Hey Smart Marketers!
Happy 2025!! Hope you succeed in your projects!
Since I launched this newsletter, I posted a lot about Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement… but that’s over.
Why I’m Done Giving Tips on SFMC Engagement
For years, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) has been the foundation of Salesforce’s B2C Marketing stack.
It’s what we’ve built expertise on, what we’ve optimized, and what we’ve helped clients implement.
But let’s be honest: that era is ending.
The signs have been there for a while, but 2024 made it clear—Salesforce is moving on.
Marketing Cloud on Core (first Growth, then Advanced) took center stage, while Engagement sat in the background, untouched, forgotten. Even Agentforce, Salesforce’s shiny new AI-powered assistant, struggles to answer basic MCE questions. If Salesforce itself is no longer investing in making MCE accessible, why should we?
So moving forward, I won’t be writing about how to optimize SFMC Engagement journeys or fix AMPScript issues. Those problems belong to a legacy system.
What matters now is what’s next.
The Slow Death of SFMC Engagement and the Forced Acceleration of MC on Core
2024 saw the rise of Marketing Cloud on Core, with Growth Edition launching first, followed by Advanced Edition.
On paper, this shift makes perfect sense—Core is deeply integrated into Data Cloud, AI-powered, and designed for a future where real-time personalization trumps batch-and-blast email marketing.
But there’s a problem.
Salesforce didn’t just introduce MC on Core—they also completely abandoned SFMC Engagement in their roadmap. No major innovations, no updates that matter, and worst of all? No clear migration path for existing customers.
What does this mean? Churn. Massive churn.
🚨 2025 Prediction : SFMC Engagement will see a dramatic increase in churn, forcing Salesforce to accelerate MC on Core’s adoption—whether it’s ready or not.
I’m pretty sure they think they have at least one more year but that’s untrue. We already see enterprise companies churning.
The Go-To-Market Crisis: Shipping an MVP and Hoping for the Best
Salesforce is great at selling a vision. They dominate AI because their product team is highly efficient at integrating AI across the stack. But marketing? Not so much.
If you’ve worked with Marketing Cloud products long enough, you know that Salesforce’s Marketing product team has never moved at the speed of its Sales and AI teams. The result?
MC on Core is not ready for B2C and if it’s going to this market, it will be as an MVP.
The features look good in theory, but in practice, it’s undercooked. We’re missing core functionalities, integrations aren’t seamless, and the actual partner enablement process is weak.
And that’s where we, as part of that ecosystem, have a choice.
The Big Question: Leap of Faith or Exit?
Faced with a half-baked MC on Core, the Salesforce Marketing community is already making moves:
✅ Some are taking a leap of faith, committing to MC on Core and using their expertise to bridge the gaps.
❌ Others are leaving Salesforce’s ecosystem altogether, moving to alternative ESPs.
And let’s be real—a significant part of the community has already left.
But Here’s the Thing: ESPs Are Doomed Anyway
Let’s zoom out for a second. The real shift isn’t just about MCE vs. MC on Core. It’s about the entire concept of ESPs (Email Service Providers) becoming obsolete.
Why? Because marketing is evolving towards:
✅ CDP-first strategies (Customer Data Platforms like Salesforce Data Cloud)
✅ Real-time orchestration (AI-driven activation tools, not rigid ESPs)
✅ Dumb activation layers (Lightweight tools that simply execute on top of a centralized data hub)
In other words, the future isn’t an all-in-one ESP—it’s CDP + AI-driven orchestration + dumb activation.
That’s the theory.
And it’s up to us to bring it to life.
2025: The Year We Decide the Future of Salesforce Marketing
We’re standing at a crossroads.
- Salesforce will aggressively push MC on Core, but its maturity level will lag behind its ambition.
- Customers will start questioning whether Salesforce is still the right marketing stack for them.
- Partners and experts (that’s us) will have to decide:
- Do we double down on MC on Core and build solutions to fill its gaps?
- Do we pivot away from Salesforce marketing and bet on new players?
- Or do we redefine the way marketing stacks should work by advocating for a shift to CDP + AI-powered activation layers?
No one has the answer yet. But 2025 will be the year we figure it out.
🔮 What do you think ? Where do you see the Salesforce marketing ecosystem heading this year?
Other ways I can help you: