For years, marketing and communications in higher education relied on mass email campaigns, batch newsletters, and printed brochures. Today, students, faculty, alumni, and community members expect personalized, relevant, and timely communications at every stage of their journey. To meet these expectations, institutions need modern marketing technology that connects data, AI, and engagement tools. Salesforce is leading the way with innovations such as Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition.
Marketing Cloud Advanced gives institutions advanced tools to understand constituents, personalize engagement, optimize campaigns, strengthen relationships, and act on unified data insights. It’s a powerful way for higher ed teams to scale and drive growth, and Cloud for Good is here to help you understand how.
What is Marketing Cloud Advanced Edition?
Marketing Cloud Advanced, or MC Advanced, is built natively on the core Salesforce Platform and powered by Data Cloud. This native functionality enables users to leverage trusted first-party data to power AI capabilities and deliver more personalized, connected, and compelling student or constituent experiences at scale.
By unifying data with Data Cloud, embedding generative AI directly into the flow of work, enabling intelligent marketing journeys, and connecting essential organizational functions and campus groups into one platform, MC Advanced makes data more accessible and actionable across the entire Salesforce org. The result is a powerful toolkit that moves beyond one-size-fits-all communications to build deeper, meaningful, and lasting relationships at scale.
Who Benefits from MC Advanced?
MC Advanced is ideal for colleges and universities that are leveraging fragmented communications tools, have outgrown homegrown legacy solutions, or require additional functionality and scalability from existing efforts. Groups and departments across campus can leverage rich CRM insights to create seamless communications and data-driven marketing strategies.
In today’s competitive higher education landscape, MC Advanced is a great solution for revenue generating groups across campuses. Groups that are tasked with their own autonomous marketing efforts can leverage MC Advanced and institution-wide data points to create a seamless communication experience at scale.
Examples of groups across campus that can benefit from MC Advanced functionality include:
- Alumni engagement groups & associations tasked with driving life-long engagement and philanthropy
- Campus museums, athletics, and performing arts centers running campus-wide events or ticketed shows
- Student services teams sending targeted academic support or engagement campaigns
- Auxiliary services communicating updates on housing, dining, recreation, and parking
MC Advanced helps these groups understand engagement, personalize interactions, and track the impact of campaigns through the power of actionable institution data.
Key Features and Capabilities
Reimagined Campaigns: Seamlessly Create Campaigns & Briefs with Flow Builder
MC Advanced incorporates Agentforce functionality to help functional teams quickly create campaign briefs and launch campaigns using Flow Builder. Whether promoting an on-campus museum gala or a student orientation event, generative AI can produce campaign briefs, content suggestions, and audience recommendations from simple prompts. Gone are the days of starting from scratch. With rich insights into content, suggested audiences, and meaningful KPIs, teams can plan and execute campaigns more efficiently. This feature is especially valuable for small or lean marketing teams, reducing manual effort and guesswork while enabling more impactful campaigns.
Predictive AI Capabilities: Identify and Improve Engagement Frequency
Predictive Scoring identifies the most engaged students, faculty, or community members. This functionality easily identifies individuals that are most likely to engage with your content, allowing you to identify high-impact recipients that will take the next step to becoming a Day of Giving advocate, serve as a host for an alumni gathering, or donate.
Predictive Engagement Frequency reduces oversaturation by flagging contacts who may receive too many messages. In our higher education world, that could mean giving busy alumni a pause in outreach while keeping them connected to the university they love, or re-engaging community members who haven’t responses to event invitations with a fresh, personalized message. The result? Fewer, better-timed messages that increase participation and strengthen relationships.
Path Experiment: Personalized and Intelligent Journeys
Path Experiment allows marketers to test different marketing journeys in real-time. For instance, testing whether at-risk students respond better to academic support outreach delivered via text messages versus email, and to determine the optimal number of touchpoints before engagement drops. Random assignment ensures unbiased results, giving marketers the confidence to make data-driven decisions about messaging channels, timing, and frequency.
Unified Conversations for SMS and WhatsApp: Dynamic, Connected, Two-Way Conversations
This key feature of MC Advanced unifies and brings together conversations and interactions across departments and teams, as well as SMS and messaging channels like WhatsApp, that can be tracked and managed in one place and provide a seamless constituent communication experience. Unified Conversations for SMS and WhatsApp also has functionality to connect constituents to service agents based on their replies to promotional SMS and WhatsApp messages. As a result, higher education marketing teams can get even more value out of their SMS messages, turning promotional one-way text messages into genuine, real-time interactions with prospective students, current students, alumni, event attendees, and others using a single SMS number or WhatsApp thread. Internal teams can also use responses from SMS messages to gain new insights about their constituents, which can be tracked and managed within Salesforce.
Segment Creation: Hyper-Targeted, Smart Segmentation and Activation
With Segment Creation teams can create audience segments based on CRM and/or external data sources for email, SMS, direct mail, or advertising campaigns using generative AI prompts. This tool makes it possible for institutions to move beyond broad demographic segments (i.e., “all prospective students”) to hyper-targeted segments (i.e., “prospective biology majors in the northeast who have engaged with three or more emails but haven’t started an application”). All with clicks and filtering over complex code.
Bringing MC Advanced Functionality Together
In a nutshell, MC Advanced allows higher education marketers to:
- Drive revenue generating activities through white-glove service and communication
- Access actionable data insights by unifying campus-wide data in Data Cloud, enabling faster analysis and quicker decisions
- Minimize missed outreach opportunities with AI tools that deliver personalized messages at the optimal time for maximum engagement
- Reduce manual efforts by automating campaign creation, communication flows, AI-driven content, and deploying pre-built campaign flows
- Consolidate tech debt by moving marketing into a single, integrated platform that connects systems across campus and lowers cost
- Shorten the learning curve through its “on core” Salesforce design, offering a familiar experience for institutions already using Salesforce
The Future of Engagement is Unified and Intelligent
MC Advanced is more than a marketing platform. It empowers higher education institutions to break down data silos, embed intelligence into every interaction, and deliver personalized engagement at scale. The result is deeper, more meaningful relationships across every outreach, and an engine to drive revenue.
For higher education teams ready to move beyond batch emails and generic campaigns, Cloud for Good can provide guidance, support, and strategy to help you get the most from MC Advanced.
Get in touch with our team or connect with us in person at our Elevate Marketing in the Education Sector event in Atlanta.
