Salesforce announced Marketing Cloud Next (MCN) at Connections ’25, aiming to unify its marketing offerings. This new platform seeks to simplify Salesforce’s marketing technology (MarTech) stack, which has seen several rebrands and new editions in recent years, potentially causing confusion among users.

Salesforce announced Marketing Cloud Next (MCN) at Connections ’25, aiming to unify its marketing offerings. This new platform seeks to simplify Salesforce’s marketing technology (MarTech) stack, which has seen several rebrands and new editions in recent years, potentially causing confusion among users.

Understanding the Marketing Cloud Ecosystem

To clarify the landscape, here’s an overview of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud products:

• Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE): Formerly ExactTarget, MCE has been Salesforce’s primary B2C marketing solution for over a decade. It operates on its own infrastructure due to being an acquired product and includes various modules for segmentation, automation, and multi-channel communication.
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE): Previously Pardot, MCAE has served as Salesforce’s main B2B marketing offering for over ten years, largely due to its compatibility with Salesforce’s core sales objects like leads, contacts, and opportunities. MCAE, also an acquired product, has been gradually aligning its objects with Salesforce.
• Marketing Cloud Growth (MCG): Launched in 2024, MCG was the initial version of “Marketing Cloud on core”.
• Marketing Cloud Advanced (MCA): Announced at Dreamforce ’24, MCA followed MCG and offers more features.
• Marketing Cloud Next (MCN): MCN represents the culmination of Salesforce’s efforts to converge the aforementioned products. It is built on Data Cloud, featuring a rebuilt personalization engine that allows rich agent activity to be utilized across the entire Salesforce product suite, not just marketing.

What Differentiates Marketing Cloud Next?

Marketing Cloud Next marks a new era for marketing on Salesforce through three key areas:

• Combining: MCN integrates nine of Salesforce’s “best of breed” MarTech and customer data acquisitions.
• Rebuilding: MCN is built on Data Cloud, also known as the “core platform.” Salesforce has also rebuilt its personalization engine on Data Cloud, providing a single shared service for all Salesforce platform products (e.g., Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud).
• Simplifying: MCN aims to service both B2B and B2C models within the same application, reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) by minimizing integrations within the marketing stack and with other platform products.

MCN also introduces “agentic offerings” such as Agentforce Campaign Creation, Agentforce Lead Management, and Agentforce Segment Intelligence.

The Great Convergence

Salesforce has been working for several years towards a unified marketing application. To facilitate the adoption of new editions with enhanced functionality, Salesforce has created “pathways” to ease customers into Marketing Cloud “on core”. MCG, MCA, and MCE+ are considered “stepping stones” where two editions can be used in parallel, leading to Marketing Cloud Next. This initiative aims to move users towards a robust infrastructure that supports AI agents and a comprehensive, single view of the customer across an organization.

The timeline for these convergences is as follows:

• MCAE to MCG or MCA: Salesforce made MCG and MCA available to Account Engagement customers in mid-2024.
• MCE to MCE+: Marketing Cloud Engagement+ is expected to be generally available in October 2025.

Salesforce emphasizes that this is a convergence, not a migration, meaning existing investments in automation and segments created in Data Cloud will be reflected in Marketing Cloud Next. The ability to connect Journey Builder journeys and Flow is a key aspect, allowing users to build new messaging and flows in MCN and invoke existing Journey Builder journeys. While the “one click” connection from MCE to MCN is not yet clear for all aspects, such as content (email templates, images, files), Salesforce is working on mechanisms to smooth the transition from the ExactTarget platform to the core platform.

Future Outlook

Salesforce’s mission is to offer a unified marketing solution that caters to both B2B and B2C needs, eliminating the need for customers to choose between platforms. Marketing Cloud Next is a significant step in this direction. Salesforce is committed to convergence and does not plan to sunset its MCE or MCAE offerings, acknowledging that for large enterprises, a “lift and shift” of their deeply embedded marketing operations would be impossible. The question of whether all existing SKUs will remain available for new Marketing Cloud customers in the future remains open.