5 Features on the SAP Marketing Cloud roadmap to look forward to

SAP is continuously improving their products to fit the need of the customer in an ever-changing world. Those improvements are brought to the customer through quarterly releases of the cloud products. As some of you might know SAP is relying on the ideas of its customers via the ”SAP Customer Influence” program. Last week, SAP announced which topics from the Customer Influence program have been selected for the backlog of SAP Marketing Cloud. In this blog we have selected some of those topics we are really looking forward to.

On SAP’s community website influence.sap.com it is possible for SAP customers and consultants to post their improvement request on one of the products or to vote on the idea’s of other community members.

When an influence request receives at least 15 community votes, it will be taken into consideration for the backlog on the roadmap. Votes are used to prioritize Improvement Requests, however other important selection criteria, such as SAP’s strategy or quick-wins, are included as well.

Last week SAP announced the 20 requests that made it to the development backlog of SAP Marketing Cloud and are therefore considered for the upcoming 2105 release. We are really looking forward to some of those improvements and I would like to share the most interesting ones with you all.

Item of interest in new email editor

First of all: request 247575.

Some releases ago the ”email lite editor” was added to make it easier and more user-friendly to create email templates. This editor was brought to the customer in phased releases, which entails that with every release some functionality is added, with the final goal in mind to be able to replace the old email editor.

In the old email editor, it was possible to add an ”item of interest” to a link. A lot of customers are using this functionality to track interests to be able to segment on this interest and/or create a trigger based campaign. We already heard the urge of this request from our customers in our Acorel inspired in 90 minutes Marketing webinar of last November and now it is also acknowledged by other customers seeing the 27 votes on this request. Great to see that this functionality most likely returns to SAP Marketing Cloud!

Filter on items of interest in campaign list

Next up: request 222937.

In SAP Marketing it is possible to link certain interests to a product category, link or campaign. This could be used to group those items as areas of interest while looking at the Marketing profile. As it is possible to add interest to campaigns it could be of use for marketeers to filter on this attribute. A category manager for instance would focus on campaigns of its own product category. At this moment it is not yet possible to do this filtering in the campaign catalogue, nor in the marketing calendar. Therefore I see it as a nice ”Quick win” for SAP to add this to SAP Marketing cloud.

Subscription logic for contacts with more than one email address

Another interesting one is: request 228421.

This one is currently a bug in one very common scenario and the 25 votes on this topic confirm this. If a contact wants to receive a newsletter on two email addresses (e.g. on a personal & business email address), and those contacts are merged in marketing cloud, the system only sends the newsletter to one email address. So it is possible to have multiple mail addresses, but the system does not allow you to use both of them in one campaign. On one hand, it is good functionality to prevent that people are not being spammed with double mails, but on the other hand a limitation if a marketeer purposefully wants to send both of the mail addresses the newsletter. I hope SAP will develop some sort of toggle functionality, so that the marketeer is in the lead to decide when both addresses have to be used.

Embed SAP-Mkt-hosted landing pages on a Company website

Request 235649 is a feature I personally really like.

Currently, it is not possible to use your SAP Marketing Cloud-hosted landing pages embedded in an external website. According to SAP this was intentionally, as it prevents third-parties to embed your landing pages in their possible malicious websites. In the improvement request it is suggested to have the possibility to whitelist certain domains to make it, in a safe way, possible to embed your landings page on your own website.

This improvement will make me (and the 32 voters on the request) very happy, as it provides the marketeer with the right tool to have the corporate identity conform website with the added form all in one central place.

Capture Email permission from third party events such as ON24

And last but not least: 261607.

Digital meetings and webinars became increasingly important in the last year, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. SAP Marketing Cloud provides standard integration between webinar platform ON24 Events. This integration works for most customers, but lacks one important feature. It is not possible to capture the email permission directly from the registration page on ON24.

Webinars are a great way to introduce new customers to your company, so it would be great to be able to ask and actually get the email permissions via this ”digital introduction”. This request is another example of a small improvement that would add a lot of value to SAP Marketing Cloud.

Let’s hope the improvements mentioned above will be integrated soon in SAP Marketing cloud. Together as a community we will help building better tooling for our businesses! We will update you on what made it to the 2105 release after the release to the customer by SAP on the fifth of May and encourage you to check out what is already delivered from the roadmap in Q1.

If you have questions on how to implement or use those improvements in your organization, feel free to contact us!