We are thrilled to announce the release of Activation Studio version 3.0, the latest version of our Marketing Cloud solution that improves the workflow for marketers. With this update, we are introducing a significant new feature: improved folder management for marketers. This release includes folders for Segment Designer, Score Designer, and Interaction Designer, with full functionality to edit, delete, move, and create folders.

What is Activation Studio?

Activation Studio is a Marketing Cloud solution that empowers marketers to create interactive and engaging campaigns. With Activation Studio, marketers can create interactive campaigns, track web interactions, and score leads without any coding knowledge. Activation Studio is an all-in-one solution for marketers who want to create engaging campaigns that capture the audience’s attention.

Improved Folder Management

One of the most significant features of Activation Studio version 3.0 is the improved folder management for marketers. This feature enables marketers to organize their campaigns into folders for Segment Designer, Score Designer, and Interaction Designer. With this feature, marketers can easily manage their campaigns and find them quickly when needed.

The new folder management feature is intuitive and easy to use. Marketers can create new folders, move campaigns into different folders, rename folders, and delete folders. With this new feature, marketers can keep their campaigns organized, reducing clutter and making it easier to find campaigns quickly.

With the release of Activation Studio version 3.0, we have introduced improved folder management for marketers. This feature enables marketers to organize their campaigns into folders for Segment Designer, Score Designer, and Interaction Designer, with full functionality to edit, delete, move, and create folders. This new feature will help marketers keep their campaigns organized, reduce clutter, and make it easier to find campaigns quickly. With Activation Studio version 3.0, marketers can create engaging campaigns that capture the audience’s attention, without worrying about coding.

We hope you enjoy using Activation Studio version 3.0 with the new folder management feature. Check out all new features included in this release.

Currently, Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers the possibility of capture web events in Salesforce Marketing Cloud via Einstein or behavioral triggers. Both options have their positive and negative aspects. We wanted to develop a flexible way for marketers to use interactions in Marketing Cloud.

The newest tool of Activation Studio, Interaction Designer, makes this attainable! This functionality offers the benefit of obtaining first-party data instead of being reliable on third parties concerning consumer data. According to Google’s changes to its privacy and transparency control, collecting primary data becomes increasingly crucial. Furthermore, the Interaction Designer complements the two existing tools of Activation Studio, Segment Designer and Score Designer. Thus, it likewise connects all tools with each other.

Introducing Interaction Designer

Interaction Designer collects behavioral data of website visitors via a flexible tracking mechanism by creating and activating tags in order to obtain interactions. It is possible to track the data of multiple websites at the same time. After defining the interactions, you can establish journeys in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to continue these interactions. The collected data can be controlled and supervised from within Marketing Cloud.

Interaction Designer as complementing tool to Segment- and Score Designer

The tracked interactions can be used in Segment Designer and Score Designer. The marketer can make use of Score Designer by utilizing collected data of Interaction Designer instead of using already existing data within Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You can create scoring rules based on the data of Interaction Designer. Consequently, you can build segments based on these interactions and scoring rules. Thus, the marketer can stimulate the purchase process by targeting the leads personalized on their interaction rate with the product or website.

Imagining a bag company: A lead who already engaged several times with the newest women’s backpack, should receive more and relevant emails about this specific bag than a lead who generally starts engaging with the brand. 

Want to know more. Learn everything about Interaction Designer here.

When companies are looking for lead scoring and grading capabilities they first think about Pardot. Until now! We released a lead scoring solution that works in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Combine any data and activate scored leads in Journey Builder.

Pardot versus Marketing Cloud

Lead scoring has never been part of Marketing Cloud. Companies looking for these capabilities mostly turn to Pardot. Missing the good parts of Marketing Cloud like Journey Builder and many more amazing designers and builders. Learn more about Pardot versus Marketing Cloud.

Similar to our Segment Designer, we wanted to create a user friendly way to include scoring rules within Marketing Cloud and make it easy to use these scores when creating segments for your campaigns.

Introducing Score Designer

Score Designer is now fully released and part of the Activation Studio.

• Easily create one time and recurring scoring rules
• Use positive and negative scores
• Use any data available within Data Designer
• Use scores to segment audiences

Want to know more. Learn everything about lead scoring and Score Designer here.

Included in the current release is the option to add fields to your target data extension. After creating your segment within Segment Designer you can now choose to add fields already in your segment criteria (grayed out), fields from Marketing Cloud system data views and add fields from other data extensions available in the Attribute Groups within the Data Designer of Marketing Cloud.

Step 1: design your segment via our visual drag and drop Segment Designer

Step 2: choose if you want to overwrite or use the update data action

Step 3: optionally choose a data retention policy

Step 4: choose fields to be included in your target data extension

You can choose to have the value of the field to be included or use a SUM, AVG or COUNT function. For example;

• have the sum value of all transaction values
• have the average transaction value of all transactions
• have the count of the email sends

To include a value related to an object that has a one-to-many relationship, you need to determine how you want to order your data. For example; if you want the invoice number of a specific transaction, you need to choose an attribute to order the data. In this case you could choose a date field to order the data and include the most recent transaction.

View the video below to see how this works in Segment Designer.

Marketers who have experience in creating SQL activities in Marketing Cloud know how time consuming creating SQL can be. One of the reasons is not knowing what potential values are within a field of a data extension. We wanted to created a seamless workflow within our Segment Designer without having to leave your screen.

In the new release we have included the option to view a set of unique values available within a specific field of a data extension. A huge time saver since you don’t have to browse to the data extension, open it and browse through all potential values. Just click the ‘table’ icon and we will show you a set of unique values.

View the video below to see how pulling in unique values works within Segment Designer.

We are happy to announce that we have integrated the Marketing Cloud data views directly into the Segment Designer. For now we have included _Subscribers, _Sent, _Open, _Bounce, _Click and _Unsubscribe. In feature releases we will also include the _Job and Journey Builder data views.

This feature makes it possible for marketers to include the data views when creating a segment. And combine data view values with other data available in the Segment Designer. For example;

• include all subscriber who have received an email in the last month, didn’t engage with the content and are part of a sales opportunity
• exclude subscribers who opened an email in last week and who purchased something on your website in the last month

View how data views have been integrated in the video below.

What are Marketing Cloud system data views?

Marketing Cloud stores certain data in data views such as bounce, sent, open and click data. There are more Marketing Cloud data views for Journey Builder activities and also for automations. Data View in Marketing Cloud can be queried via a Query Activity.

SQL example all tracking data Marketing Cloud data views

Below an example of a SQL query to get all tracking data from all relevant system Data Views. Example provided by sfmarketing.cloud. Fields included in example are:

• SubscriberKey
• EmailName
• SentDate
• OpenDate
• ClickDate
• BounceDate
• BounceCategory
• UnsubscribeDate

SELECT 
s.SubscriberKey, 
j.EmailName, 
s.EventDate as SentDate, 
o.EventDate as OpenDate, 
c.EventDate as ClickDate, 
b.EventDate as BounceDate, 
b.BounceCategory, 
u.EventDate as UnsubscribeDate
FROM _Sent s LEFT JOIN _Job as j ON s.JobID = j.JobID 
LEFT JOIN _Open o ON s.JobID = o.JobID and s.ListID = o.ListID and s.BatchID = o.BatchID and s.SubscriberID = o.SubscriberID and o.IsUnique = 1
LEFT JOIN _Click c ON s.JobID = c.JobID  and s.ListID = c.ListID and s.BatchID = c.BatchID and s.SubscriberID = c.SubscriberID and c.IsUnique = 1
LEFT JOIN _Bounce b ON s.JobID = b.JobID and s.ListID = b.ListID and s.BatchID = b.BatchID and s.SubscriberID = b.SubscriberID and b.IsUnique = 1
LEFT JOIN _Unsubscribe u ON s.JobID = u.JobID and s.ListID = u.ListID and s.BatchID = u.BatchID and s.SubscriberID = u.SubscriberID and u.IsUnique = 1

We’ve added the option to use new actions in combination with date fields and number fields within the Segment Designer. This option gives marketers the possibility to easily add more complexity to their segments. Marketers can now use date type and number field specific actions. Creating segments in Marketing Cloud have never been easier.

Date fields

When dragging a date field into the Segment Designer, you now have the option to select the ‘is anniversary off’ selector. This makes it easier to include birthdays or the date a new client signed with your company. The selector doesn’t look at the year, but the recurrence of the day and month.

Number fields

It was already possible to use common actions like ‘between’ and ‘greater than’ selectors. Now it’s also possible to use ‘average’, ‘sum’ or ‘each’ in combination with number or integer fields. A marketer can use this when for example wanting to segment all customers with an average purchase between 500 and a 1000 dollars or a customer lifetime value of greater than 2500 dollars.