3+ Account Engagement (Pardot) Summer ‘24 Updates You Should Know

The Salesforce Summer ‘24 release notes have arrived. As is tradition, I’ll be covering the highlights for Account Engagement (Pardot) Admins and users. There’s a sprinkling of updates that will please the average Account Engagement Admin – operational emails will now be able to be processed through Engagement Studio, gain insight into the most key alerts, and be able to move image files to Salesforce CMS quickly.

Depending on your Salesforce instance, Summer ‘24 will arrive for you either mid-May or the first two weeks of June 2024. Check your own release dates here.

1. Operational Emails in Engagement Studio

I’ve heard how this one has been a keen favorite for many admins and users. Operational emails are messages that need to be sent as an obligation a brand has to their customers – for example, service updates/disruptions, order confirmations, and other types of necessary alerts. These are the opposite to marketing emails*, where prospects can opt-out of receiving emails of a promotional nature. 

(*The same concept as transactional versus commercial emails in Marketing Cloud.)

The onus is on the Account Engagement user to sensibly mark an email as “operational” – abuse this, and you would end up in “hot water” with your customers (spam complaints would be your least concern). 

Previously, operational emails could only be sent as list emails. As one-off emails in nature, this would involve creating the email, forming a set list of prospects, and sending. Only prospects on the list at the time of sending would receive the email. Instead, Engagement Studio is more dynamic, where prospects flow in/out according to their demographic or behavioral data – essentially, you define criteria and Engagement Studio handles the rest. 

We’ve seen how Engagement Studio can be used for operational purposes, and now, particularly with privacy regulations heating up (take APRA, as one example), this will come as a welcome capability to keep automated campaign sequences in one place, while both getting necessary messages to your customers and remaining compliant. 

How this will be shown in the user interface is still unknown. 

2. Alerts in Optimizer

It seems like there are enhancements to Optimizer with every release that comes – and I’m certainly not complaining! 

Optimizer is an Account Engagement Admin’s control panel. You can view/manage a list of suggested actions in a table (and prioritize accordingly), pause/cancel jobs (preventing org processing overload), and gain an “at a glance” understanding with the overall account health score gauge chart.

With Summer ‘24, there will be a dedicated messaging section that will display alerts and recommendations for available features (new/existing), which will narrow down the most key points from the existing list (shown in the image above).

3. Copy Images to a Salesforce CMS Workspace

Salesforce CMS is a repository for assets, like images, that’s shared across any products in the Salesforce product suite that your organization utilizes. 

For Account Engagement Admins/users, Salesforce CMS came into view when the Lightning email builder was released, superseding the ‘classic’ email builder. The Lightning builder leverages Salesforce CMS (as opposed to Account Engagement’s own file repository). 

This update (I assume) means that you can copy your Account Engagement files into Salesforce CMS, as opposed to downloading, and reuploading. This (again, I assume) would maintain the image’s reference so that you are not breaking any existing assets where the image is used. 

One point to note: the release notes mention that this will be functional “with Data Cloud enabled”, which I can’t currently speak to in terms of “why”.

Misc Updates 

• Account Engagement API: If your organization leverages the API, you can read up on new and changed items here. Exporting and pulling related data based on defined relationships seems a solid update, as well as creating landing pages using the API and Bulk Asset Copy flows now support forms. 
• Engage for Gmail Chrome Extension Is Being Retired: If you are a Salesforce Engage customer, there are recommended steps to review. 

Summary

While the Summer ‘24 release brings a sprinkling of updates, hopefully, they will please Account Engagement Admins – especially when these enhancements plug some gaps in how to effectively run an Account Engagement org. 

There’s still time to get prepped for these new features ahead of the Summer ’24 release, so make sure you know what to expect before they arrive. Happy reading!