Journey Pause
Journey Builder is a powerful tool in SFMC. It provides a visual canvas where we can drag-drop channels and orchestrate the interaction with the audiences. One of the issues with this until now was once we started a journey, there was no mechanism to pause. The only option was to cancel, meaning every contact within that journey exits the journey. When we recreate a new version, there was no easy way to resume the audience from where they had left off. Think about a multi-week onboarding campaign, and we may be sending the same welcome emails to millions if we’re not paying attention.
But no more. We can now pause journeys for up to fourteen days.
Deployment Package
Salesforce provides a robust platform for change control and deployment between instances. The only exception being the Marketing Clouds. We could share data extensions between business units. But when it came to hundreds of Journeys and Automations and building a production BU from a Test BU, the only option was recreating everything from scratch. It was great to see a deployment manager for SFMC. It needs to be installed from the SFMC AppExchange. Deployment Manager can be used to deploy Journeys, Data Extension, Attribute Groups, and Automations. Another point to note it doesn’t overwrite any of the artifacts if they already exist in the target BU.
Query Studio
Salesforce has Workbench for running SOQL queries. What were the options for a SFMC user till the very recent past? Create a Data Extension. Write SQL. Populate that target data extension. Iterating and testing audiences in a data extension can become messy pretty quickly. Query Studio has finally come to the rescue. It’s an app that needs to be installed from the SFMC AppExchange. Once installed, it shows up as a menu option, and the interface is intuitive.
SFDC4Life 