Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) is designed for personalized, bulk email sends with robust tracking (opens, clicks). Using a Journey with a Salesforce Data Extension allows for a one-time, targeted send based on Salesforce data without setting up ongoing automation in Salesforce CRM. The other options either lack proper tracking, are for manual/individual emails, or are for web personalization, not email sends.

A core benefit of Marketing Cloud Connect is creating a unified customer view. Mapping send and engagement data (like ‘Sent’ to ‘EmailMessage’) surfaces Marketing Cloud email interactions directly within Salesforce CRM. This gives sales and service teams crucial context about a customer’s engagement with marketing emails without leaving their primary system.

The ‘Journey History’ data extension automatically stores contacts who entered a journey. You can query this data to create a precise audience of past attendees. Sending a one-time email via Email Studio to this audience is efficient and appropriate for a single, post-event communication, avoiding the complexity of modifying or repurposing the original automation Journey.

This is a fundamental distinction. In Personalization, a Segment is defined by rules (e.g., ‘Product Viewed = Hiking Boots’) and is evaluated in real-time as a user browses. An Audience is a static list of known users (e.g., from a data extension) that is uploaded or created via a query for broader campaign targeting. Segments power real-time website decisions, while Audiences are for predefined groups.

Best practice is to attempt re-engagement before suppression. A sunset journey (e.g., a series of emails asking if they still want to hear from you, with an option to update preferences) respects the subscriber, improves list hygiene, and can recover some engaged users. Immediate suppression or increasing send frequency can harm sender reputation and worsen engagement.

For MobilePush, the SDK must collect the Device ID (to target the specific device) and associate it with a Contact Key (a unique identifier for the user, like an email or user ID). This pairing is the foundational data required to register a device and target messages. The welcome notification itself would be built in Journey Builder, but the SDK configuration requires these two core identifiers.

The Report sync creates a snapshot of the report’s members at the moment the sync runs (or on its scheduled interval). It is not a live, dynamic connection. If a new record qualifies for the report 5 minutes after the sync, it will not appear in the Marketing Cloud Audience until the next scheduled sync occurs. This is a key architectural consideration for campaign timing.

Transformations are a core ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) function in Marketing Cloud Intelligence. They allow you to manipulate the raw data ingested from various sources (like Marketing Cloud, Google Ads, etc.) to create consistent, analysis-ready metrics and dimensions. Examples include converting currency, categorizing values, or creating a ‘Cost per Lead’ calculated field.

The Subscriber Preferences feature in Email Studio allows contacts to self-manage their preferences. It pulls attribute values from a designated Data Extension. Therefore, the CloudPage form should write the user’s selections to that specific Data Extension. This ensures the preferences are centrally stored, easily accessible for audience filtering, and can be displayed in future preference centers.

Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) is designed for personalized, bulk email sends with robust tracking (opens, clicks). Using a Journey with a Salesforce Data Extension allows for a one-time, targeted send based on Salesforce data without setting up ongoing automation in Salesforce CRM. The other options either lack proper tracking, are for manual/individual emails, or are for web personalization, not email sends.0