Yes! The winter ’23 update has arrived. As previously announced, Pardot is now called Marketing Cloud Account engagement.  With this new winter release, we see some new changes coming in.  

We’ve listed some of the new features for you in this blog post:   

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement External Actions

As part of the release, you can now take actions on prospects outside of MC account engagement. Because with these external actions you are able to easily get prospects to register for an event or a webinar, you can also send them a survey and text themselves as well as activate other third-party platforms through engagement studio.  

This feature opens the door to Salesforce cases, and we can link engagement studio to different Salesforce objects. We think this is a very good feature to automate actions in combination with third-party platforms/activities and close gaps between salesforce and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. Are you thinking about integrating certain platforms and controlling them from MC Account Engagement? We suggest External actions as a very handy feature to do so.

Do not make a mistake, it’s not the same as external activities. External activities are engagements you’d like to pull into MC Account Engagement as enriched information on your prospect, coming from external sources.

Pause prospect activity

This feature is also a good newcomer to protect a company’s data and measure activity with more accuracy within MC Account Engagement. From now on, we can start pausing prospect activity. This is especially good because high activity levels are usually due to activity by a bot. 

When you pause activity for a prospect, an error will appear on the prospect record and will be indicated with an icon in the list view. We do need to remember that a paused prospect who is logged in can still receive marketing emails. 

Simplify opt-out status of prospects between Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Salesforce 

The opted-out field in  MC Account Engagement now requires a registration system. All you must do now is choose between MC Account Engagement or Salesforce as the primary value for the prospect’s opted-out field. Previously we could also choose “use the most recently updated record,” but this is no longer an option for field synchronization. In other words, you must choose either Salesforce or MC Account engagement as the source of truth. This means that you have better control in terms of the opt-out policy and that the status can’t be overwritten over time. 

We think the simplification of the opted-out status is a good feature. From now on, we will know the source of truth with certainty.

Licensing for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement users  

As you may already know, Pardot-only Logins are gone as of 2021. all users who want to log into Pardot must be assigned a Salesforce identity license to use Salesforce’s single sign login.  

The new special license allows us to give users access to most of the marketing tools available to MC Account Engagement. In addition, the new special license does not give full access to Salesforce. When you create a user record in Salesforce with this specific identity license, you create a user record, so the Single sign-on (SSO) has been activated.  

You have full access within MC Account Engagement, but you can’t access the other salesforce products. Salesforce announced that this license will be limited to a number of licenses per org, but the exact number of licenses has not yet been confirmed. When buying additional licenses, it will cost $5 per license. 

Other Small Updates 

In addition to the above updates, there are some other minor updates that are not unimportant in this feature.  

• It is important If you’re using the WordPress Plug-In for MC Account Engagement: A security update happened on August 12 for this Plug-In. You must first clear the cache in the settings of the Plug-In and only then can you enjoy this latest update  
• Pardot’s Classic App will no longer be available in all Salesforce org as of Oct. 17, 2O22. 
• Newly updated in MC Account Engagement API V5: Account added, lifecycle history and support for the prospect queries based on the email address and CRM FID. 

As you can see, this Winter ’23 release has significant improvements attached to it. These updates will become available in your org by the end of this month or the beginning of October. Would you like to know more about Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) and its releases? Do not hesitate and get in touch!