If you ever got stuck not being able to find the solution for certain issues while blazing your Salesforce Marketing Cloud trail, probably the time has come to unveil some hidden magic. Yes, your gut feeling was right, a solution is somewhere nearby. Just this time, you’ll probably need a helping hand from your account manager or SFMC support.
In this article we are going to cover some on-demand SFMC features that are not available in your org by default, but can be activated or configured upon request. Some of the features can also be activated by your org’s admin.
A word of caution: some of the features are billed additionally, and, as Salesforce Marketing Cloud is continuously changing and developing, some of the below mentioned options might retire / undergo changes with time.
Here is what we are going to cover:
- Basic and Advanced Audit Trail
- Multi-Org Account
- Parameter Manager and _AdditionalEmailAttributes
- Send Log (Email, SMS, Push)
- Email Attachment
- Business rule to override subscriber’s email address
- Hard bounce management: “one & done”
- Contacts Without Channel Addresses
8 hidden treasures of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to help if you find yourself in one of the following situations:
Use Case 1. Your company enforces change management processes, and for better visibility you need to know when and by whom certain changes were made.
Solution: Basic Audit trail (free option) and Advanced Audit Trail (paid). While the Basic Audit Trail is available for SFMC customers and can be activated under Security Settings, to get the Advanced one you should reach out to your account executive.
Note: audit data only becomes available after the feature is activated, which means that no historical pre-activation insights can be pulled out. A rule of a thumb would be to enable at least Basic Audit Trail along with rolling out your fresh SFMC org.
Use Case 2. You are rolling out a solid QA process, and to create a safe testing environment the decision was made to connect a separate SFMC business unit to SFDC sandbox.
We are going to save you some time: nope, no out of the box configuration is available by default.
Solution: Multi-Org Account is what you are looking for. The feature is enabled upon logging a ticket to support, but no rush here – once enabled, the setting cannot be reverted. Take a day or two to prepare your org, and make sure you review all the requirements that are listed in the Salesforce help portal. This includes pausing all email communication activities, verifying the proper Marketing Cloud connect managed package version is installed, and much more.
Note: once enabled, Multi-Org Account cannot be switched off. Take you time, to do your preparation homework thoroughly.
Use case 3. You are already working with data views to get stats on your org’s email and sms activity, but it’s not covering all your needs for different reasons.
Probably you plan to start using _AdditionalEmailAttributes, or you’ve kicked off push notification channel for which data views do not exist (yet?).
Solution: request enabling Send Log functionality to fulfill your tracking needs. Send Logs are available separately for email, sms and push, so don’t forget to request them all if needed. Send Log is provided in a form of enabling data extension template which you can additionally tweak by adding up to 10 additional fields – something you can’t do with data views, admit it!
Note: do you best to plan a structured approach to those additional fields you add to your send log, and plan a retention policy for it.
Use Case 4. After reading through the Use Case 3, you’ve probably got curious about _AdditionalEmailAttributes? And probably you’ve already started looking into configuring the parameters to track your campaigns in Google Analytics.
Solution: good news – Parameter Manager can now be enabled in Setup by SFMC admin without reaching out to support. Link your Google Analytics account to your SFMC org, and enable Web Analytics Connector (WAC). When Parameter Manager is activated, you’ll receive 5 additional email tracking attributes configurable when creating / editing email. Use _AdditionalEmailAttributes to enrich the data about the campaign, source, etc.
Note: if you started using WAC before Parameter Manager was rolled out, you still need to request 5 additional email attributes through creating a support ticket.
Use Case 5: You’ve got a business requirement to send an email with a file attached (purchase confirmation, invoice, contract extension, etc). I
If you’ve worked with Pardot, you might expect this to be an easy task, but Salesforce Marketing Cloud is here to surprise you – the feature is not available as an out of the box functionality.
Solution: Email Attachment is a feature you are looking for, and it is subject to additional billing. Your account executive can help you get up and running.
Note: make sure you’ve evaluated all pros and cons and made sure this will not have a negative impact on the sender reputation and email deliverability.
Use Case 6: You’ve noticed that subscribers’ email addresses stored in sendable data extensions do not always match the data stored for the same subscriber under All Subscribers.
Logically, the requirement is to send email communication to newly received email addresses, overriding what is already stored in All Subscribers.
Solution: reach out to SFMC support to enable the business rule for your account that will be using email addresses from sendable data extensions for known subscribers, therefore overriding email addresses stored for given subscriber keys in All Subscribers. Yes, it’s that simple! And free of charge.
Note: there are more business rules available, e.g. to automatically update an email address in All Subscribers if an email address in CRM was changed. We’ll be sharing more on this in the upcoming posts.
Use Case 7. When running Contacts Counts report, you’ve noticed a mismatch between the number of contacts per each channel and the overall number of contacts summed up.
Take care about the issue on time before it will cause an increase of cost in the next billing cycle.
Solution: Contacts Without Channel Addresses is a type of data extract that should now be available by default in every org, but it might very well be that you’ll have to reach out to support to get one. This feature will unveil all your contacts stuck in the limbo without being related to any channel, therefore you are not making any use of them, but they do affect your billable contacts count. In one of the upcoming posts we’ll cover this in more details.
Note: the automation extracting Contacts Without Channel Addresses might run for a couple of hours, and can only be initiated once in 24 hours.
About the author: Daria Nemchonok, CEO of LeverUP Consulting and a Senior Solution Architect with the domain expertise in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and extensive hands-on implementation experience in some of the most challenging and large-scale SFMC projects in EU
Questions? Ping us at support@leverup.io
