Spring '24 Release Review
Published on 02/15/2024
After what felt like a longer than usual January, Salesforce finally shared the release notes for the Spring 2024 release. After such a long wait for new features and with the extended delay and overall lateness to the party with some stacks only having 10 days to get prepared for the changes, surely this release is setting up to be a big one!
Alas, it seems not.
In fact, much of this release seems to be about less to do with Marketing Cloud Engagement and is padded out with references to Data Cloud, Cross Cloud capabilities and repeated content - which for many customers may not be entirely useful. However, let’s get into the details of what you can expect in the Spring 2024 release.
WhatsApp as a channel in SFMC gets a little bit of a face lift and brought up to speed with some of the other channels available in the platform. New transactional messaging API capabilities allow users to send non-promotional messages from outside of Journey Builder. You’ll also start to see WhatsApp engagement reporting made available in Intelligence Reports for Engagement (The reporting that replaced Discover reports) but not in Intelligence Reports for Engagement Advanced (The additional premium Datorama SKU?). But it’s something!
More of a Google change than an SFMC change, but users who use MobilePush and leverage the Firebase FCM APIs will need to update to HTTP v1. The Firebase FCM APIs have been deprecated for almost 8 months at this point, so it’s good that Salesforce have finally started to allow users to update. Check out the Firebase documentation here to find out more.
Back in the Winter 2024 release, Salesforce moved the journey optimisation dashboard from open beta to general release and the relentless approach to making users optimise the way they work seems to be continuing. Now, SFMC will make recommendations to you if you have items such as back to back decision splits which could impact journey performance. It currently won’t prevent you from activating journeys with less than optimal performance, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that changes in future releases.
The Journey History Dashboard gets some overdue enhancements where you may have similar activities being indistinguishable in the user interface. Now activities will have Activity IDs to enable you to distinguish between them. On the subject of dashboards, from the journey dashboard you’ll be able to pause and resume multiple journeys at once from the journey dashboard rather than having to go into each individually. This is the natural progression from the bulk stop journey capability from Winter 2024. Keen to see how Salesforce tackles the configuration elements of pausing journeys as not every reason to pause is created equal!
Ever wished your emails would send faster out of Journey Builder? Approximately 5 weeks after the release lands for some accounts - Salesforce has stated a new High-Throughput Sending for Journey Builder setting will be available in the journey settings panel. No mention of cost implication, or whether this essentially applies high priority sending to each of the email activities in a journey. There’s probably not many scenarios where you would elect to not use High-Throughput Sending for Journey Builder unless there’s an additional burden on Super Message consumption? It’s a little light on the detail in the approximately 20 words in the release so keep your eyes peeled on your super message consumption!
What could be the most significant part of this release is the introduction of being able to Track any URL interaction in Engagement Split Activities in Journey Builder. Again, no details have been shared about the specific implementation of this new capability, will this be done via a list in the user interface or will users be required to paste requisite URLs into a free text field? We’ll soon find out.
Einstein Probabilistic Opens is being renamed to Einstein Metrics Guard. Nothing new to see here, just padding out the release with a rename.On the subject of padding out the release. WhatsApp is also getting referenced here. Just with a bit more detail in that you’ll get dashboards and dimensions to build your pivot tables against.
A couple of things to call out here, some documentation for what has previously been undocumented REST API endpoints. Great to see the documentation for these, many of which have been previously shared on StackExchange and through various blogs and communities. However, getting this documented means any of the solutions that have been built under the caveat of “This is undocumented and may stop working with no recourse” now have some extra support.
A neat new feature is the ability to create one use imports via the REST API. Previously you could have leveraged an existing Import Definition via the SOAP API to deliver similar type capabilities. Plenty of use cases for this kind of functionality and you can leverage S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage or any of your existing File Transfer Locations.
A couple of items here, both hygiene and optimisation related. First one is around Data Retention and Data Extensions that would be deleted via the retention configuration. These can no longer be linked to the Contact model. If you’ve got any of these and they’re used in your Journeys, make sure to check as this could end up creating some unexpected outcomes if links are getting removed.
What seems like a new enforcement of a known limit within SFMC is the cap on field length for the field used for sendable data extension data relationships. Where SubscriberKey has a cap of 254 characters, this will now be enforced within Data Extensions in the sending relationship. This shouldn’t impact any other text fields that you may use for content. Again, check the sendable fields in your Data Extensions to make sure this doesn’t cause issues in your SFMC org as this will be enforced on existing as well as new activities for email sends or Journeys.
Process Builder is being retired (and has been since 2022ish) but this time for Marketing Cloud Connect. The retirement will happen beginning after the Spring 2024 release and is expected to run until May 2024. Migrations to record-triggered flows will happen automatically when a Journey using the object is published. All journeys that depend on that same object will also be migrated.
Distributed Marketing gets a couple of enhancements.
Having been lagging behind other elements of SFMC, CloudPages will move from collections to Folders and get a new recycle bin similar to Content Builder. This should make things easier and remove the need for hacky workarounds to move Cloud Pages between folders. You’ll also be able to nest folders which will allow a more efficient storage taxonomy for your Cloud Pages.
The Marketing Cloud Engagement App is being retired. If you have it installed already you can continue to use it until retirement on May 5th 2024. Recommendation from Salesforce is to use your mobile browser instead. If you’re an active SFMC user on the go, it would be good to hear some community comments of your experience of interacting with SFMC on your mobile device.
IP addresses for Event Notification System are changing. If you have an IP Allowlist within your business to listen to events, you’ll need to get these updated to match your stack.
Automation Studio gets some general enhancements. Salesforce is claiming that scheduled automations are now 62% more on time. Salesforce have also previously claimed that Importing Data from one Data Extensions to another would be up to 10x faster, so it would be interesting to see if there is any evidence to back up this claim.The Data Extension Storage report available in the Setup tab is getting the customer key added to it, this should help you find any of those Data Extensions that don’t appear in the user interface but still have storage usage attached to them!If you’ve ever had a situation where an automation has been paused and you’re not sure why or who did it. Salesforce has decided that you should know who most recently paused the journey so you can make sure the right person is aware that they’ve not reactivated a journey that has been paused!
This is the shortest set of release notes and the review is the shortest written, even when compared to the 5 release cycle that was replaced a few years ago. Progress in the platform is slow, there is padding in the documentation and repetition between releases. The level of detail in the release notes is getting less and less. With the release notes published as late as they are to the release going live this is becoming unacceptable. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement is an enterprise platform and the quality of the information provided in these notes is a fraction of what is published for other platforms in the Salesforce ecosystem.
That’s not to say that there aren't good things in this release, there are. Most of them are quality of life releases rather than game changing capabilities. Cloud Pages getting folders is great, the new REST API documentation is also welcomed (albeit not new capability just not admission of the capability) and the single use imports without needing an Import Definition through the REST API is definitely welcomed.
Fingers crossed we get a bit more in the next release!