A few days ago, François shared his personal predictions on what the Winter ’26 Marketing Cloud Next release might bring. So now, the cat’s officially out of the bag – read on to see the highlights the new release actually has in store for us:
1. Create Emails Faster with Reusable Content Blocks & Email Templates
Soon, we can speed up email production and maintain consistency with reusable content blocks. Banners, footers, terms and conditions, or any other boilerplate content can be created and stored by content admins. These combine text, images, links, and buttons in a shared marketing workspace. Marketers can then drag them into emails, apply variations for different audiences, and add personalization rules. Additionally, standardised email templates can be made available for a consistent branding.
2. Agentforce Improvements: Flexible Campaigns, Better Insights, Faster Content
Drafting briefs and creating campaigns is now powered by customizable flows. Admins can adapt flows to add business logic like approvals, assign campaign owners, send notifications or add integrations, while marketers just ask Agentforce to draft and refine campaigns.
Agentforce now generates insights from past campaign performance. Marketers get summaries of key metrics like opens, clicks, and unsubscribes, while admins can customize the focus in Flow Builder to help teams refine subject lines, timing, and overall strategy.
The new Content Builder Agent makes it easier than ever to draft, revise, and optimize marketing assets like subject lines, SMS, or email copy. Just provide your company details and voice guidelines to keep everything on-brand, then get started quickly by selecting the Content Builder Agent template in Agent Builder.
3. Optimize Email Deliverability with New Dashboard Filters
The redesigned Deliverability Dashboard offers new filters with failure reasons by domain (e.g., Gmail, Hotmail). The message type captures whether the message was promotional or transactional.
4. Personalize Landing Pages with Smarter Data Capture
Capture more data without needing inputs from users. Hidden fields let you track details like the utm source, campaign or product page a lead came from, while default values pre-fill fields to save users effort. These will help to keep the forms clean with higher conversions and better insights.
5. Integrate and Track External Forms Using Form Handler
Connect your website forms directly to Salesforce with the new Form Handler. Map your fields from any form to Salesforce objects like leads or cases with no code. Trigger follow-up emails or tasks automatically, and make the whole experience smoother with built-in spam protection, custom redirect pages, and web tracking to see how forms are performing.
6. Personalize and Launch Landing Pages Faster with Merge Fields and Templates
Marketers can now personalize landing pages with merge fields (like name, organization, or product) and boost performance using real-time data from Data Cloud. To speed up creation, admins can provide ready-to-use templates with new HTML tag support that adds flexibility for custom designs.
7. Engage Customers with Interactive Push Notifications and Deeper Mobile Analytics in Marketing Cloud Next
You can now connect with customers through interactive push notifications sent directly to their verified mobile devices. Choose from simple pushes with media and buttons or carousel pushes with up to six swipeable cards. Each of those has its own content and actions. Developers can integrate your apps using the unified Marketing Cloud SDK, which was previously only supported for sending Push notifications through Marketing Cloud Engagement. On the marketing side, you’ll get clear insights into performance with campaign-level analytics, so you can track sends, opens, and interactions across all your mobile messages in one place.
8. Boost Engagement and Track Performance with New WhatsApp Metrics and Interactive Messages
Marketers can now measure WhatsApp open and click rates in the Insights dashboard and filter results by sender name for clearer performance tracking. New interactive features such as flows, location sharing, call-to-action buttons, and product carousels by integrating your product catalogue, make messages more engaging and help drive conversions with real-time catalog updates.
9. Optimize Campaigns with Enhanced Insights Dashboard in Marketing Cloud Next
The updated Insights dashboard provides clearer visibility into marketing performance with new charts and visualisations. Easily spot your top-performing segments and track engagement trends over time across different channels.
10. Score Leads and Accounts More Accurately with Multiple Scoring Models
Create multiple scoring models tailored to different products, regions, or channels like email and WhatsApp. You also have flexibility to control how often scoring runs, to help balance the cost.
11. Set Up a Sandbox to Test Marketing Cloud Next
One of the features I’ve been personally longing for: Use a sandbox org to experiment with new Marketing Cloud Next features and content without affecting production. Build and test complex multichannel campaigns in a safe environment, then deploy to production once everything works as expected.
And speaking of sandboxes: did you know you can get early access to new Winter release features? With a Preview Sandbox, you can explore them up to 6 weeks before the official launch. Find out more here.
Final Thoughts
There are still a few features that didn’t make the list, like Business Units, form pre-filling, and a custom preference center.
With Dreamforce just around the corner, and the release notes being in preview mode, I’m hoping we’ll still be surprised with something big such as Business Units.