Leer este artículo en español →
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is Salesforce's family of marketing products: the tools a company uses to send emails and SMS, design customer journeys, personalize its website and measure its campaigns. For years "Marketing Cloud" was almost a synonym for a single product, the one now called Marketing Cloud Engagement. In 2026 two generations live side by side: Engagement, which comes from ExactTarget, and Marketing Cloud Next, the agentic version built on the Salesforce platform. In this article we explain what each product does, what has been retired along the way and what you need to implement it.
Joaquín País, CEO of ShowerThinking, explains the newest piece on video:
The Marketing Cloud family in 2026
In its annual report, Salesforce now groups this whole offering under the name Agentforce Marketing.
Marketing Cloud Engagement: how it works
Marketing Cloud Engagement is the digital marketing platform Salesforce built from ExactTarget. It is not a closed tool: it is a platform that is configured and developed for each company, designed to work with millions of customers and many channels at once. It is organized in studios and builders.
Email Studio and Content Builder
Email Studio is the email marketing module. It works with databases of millions of records, with dedicated IPs and with data extensions, data tables that can be joined and transformed. Content Builder is the content manager where emails and their blocks are built and organized. We explain them in Email Studio in Marketing Cloud and in the Content Builder Guide.
Mobile Studio
Mobile Studio sends SMS, push notifications and chat messages from the same platform: delivery notices, reminders or SMS campaigns. More in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Mobile Studio.
Contact Builder
Contact Builder is where each customer's data comes together and gets connected: data from the CRM, an ERP, stores or the website. It is the fuel of Marketing Cloud: without a good data model, nothing else works. We cover it in Contact Builder in Marketing Cloud.
Journey Builder
Journey Builder is the canvas where customer journeys are designed across all channels. An example: an email invitation leads to a landing page with a form; if the person signs up, they get an SMS confirmation, and a reminder in the days before the event. Each step depends on what the person did in the previous one. The journeys we build most often at ShowerThinking are welcome series, onboarding, abandoned cart, renewals, events and reactivation.
Journey Builder, the canvas for customer journeys.
Automation Studio
Automation Studio works hand in hand with Journey Builder: it prepares the data and segments that feed the journeys. For example, every day it pulls the customers who have not bought anything in more than 90 days so they enter a reactivation journey. For more advanced queries there is SQL, and for web pages and forms, CloudPages.
Automation Studio prepares the data the journeys use.
Marketing Cloud Next: the new generation
Marketing Cloud Next is Salesforce's agentic marketing platform, introduced in June 2025. It is built inside the Salesforce platform, uses Data 360 as its data layer and works with AI agents that propose a campaign's audience, content and journey from a goal. It does not replace Engagement: Salesforce presents it as capabilities added on top of what you already have. We explain the differences in What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next?
Braze may join the family too: the customer engagement platform Salesforce has agreed to acquire, and Engagement's most direct rival among app-centred consumer brands. We explain it in what is Braze and what it means for Marketing Cloud.
Engagement or Account Engagement (formerly Pardot)
This is the most common question. Both are Salesforce products and both do email marketing, but they are built for different businesses:
- Account Engagement is B2B marketing automation: lead capture, forms, scoring and alignment with the sales team, on moderate data volumes.
- Engagement is a B2C platform: many more channels (email, SMS, push, WhatsApp), much more data and complex journeys, in exchange for needing a technical team to run it.
We compare them in more detail in Pardot (Account Engagement): what it is and how it differs from Marketing Cloud.
Personalization, Intelligence and Data 360
- Marketing Cloud Personalization, formerly Interaction Studio and before that Evergage, personalizes the website and app in real time based on each visitor's behavior. We explain it in Marketing Cloud Personalization.
- Marketing Cloud Intelligence, formerly Datorama, brings together data from every marketing platform to measure campaigns and spend.
- Data 360, formerly Data Cloud, unifies each customer's data into one profile and lets you segment and activate audiences in Engagement, in Next or on advertising platforms. We cover it in What is Salesforce Data 360?
What you need to implement Marketing Cloud
A team with different profiles
A Marketing Cloud Engagement project needs marketing automation specialists to segment and build journeys, developers for integrations and code, and on large projects, a Salesforce architect. The platform also lets you split operations into business units, by country or by brand.
The profiles in a Marketing Cloud team.
Training and certifications
Official training is on Trailhead, which is free. Marketing Cloud certifications have been renamed with Engagement in the title: Engagement Specialist (formerly Email Specialist), Engagement Administrator, Engagement Consultant and Engagement Developer. Account Engagement has its own. We cover them in Salesforce Certifications.
A short history of Marketing Cloud
Salesforce bought its way into marketing: Radian6 in 2011, for social listening; Buddy Media in 2012, for social media management; and ExactTarget in 2013 for $2.5 billion, which brought email marketing and, along the way, Pardot. Then came Krux in 2016, Datorama in 2018 and Evergage in 2020. Bringing so many acquisitions under one name is Marketing Cloud's great strength, since it covers everything a marketing department needs, and also its great difficulty, because it is not easy to run without a specialized team. Marketing Cloud Next is the attempt to solve that by building everything on a single platform. The full Salesforce story is in The Salesforce History.
Marketing Cloud FAQ
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce's family of marketing products: Engagement, Marketing Cloud Next, Account Engagement, Personalization and Intelligence, with Data 360 as the data layer.
Are Marketing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Engagement the same thing?
When people say "Marketing Cloud" they almost always mean Engagement, the platform that comes from ExactTarget. But today Marketing Cloud is the name of the whole family.
Do I have to migrate from Engagement to Marketing Cloud Next?
No. Salesforce still sells Engagement and presents Marketing Cloud Next as capabilities added on top, not as a replacement.
What is the difference between Marketing Cloud and Pardot?
Pardot, now Account Engagement, is B2B marketing automation. Marketing Cloud Engagement is a B2C platform with more channels and more data.
What happened to Social Studio and Advertising Studio?
Social Studio was retired on November 18, 2024. Advertising Studio is being retired: its subscriptions have not been renewable since August 15, 2026.
Which Marketing Cloud certifications are there?
Engagement Specialist, Engagement Administrator, Engagement Consultant and Engagement Developer, plus the Account Engagement ones.
Sources
How ShowerThinking can help
At ShowerThinking we have been implementing and running Marketing Cloud Engagement for years, and we now help companies decide what to move to Marketing Cloud Next. If you are considering Marketing Cloud or want to get more out of it, get in touch and we will go through it in a 30-minute session.
