What you should know about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next

Marketing Cloud Next started in 2024 as a small “Marketing Cloud Growth” edition for B2B SMBs in the US. Two years later it is the flagship of the Salesforce marketing stack – built on the core platform, Data 360 and Flow, with AI agents that can draft a whole campaign. But it is not Engagement 2.0, and the license fee can be the smallest part of the bill.

What is Marketing Cloud Next

Marketing Cloud Next isn’t a single product you buy. It’s a name for a set of products that share one org, one data layer and one AI layer:

Salesforce Personalization is a different thing than the “basic personalization” included in Growth (merge fields and dynamic content based on a Data Graph). You need it for real-time personalization on your website or app. Marketing Intelligence goes beyond the Marketing Performance Intelligence dashboards included in Marketing Cloud – it adds paid-media connectors, configurable attribution and agents.

The rest of this article is about the core product – Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced – and the Data 360 part it can’t work without.

From the business view, Marketing Cloud Next is a marketing automation product that reads its data from Data 360 and has Agentforce features on almost every screen. Emails, SMS, MMS, RCS and WhatsApp messages, mobile push and in-app notifications, forms and landing pages are created and sent from the same org where your Sales and Service teams work.

From the consultant or user perspective, it is the first real move of Marketing Cloud functionalities into the Salesforce CRM instance. Until then, Marketing Cloud was a separate product, with a separate tech stack and separate hosting. Moving it into the CRM org means simpler integration, fewer sync delays and easier licensing (theoretically).

Short history of the product

• April 2024 – Marketing Cloud Growth Edition launches, positioned for B2B SMBs and available only in the US region at the start.
• Dreamforce 2024 – Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition joins, with path experiments, predictive AI and conversational messaging.
• 2025 – both editions are sold as Marketing Cloud Next, under the “Agentforce Marketing” umbrella since Dreamforce 2025.
• Dreamforce 2026 – the brand goes back to “Marketing Cloud”, and Salesforce announces Campaign Agent for the Advanced edition.

When Growth launched, it looked like a replacement for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) for small B2B companies. Today Salesforce’s marketing pages center on Marketing Cloud Next, and Engagement customers slowly get upgrade paths to it. With retail triggers, coupon codes and mobile app messaging added in 2026, it is also no longer a B2B-only tool.

Why Marketing Cloud Next exists

Classic Marketing Cloud Engagement was built on the infrastructure Salesforce acquired with ExactTarget in 2013. That stack has more than a decade of features, but it sits largely isolated from the Salesforce Platform. To talk to Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Data 360, it needs connectors, synchronized Data Extensions and a lot of patience.

Marketing Cloud Next is built directly on core Salesforce infrastructure, so you get native access to CRM data, Flows, Data 360 and Agentforce – no connector required. Your contacts live in the same org as Sales and Service. Personalization based on CRM attributes needs no extra setup, and a marketing email can react to a closed Case or an Opportunity stage without a sync job in between.

But there is a tradeoff, as it still covers a narrower feature set than Engagement, and many things you know from Engagement work differently or don’t exist (yet 😉).

Marketing Cloud Next functionalities

Let’s make it as simple as possible. We can divide Marketing Cloud Next functionalities for sections:

1. Data – getting and unifying the data in Data 360
2. Audience – deciding who gets the message: segments, lists, records or campaign members
3. Content – emails, messages, forms and landing pages
4. Journeys – campaigns and Flows
5. Measure – reporting, scoring and experimentation

A simple example to follow through the article: an online shop wants to send a “we miss you” email to customers who bought something in the last year, but not in the last 90 days, and follow up with an SMS if they don’t open it.

Data

Marketing Cloud Next is built on Data 360, which handles data ingestion, storage, processing, unification and segmentation. If you are new to Data 360, start with What you should know about Salesforce Data 360. The short version is below.

• Data Ingestion brings the data from multiple sources (Salesforce CRM, Commerce, cloud storage, SFTP, APIs) into Data Lake Objects. You can ingest data in batches, stream it, or use Zero Copy connections to Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery or Amazon Redshift without copying the data at all.
• Data Harmonization maps the data from Data Lake Objects to Data Model Objects and connects them with proper relationships. You can’t unify or segment anything without this step.
• Data Unification merges customer data from many sources into a single customer view, using Identity Resolution. Our online shop has Contacts in CRM and customers in the e-commerce platform – Identity Resolution connects them into one Unified Individual, so the shop doesn’t email the same person twice.
• Insights is a name for all the stuff connected with analyzing the data. Calculated Insights (built with SQL or a UI) let you create metrics like “days since last purchase” and use them in segments.

You don’t build the marketing data model from scratch. In setup you deploy data kits – packages with the data streams and DMOs for consent, flows, email, SMS and WhatsApp engagement (plus an optional Sales data kit for Accounts, Contacts, Leads and Opportunities). Then you generate an Identity Resolution ruleset for the Individual object with three match rules: Normalized Email, Lead to Contact (so a converted lead doesn’t become a duplicate) and Device to Known (so anonymous web visits land on the right profile after a form submission).

If you have Flex Credits, batch ingestion is free, but not streaming ingestion and other operations, like data transforms – more in the pricing section and the Data 360 Credits Guide.

Marketing Objects – the closest thing to Data Extensions

Not every piece of data belongs in the Data 360 model. A table of reward points, store addresses or promo copy for one campaign is usually a reference data for a message, not a customer attribute. For this, Marketing Cloud Next has Marketing Objects – if you come from Engagement, they are the closest thing to Data Extensions. A marketer creates one by uploading a CSV (no Data 360 admin needed) and reads it in a message with AMPscript or Handlebars, or uses it as a data source for forms and landing pages.

They are much simpler than Data Extensions, though: three data types (Text, Number, Decimal), up to 100 columns, 25 objects in Growth and 100 in Advanced, and a full refresh as the only documented way to update the data.

Audience

The audience answers one question: who gets the message. The clearest definition of it in Marketing Cloud Next is the start of an Audience Flow – the flow type for scheduled and one-off sends. When you create one, you pick one of four sources:

Event-triggered flows don’t need any of these. Whoever triggers the event – submits a form, abandons a cart – enters the flow (more in Journeys).

Segments

Segments split your audience into groups that share some common context. They use the Data 360 segment canvas (drag-and-drop UI) or AI-assisted segment creation, where you describe the audience in natural language. In Engagement, anything beyond simple Data Extension filters meant writing SQL in Automation Studio or buying a third-party tool, so this was an advantage from day one.

The second advantage is speed. When you send segments from Data 360 to Marketing Cloud Engagement, you wait for a segment activation (from 1 hour for rapid segments up to 24 hours). In Marketing Cloud Next segments are consumed directly in Data 360, so there is no activation step. You just choose the segment as the entry source of the Flow.

Two rules for segments used in campaigns: they have to be built on the Unified Individual object, and in the data space of your marketing org (or of the business unit, if you use them). A single segment can have up to 50 filters on the Include tab and another 50 on the Exclude tab.

The segment only decides who gets the message. Personalization data (e.g. the name of the last purchased product) comes from Data Graphs – segment answers “who”, Data Graph answers “with what context”.

More in Segmentation in Salesforce Data 360 and Segment Canvas.

Actionable Lists, Salesforce Records and Campaign Members

The other three sources work on CRM records directly, without a Data 360 query in between. That makes them the natural choice when the audience is a decision someone made, not a rule.

Actionable Lists are static. A list holds leads or contacts (never both), and it changes only when you import more records, add or remove members by hand, or let a flow do it with the Add to Actionable List and Remove from Actionable List elements. You can create a list from a CSV, from a campaign, from records selected in a list view, or as part of a lead or contact import. By default only the list’s creator can edit it, so share it with your team if more people will work on it.

Salesforce Records and Campaign Members let you target people the way your sales team already sees them. If an account manager builds the invitee list for a customer event as campaign members, a marketer can send the invitations and reminders to exactly that list, and the sales team keeps working on the same campaign record.

Prospects deserve a mention here too. It’s a separate object for people who shared their details but aren’t qualified yet (think Pardot prospects that shouldn’t clutter the sales team’s Lead list). They are treated as Unified Individuals, so you can segment and message them, and convert them to Leads or Contacts manually or with a Flow when the engagement score is high enough.

Content

Content lives in Salesforce CMS – the same content management system used by Experience Cloud and other Salesforce products, organized in workspaces and folders. There you store images (which you can upload in bulk with my Bulk Image Import for Marketing Cloud Next tool), emails, forms, landing pages and messages, and because it is shared across products, one image has one URL everywhere.

Marketing Cloud Next supports these content types:

You personalize content with merge fields – their syntax is {!$provider.Field}, for example {!$unifiedIndividual.ssot__FirstName__c}. Merge fields can read from much more than the recipient’s profile: a Data Graph, an event that triggered the flow, a Salesforce record, a lookup Data Graph (e.g. your product catalog), an Apex class, content variables filled by Flow at send time or a coupon list.

Dynamic content lets you show different subject lines, preheaders or content blocks depending on the recipient’s data – up to 25 personalization points per email and 15 variations per component

A few more building blocks you will use every day:

• Repeater component shows a list of items, for example the last four products a customer viewed.
• Brand kits (managed in Brand Center) store colors, fonts, buttons, tone and guardrails. Content inherits them, and Agentforce uses them to ground the text and images it generates.
• Reusable content blocks – headers, footers and banners that content authors drop into any email or landing page.
• Language variants – translate an email in the builder (with AI) or through XLIFF files. Variants inherit layout and style changes from the default language.
• Form handlers let you keep the forms you already have on your website and map their fields to Salesforce records.

AMPscript in Marketing Cloud Next

Since the Summer ‘26 release, Marketing Cloud Next also runs AMPscript – but only a subset of it. The AMPscript reference now has a separate availability column for Next, and only 64 of about 150 functions work there. String, math, date and rowset functions work, and so do read-only lookups against Marketing Objects and RetrieveSalesforceObjects() (without Marketing Cloud Connect, because it’s the same org). Everything tied to Engagement’s infrastructure doesn’t: AttributeValue(), CloudPages functions like RequestParameter(), HTTP calls, SMS conversations, the SOAP API and writes to Data Extensions. There is still no SSJS.

Journeys

The Campaign section keeps all the content and flows in one place. You create parent and child campaigns, plan them for a specific period and track budget, revenue and response. The Marketing Calendar shows campaigns and scheduled segment flows in daily, weekly and monthly views. With Agentforce you can create the whole campaign from a brief – it drafts the goals, KPIs, audience, content and flow, and you approve or refine each part.

Journeys are built with Flows. These are Salesforce Flows tailored to marketing needs (called marketing or campaign flows), with a simplified interface. You will find elements to create decisions, add, update or delete records, send email, SMS, RCS, WhatsApp or mobile messages, create consent, add people to an Actionable List and wait for a date, a time period, a condition or an event.

For our online shop: the segment is the entry source, the flow sends the “we miss you” email, waits 3 days, checks if the email was opened, and sends an SMS to those who didn’t open it. Besides a segment, a flow can start in several ways:

Because it is the same automation engine as the rest of the org, a marketing flow can also create a Task for a sales rep or update a Case without any integration. The flip side is that there is no Journey Builder, and some patterns look different in Flow:

• Exit criteria are Exit Rules on the Start element (up to 10 per flow), evaluated every time a person enters or resumes the flow.
• Einstein splits become an Einstein Decision element that reads Engagement Frequency or Engagement Scoring from a Data Graph (both need the Advanced edition).
• Goals – I haven’t found a separate goal setting, so I model goals with Exit Rules and Wait for Conditions.
• If you still run Engagement, the Send to Journey element passes people from a flow into a Journey Builder journey.

Standard Flow limits apply too – check them in the pricing section if you plan hundreds of campaigns.

Retail triggers and coupons

For B2C, the biggest 2026 addition is Marketing for Retail – twelve ready-made triggers, from abandoned cart, browse and page, through back in stock, low inventory and price drop, to birthday, reengagement and replenishment. An admin turns a trigger on and sets a few conditions (for example, 30 minutes of inactivity after a cart change), and marketers get an automation event with the cart, product and price context to build a flow on. The daily triggers come with flow templates that already contain the email content.

Each trigger needs your carts, orders, product views and product catalog mapped to specific Data 360 DMOs, and every run of a trigger consumes Data 360 credits – so the job frequency is a budget decision. Coupon lists complement the triggers with unique codes per recipient, and three API events (order status, shipment, return) cover transactional order messages.

Distributed Marketing and Alerts

For B2B, Distributed Marketing and Alerts lets sales reps send marketing-approved emails. A marketer builds a template with locked sections, approved subject lines, phrases and images, and a sales rep picks a template from the lead or contact record, personalizes the unlocked parts, picks a From address and sends it (or schedules it).

Measure

Reporting in Marketing Cloud Next now runs on Marketing Performance Intelligence – an app built on Data 360, Tableau Next and a Marketing Semantic Data Model. After installation, you get:

• Marketing Analytics dashboard with cross-channel trends and AI summaries;
• Campaign Insights and a Deliverability Dashboard (with the reasons why emails weren’t sent) on every campaign record;
• Content Performance dashboard on every content record, including results per dynamic content variation;
• Flow Performance with element-level analytics directly on the flow canvas (Advanced edition).

If you need to know how a single block performs (e.g. which of two buttons in the same email gets more clicks), turn on Impression Region Tracking for that block and report on it separately.

Opportunity Influence connects marketing activity with revenue on Opportunities, with first-touch and last-touch models. It uses email and SMS clicks from contacts with a role on a Closed Won Opportunity, and it needs the Sales data kit. Scoring Rules let you define how engagement changes a person’s score – by default an email click adds 3 points, a form submission 10 and an unsubscribe takes 5 away. You can score people and accounts, with up to 30 engagement and 30 fit rules per model.

Einstein Metrics Guard gives a confidence score on whether an email open or click came from a human or a machine, and filters the machine ones out of your reports. You need it because Apple Mail Privacy Protection opens emails automatically and corporate security scanners click every link, so raw open and click rates are inflated. Einstein Send Time Optimization picks the best time to send an email to each recipient (in Growth, only if you opt in to the global model trained on data from many customers).

The Advanced edition adds predictive scoring, engagement frequency, path experimentation and B2B Analytics for Marketers – dashboards that connect campaigns and engagement with pipeline (account-based marketing, pipeline, attribution with first touch, last touch, linear, time decay and U-shape models).

Growth vs Advanced

Both editions are built on the same foundation (Data 360, core platform and Flow), and both require Salesforce Enterprise or Unlimited Edition plus a Data 360 edition. Growth gives you the tools to run campaigns, Advanced adds the tools to optimize them and to scale to more brands or regions.

Path Experiment splits your campaign flow into up to 10 paths (e.g. 60/40 for two paths) to test different content, channels or timing. In Growth you can build a workaround with decision splits and tagged records, but you will compare the results manually.

Einstein Engagement Frequency labels each person as “Undersaturated”, “On Target” or “Saturated” based on past engagement, so you can slow down for people who are close to unsubscribing. Einstein Engagement Scoring predicts the likelihood of opens, clicks, staying subscribed and web conversion for each person.

Unified Conversations turn SMS and WhatsApp into two-way conversations, where AI handles simple replies and hands over to a human when needed.

Business units

Business units split one org into divisions – brands, regions or product lines – with separate data, content, campaigns and subscriptions, while leadership still reports across all of them. Each business unit maps to exactly one data space, and a data space can belong to only one business unit. You can create up to 150 of them.

Plan them carefully, because most decisions are one-way. After you create a business unit, you can’t edit or delete it, and you can’t move a data space, workspace, campaign or brief to another business unit. Deactivation is permanent too, and the data space of a deactivated business unit can never be used by another one. Content can still travel between business units through Common Assets – a shared library where members post copies of their content for others to reuse.

Upgrade paths from Account Engagement and Engagement

If you are an existing customer, your current edition maps to a Marketing Cloud Next edition. You still need a Data 360 license and credits (Data 360 is available through several SKUs, including the no-cost Salesforce Foundations).

Check with your AE before you buy anything new – you may already have access.

Marketing Cloud Next and AI

Agentforce shows up in more places with every release. As of September 2026:

Don’t confuse the Campaign Creation agent (available now, you guide it step by step) with the Campaign Agent (announced, autonomous).

Marketing Cloud Next vs Engagement and Account Engagement

Many Engagement customers expect Marketing Cloud Next to be “the new Marketing Cloud Engagement”. It isn’t – at least not yet.

For existing customers, Salesforce offers ”+” packages (like Engagement+ and Account Engagement+) that add Marketing Cloud Next capabilities next to the product you already have, instead of forcing a migration.

When Marketing Cloud Next makes sense

Marketing Cloud Next is a good fit when:

• you already use Sales Cloud or Service Cloud and want marketing in the same org;
• your campaigns depend on CRM data (Opportunities, Cases, Orders) and you are tired of sync jobs;
• you plan to use Data 360 anyway – for segmentation, unified profiles or Agentforce;
• you run B2B or mid-volume B2C marketing without heavy code-based personalization;
• you run e-commerce and your commerce data already lands in Data 360 in the standard model, so retail triggers work almost out of the box.

It is probably not the right tool (or not yet) when:

• your email program relies on complex AMPscript templates and Journey Builder logic;
• you send millions of messages per month and your Engagement setup works well;
• nobody in your team will own Data 360 – data model, identity resolution, consent and credits don’t manage themselves.

Waiting doesn’t mean ignoring it. A free Developer Edition and the Trailhead modules let you learn the platform now, so you’re ready when the next releases close the gaps you need.

Marketing Cloud Next pricing

Every product under the umbrella has its own license, and most of them also consume credits. For the core product, both editions are priced per org, per month, and billed annually:

The license fee is only part of the bill. What’s included and what’s not:

Additional costs to plan:

• SMS and WhatsApp – paid with separate credits, starting at $10 per 1,000 credits per channel.
• Additional emails beyond the included 180,000 or 360,000 per year – $10 per 1,000 sends.
• Data 360 consumption – unification, segmentation, retail triggers, Marketing Performance Intelligence and other operations use Data 360 credits. Growth comes with a Data 360 instance with 1 TB of storage and a limited number of unified profiles, but Salesforce doesn’t publish the current base credit number (the separate Segment and Activation pool was retired in September 2025) – check your Order Form. When credits run out, you buy more (Flex Credits cost $500 per 100k), or you move to profile-based pricing, where you pay per profile instead of per operation. My Data 360 Credit Calculator compares both for your volumes.
• Other products under the umbrella – Salesforce Personalization and Marketing Intelligence are licensed separately (listed at $8,000 and $10,000 per org per month).

Check the platform limits before the implementation, especially for Flows, CMS and scoring.

Segment limits follow Data 360 limits – check Data 360 Limits and Guidelines and the Data 360 Pricing Calculator before you plan hundreds of segments.

API functionalities

The Marketing Cloud Next API lets you:

• Manage Records – get, create, update, query and delete records;
• Manage Identity Resolution – list rulesets, get ruleset details and run rulesets;
• Manage Segments – list segments, get segment details and members, publish segments;
• Manage Content – upload and publish content;
• Manage Flows – list flows, and start broadcast and on-demand flows with a payload (e.g. an order confirmation);
• Submit forms – send submissions from your own website forms to a form handler through the Connect API.

On top of that, you have the whole Salesforce Platform and Data 360 API surface, because it is the same org.

FAQ

Is Marketing Cloud Next the same as Marketing Cloud Growth?

Not exactly. Marketing Cloud Next is the umbrella name for the whole stack (Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Personalization, Marketing Intelligence, Data 360 and Agentforce). Growth is one of the two editions of its core product, Marketing Cloud – the other one is Advanced. When Growth launched in 2024, the stack didn’t have a separate name yet, so older materials use “Marketing Cloud Growth” for the whole thing.

Does Marketing Cloud Next replace Marketing Cloud Engagement?

Not one-to-one. Engagement remains available, and the ”+” packages add Marketing Cloud Next capabilities next to it. If you decide to move, plan it as a rebuild, not a lift-and-shift (see Marketing Cloud Next vs Engagement and Account Engagement).

Do I need Data 360 to use Marketing Cloud Next?

Yes – Data 360 is its data layer, and you need a Data 360 edition in the org. It can come from several SKUs, including the no-cost Salesforce Foundations. Either way, you will pay for the credits you consume, and you may need more of them as you scale.

Can I use Marketing Cloud Next without Sales Cloud or Service Cloud?

It runs on the Salesforce core platform, so you need a Salesforce org in Enterprise or Unlimited Edition. Most customers use it next to Sales or Service Cloud, because that’s where the value of having marketing in the same org shows up.

Can I test Marketing Cloud Next in a sandbox?

Yes, it supports all sandbox types (Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy and Full Copy). Sandbox sends consume real credits, so turn on the Blackhole for email – it suppresses test sends except for up to five allowed domains. Flows, content and Data 360 objects can be deployed to production, but in a strict order: Data 360 objects first, then Marketing Objects, content and flows at the end.

Is there a free way to try it?

Yes, Salesforce provides a free Marketing Cloud Next Developer Edition through Trailhead for learning and testing.

Key takeaways

• Marketing Cloud Next is an umbrella for several separately licensed products on the Salesforce core platform – Marketing Cloud Growth or Advanced at the center, Data 360 underneath and Agentforce across all of them.
• Marketing Objects are the closest thing to Data Extensions, but with much smaller limits.
• Choose Advanced if you need experiments, predictive AI, mobile app messaging, Agentic Content, business units or the Buyer Engagement agent – everything else is in Growth.
• Coming from Engagement means rebuilding your emails and journeys, and consent is the first thing to plan.
• $1,500 or $3,250 per month is the starting point – messaging credits and Data 360 consumption come on top.

If you have questions or see something that already changed (Marketing Cloud Next changes almost every release), let me know on LinkedIn.

Articles in this section

• Consent Management in Marketing Cloud Next – how consent attaches to contact points, the objects behind it, how to update it safely and why send time reads a cache

Useful links

• Marketing Cloud Next Documentation
• Marketing Cloud Next Developer Documentation