Summer ’23 Release Highlights: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)

External Triggers, Dashboards and Business Units.

It’s that time of the year, once again, to explore and learn all the updates, improvements, fixes, and changes coming to the Salesforce platform and its products. With this year’s second installment, the Summer ’23 Release, headed to orgs everywhere by June, now’s the time to brush up on the latest and greatest, as featured in the Release Notes!

In this series of Release Highlights, we take a look at some of the new features added within M.C. Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot). Some of them feel like they should have been part of the ecosystem for some time while others bring a fresh perspective from trailblazers like yourself.

Let’s dive in.

Trigger an External Action After Prospect Engagement  

I’m constantly looking for new ways to automate my routine tasks. This allows me to free up time for strategic thinking, planning, and evaluating my contributions to the team. I often create automations that guide prospects through a series of actions based on their level of engagement. For instance, if I want to create a journey that invites prospects to register for an upcoming webinar, I would usually build a landing page with a registration form, export the list of registrants, and use a third-party tool to register them for the webinar or notify them via text. However, with this new update, I’ll be able to trigger an external action (such as adding them to a webinar meeting or sending a text to name a few) for prospects who meet and complete certain actions throughout my journey. The entire list of external actions has not been released but I’m looking forward to testing the feature and trying them all out. Cutting down time while automating tasks is a win-win for all.

Enhance Your Visualizations with Images, Rich Text, and Dashboard Widgets  

As someone who uses Salesforce to combine large amounts of data, I’ve come to appreciate the value dashboards have to offer such as providing real-time insights, boosting our team’s collaboration, and improving our performance goals. However, I also understand how someone may find it daunting to have to traverse these endless data streams and try to make sense of it all. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack. This new update unlocks visual elements like images, rich text, and widgets to help create simple-to-follow dashboards for everyone to use. With just a few adjustments, you can now design dashboards that segment data, tell a story, and offer more context. Allowing you to combine up to 25 widgets, including 20 charts and tables, as well as two images and even animated GIFs. As a trailblazer, I’m thrilled about this new feature, as it helps me improve the presentation of my dashboards and get the insights I need to make the decisions that will improve our team’s performance goals.

Copy Assets Between Account Engagement Business Units More Easily  

Lately, we’ve collabed with clients on projects involving multiple Business Units (BUs). Our tasks include configuring domains and creating various marketing assets like email templates, landing pages, customer redirects, and Engagement Studio programs. During this process, we realized that while the initial prep work was essential, recreating the same assets within each BU took additional time. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could clone these assets within each BU and save time? Fortunately, with Summer ’23, there’s a solution! This latest update allows you to use API version 5 to query assets from one BU and transfer them to another. Having to use APIs to create queries may sound even more time-consuming but simply connect with your Dev team to have them whip up a solution in no time.

As always, we’ll keep the Release Highlights rolling out as we count down to go-live! And, if there’s something in the Release Notes that caught your eye and you’d like us to cover, feel free to drop it in the comments below!

Until next time, thanks for stopping by and we’ll see you in the cloud!