If you’re a Salesforce admin, Marketing Cloud Next puts marketing automation into a tool you already know.
While Marketing Cloud Engagement runs its journeys in Journey Builder, Marketing Cloud Next runs campaigns on Salesforce Flow. That means the automation your marketing team relies on now sits directly on the platform you support, allowing your team to adopt Salesforce Flow best practices across both core CRM and marketing operations.
Here is what carries over from your Flow experience and what’s new during a Marketing Cloud migration.
Marketing flows are a focused version of Flow
Campaign flows are a subset of Flow that gives marketers specific marketing actions in a focused interface, and some Flow elements you might use today are not available in them. You stay in control of access. Out-of-the-box permission sets define which flow elements a marketer can use, and you can build custom permission sets for finer control.
How flows start
Salesforce Flow has nearly 100 flow types, and Marketing Cloud Next draws on four of them:
- Segment-triggered flows: Run for members of a Data 360 segment when the segment activates or on a schedule.
- Automation event-triggered flows: Wait in the background for an event such as a form submission.
- Data Cloud-triggered flows: Fire when a Data 360 record is created or updated, or based on a calculated insight. Marketers who build them need the Data Cloud Marketing Admin permission set.
- Autolaunched flows: Run from subflows, Apex or the REST API.
If you’ve built record-triggered and scheduled flows, you’ll recognise the logic in all four.
Plan segment timing with marketing
A segment must be published before a flow can use it, and the flow works from the segment as it stood at its last publish. Flow Builder can publish the latest segment automatically before the flow runs, but that can take up to two hours. For time-sensitive sends, publish segments ahead of time and agree on the schedule with marketing.
Campaigns and flows are separate objects
Campaign records group audiences, campaign flows, content assets and outcomes in one place. A campaign can relate to multiple flows, and each flow relates to only one campaign, so set naming conventions early to keep reporting tidy as flows multiply.
Testing is built in
The Path Experiment element splits contacts randomly across paths. It can declare a winner once a path reaches 95% confidence, or your marketers can review results and choose the winner themselves. Path Experiment is available in Marketing Cloud Next Advanced Edition, and adding it to a flow requires the Marketing Cloud Manager or Marketing Cloud Admin permission set. Confirm your edition and assign the appropriate permission set before marketing plans their first test.
Journeys and flows can work together
If you still run Marketing Cloud Engagement, you can move each journey across one at a time. A flow in Marketing Cloud Next can invoke an existing Engagement journey, and since Winter ’26 a flow can be triggered when a contact enters a journey, exits a journey or reaches a journey goal.
We’ve helped more than 20 organisations make the move to Marketing Cloud Next. If you’re thinking about migrating, discover our range of implementation packages.
