Communities: Distributed Marketing, 1-to-1 Journeys, and New Support Components

Communities get an even jauntier spring to its step with an abundance of cool features. The Community Cloud is better integrated with the Marketing Cloud with two new features. Partner communities can now take advantage of distributed marketing, which allows partners to use preconfigured customizable campaigns when marketing new programs. Lightning communities can use personalized email journeys to help onboard community members and nurture relationships. Other fabulous additions include customer communities, which can now use the Contact Support Form and Case Deflection components together to help customers find solutions to their issues before they even file a case.

Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions

Tip

There’s lots of Lightning around Salesforce these days—Lightning Experience, Lightning Bolts, Lightning components—and it can be tricky to understand how it applies to Communities.

Lightning Bolt solutions and Lightning templates use the same underlying technology as Lightning Experience—namely, the Lightning platform and Lightning components. However, you aren’t required to enable Lightning Experience to use them.

Put Power of AI in Your Community with Einstein Answers (Pilot)
When your customers come looking for answers in your community, they want accurate results that solve their issues quickly. Einstein Answers is here to help. When a community member asks a question, Einstein Answers looks through articles and past discussions in your community. After sifting through your community’s data, Einstein Answers suggests answers to the community member’s question. Power users, known as Answer Champions, review and rate the suggested answers and post good ones to the community.
Market to Your Members with Journey Builder for Communities (Generally Available)
Drumroll please: the Community Cloud and Marketing Cloud Integration we introduced as a beta feature in Winter ’18 is now generally available. With Journey Builder, you can create customer journeys across email, mobile, ads, and the web. With the Community Cloud integration, community and marketing managers can place community members on rich customer journeys, boosting engagement and driving activity in the community. You must have both Community and Marketing Cloud licenses to use this feature.
Lightning Communities: New Support Components, More Granular Audience Definitions, and a Streamlined Theming Experience
Give your community more power in deflecting cases, set audiences at the component level, customize communities faster with theming, connect your external CMS with your community, and so much more.
Security: Easy Deactivation and Stricter Login Requirements
We want your community experience to be as safe and secure as possible. Trust is our number-one priority, after all. So we made it easier for external users to deactivate their accounts.
Usability Improvements: Account Role Optimization, Language Settings, and More
Check out the major usability improvements that we packed into this release. Account role optimization helps you minimize the number of roles used for customer and partner community accounts. In addition, we moved language settings into Community Builder so they are easier to find and use. And enhancements to SEO help customers and search engines find the information and answers they're looking for quickly. We also start you in Workspaces instead of Community Management to improve your access to new features for managing your community.
Chatter in Lightning Communities: Rich Content Editor on Mobile, Notifications for Group Mentions, and Share Via Link
Add style to your mobile feeds. Get in-app notifications when your group is mentioned. Share links to posts. And harness your unique expertise when the questions you’re most qualified to answer are delivered right to you.
Partner Communities: Calendars, Scorecards, Campaign Marketplace, and More Guided Setups
Campaign Marketplace provides channel marketers with a place to share preapproved marketing campaigns with partners so that they can drive demand for their supplier’s products or services. Partner scorecards help channel account managers track their account performance against a set of KPIs. Partners and vendors can use calendars to track and share events. And new guided setups make it easy for your admins to set up channel programs and scorecards, Campaign Marketplace, and Intelligent Sales Enablement.
New Guided Setups: Channel Programs, Campaign Marketplace, and Intelligent Sales Enablement
New guided setups take your channel programs even further. We walk you through setting up channel programs and scorecards, creating a campaign marketplace, and setting up files and libraries for Intelligent Sales Enablement. You can also access a curated list of community app extensions to find even more solutions for your partner community. You need a Partner license to access Guided Setup from Community Workspaces.
Community Analytics: Case Deflection and Sentiment Analysis Dashboards
Two new dashboards show how well your community is deflecting cases and give you a feel for your community’s overall sentiment. The dashboards are available in the Spring ’18 Community Management Package on the AppExchange, available soon after the release.
Files in Lightning Communities: Navigate Libraries with Tiles, Allow Standard Users to Create Assets, and Collaborate with Quip
Updates and new features in Files in Lightning Communities make it easier to work with files and libraries. The new tile-based Libraries and Files Experience makes it easier to navigate your libraries and get to the files and folders you need. Quickly access your most recent asset files, allow standard users to create assets, and provide customers with a way to create asset files that unauthenticated users can access. Give your team a way to preview files on the go, use integrated search to fine. Quip integration opens up a whole new world of collaboration.
Other Changes in Communities
Learn about smaller changes that improve your experience with communities.