Around a year ago, Salesforce’s product offering for marketers was composed of two main products, Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE). Towards the end of 2024, Marketing Cloud Growth and Marketing Cloud Advanced were announced, and then in June 2025, there was another new product introduced: Marketing Cloud Next, geared towards agentic AI capabilities. So we’ve gone from two to five products in rapid time. If you’re confused, believe me, you aren’t the only one. It’s really clear that we’re in a transition period in terms of Salesforce Marketing tech - there’s a large, existing install base of MCE and MCAE clients, who are using those two, mature, existing products. Look at it this way, ExactTarget (MCE) was founded in 2000 and Pardot (MCAE) was founded in 2007. We’re talking about products which are 25 and 17 years old respectively, then acquired by Salesforce in 2013, so 12 years ago. Whilst new features have been added over that time incrementally, those products are foundationally the same as they were 10 years ago.
The Strategy: A Refresh and a Bridge
What does this mean? Simply, that it’s the right time for a refresh. Look at what’s happening across the Salesforce platform as a whole - Agentic AI, focus on data activation with Data Cloud, and full-funnel conversational customer engagement. If you’re familiar with the features and data models of the existing MCE and MCAE products, you’ll know that there would be considerable investment and effort needed to bring those three themes into both products. Instead, what makes sense is developing new products, ready out of the box to work with the ’new’ Salesforce ecosystem. What about Marketing Cloud Growth and Advanced? For now, these don’t have full feature parity with MCE & MCAE. I’d say this is especially important for Marketing Cloud Engagement, which is a broad product with powerful personalisation features driven by AMPScript, and it will take a long time until we can perform some of the same capabilities in a new product. That’s why, in my opinion, the most interesting of these new products is Marketing Cloud Next, where the product messaging is all around unification and agentic AI enablement, regardless of which Salesforce marketing technology you’re using. Want to make the most of new Agentforce features for Marketing right now, but don’t want to do a big, messy migration just yet? Marketing Cloud Next becomes the ‘activation layer’ for these features, regardless of which of the existing SFMC suite products you’re using today.
The Future Vision
Where does this go in the future? I’d expect to see their product segmentation down the line move away from B2B & B2C having completely separate products, both with different ways to connect to Salesforce Core, to a future where B2B & B2C use a single product suite, where the product segmentation is based on feature richness, i.e. SMS channels, or predictive and generative AI features.