth is a real move towards simplifying Salesforce marketing by all your builders and asset creation in one place, plus AI that leverages Data Cloud to deliver helpful segmentation and campaign management.

Until then, this announcement is most relevant to brand-new customers who have never used Salesforce before.

In the meantime, you can always get in touch for a chat about your existing Marketing Cloud account and help with implementation, support, training, templates, or audits.