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It’s Christmas in July!
OK, maybe not quite, but I do get pretty excited to see what new features and functionalities Salesforce will add in each release.
The Salesforce Summer ‘24 release included some really exciting updates for Automation Studio within Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement. Exciting for SFMC nerds who love Automation Studio, at least!
The release period was June 7, 2024 through June 28, 2024, though the features may still be rolling out to some accounts.
Below are the three Automation Studio updates in the latest release that I’m excited about.
Repeat Timing Intervals
This one is big – you can now schedule automations to run as soon as every 15 minutes. When configuring the schedule for Scheduled Automations, the drop down now includes “Minutes” as an option.
One thing to note is that while you can type other numbers in the “minute” box, the system will round up or down. For example, when I type 16, it rounds down to 15 automatically. If I type 28, it rounds up to 30.
Previously, the quickest interval you could run an automation was every hour. Though a bit rare, I had run into situations in the past where this was a limitation. So, I’m excited to have the option of having automations act a bit more real-time, which might be appropriate in some situations.
Off-Peak Scheduling
For those of us who work in SFMC often you may have noticed something else different in that screenshot above – the Use Recommended Time button and the circle next to Start Time!
With this update, Automation Studio will now assess whether the schedule you are setting is at a peak time (a.k.a. when a lot of other accounts also have automations running.) If it is, Automation Studio will suggest an off-peak time, which you can either use or ignore.
In playing around with this new setting, I thought it may focus primarily on those 15-minute mark times as the “peak” times. While many of those times are considered peak times, other times are showing up as peak times on my stack, too (like 1:48 AM!)
While using these off-peak times will be helpful for platform efficiency, I even think they could be interesting to use for scheduling of email campaigns, particularly for companies who want to try to hit a subscriber’s inbox at a time in which their competitors are not!
Data Copy or Import
Whether trying to create test data, copy data to another data extension for development or copy data to another data extension to create an archive, there are a multitude of reasons why one might need to copy an entire data extension.
Way back in the day, in order to copy an entire data extension, one would either need to export and re-import the data or write a query to populate a new data extension.
Several years ago, Contact Builder began allowing the ability to “copy from an Existing Data Extension”. Now, that functionality is finally available in Automation Studio, too!
Import Activities are now called “Data Copy or Import”. The Source can now be defined as either a Data Extension or a File Location. If choosing a Data Extension, you can simply choose the Source, Destination and Mapping, just like one could with a file import previously.
This new feature is going to be super helpful for development purposes and for less technical SFMC users who need to be able to copy data without exporting it nor writing a query!
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