The latest Winter ’26 release for Marketing Cloud Engagement brings a wealth of innovative capabilities designed to transform how marketers connect with their audiences. This update introduces groundbreaking features across multiple facets of the platform. From enhanced automation tools to revolutionary AI-powered content creation, the Winter ’26 release represents a significant leap forward in marketing technology. Let’s explore the most impactful changes and how they can revolutionize your marketing strategies.
The Winter ’26 release puts Marketing Cloud Next for Engagement front and center. This deep integration between Marketing Cloud Next and Marketing Cloud Engagement unlocks powerful capabilities. First previewed at Connections & Dreamforce 2025 and now they’re ready for real-world execution.
Agent Builder now allows marketers to configure “Journey Decisioning Agents” for specific tasks related to existing journeys in Journey Builder. These intelligent agents can:
This functionality requires the MC Agent Actions User permission and is exclusively available within Marketing Cloud Next for Engagement. By leveraging these capabilities, marketing teams can deliver highly personalized experiences without extensive manual intervention.
The Winter ’26 release introduces powerful connections between Flow Builder and Journey Builder, enabling marketers to create more sophisticated customer journeys through:
These enhancements eliminate the need for complex coding, allowing marketers to orchestrate sophisticated customer experiences through intuitive visual interfaces.
Winter ’26 introduces the ability to link existing journeys in Marketing Cloud Engagement to campaigns, creating a unified workspace for activities and analytics. This connection automatically aggregates journey metrics into overall campaign data, providing a comprehensive view of marketing performance.
By incorporating journey history data into Data Cloud, marketers gain access to deeper insights for creating custom reports on journey entries, exits, goal achievements, and messaging activities.
The Winter ’26 release brings several significant improvements to Automation Studio, enhancing performance, data retention, and execution control.
Performance optimization becomes more accessible with the introduction of the SQL Query Activity Optimizer Dashboard. This intelligent tool:
These recommendations align with established best practices for SQL query execution, making it easier for marketers to implement performance improvements without deep technical expertise.
Data retention for automation-related data views has been significantly extended from 31 days to 6 months. This extension enables:
With access to a longer history of automation performance, marketers can identify patterns and optimize their processes more effectively.
This is something that will help enhance efficiency. Now the recommendation feature for automation start times has been enhanced with more sophisticated statistical analysis. This improvement helps ensure that automations run at optimal times, reducing system load and improving execution reliability.
The Stop button functionality has been upgraded to clear all automations queued for execution. This prevents new automations from starting before previous ones have fully stopped, enhancing system stability and data consistency.
Journey Builder receives several transformative updates in the Winter ’26 release, making it more powerful and user-friendly.
Perhaps the most significant enhancement is the ability to download all journey history events directly from the Journey History dashboard. Previously, marketers could only download the data displayed on screen. This required the use of the Journey History Download API to retrieve history “30-day max” + “~10,000 record limit.”
This game-changing feature allows marketers to:
While this data is limited to the past 30 days, it represents a major improvement in accessibility and usability.
The Journey Dashboard now includes new visual indicators that provide important information at a glance:
Additionally, when applying multiple filters, the journey count automatically updates to show the number of journeys matching the selected criteria, making it easier to navigate complex journey landscapes.
Journey Builder now supports MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service), allowing marketers to send images, GIFs, audio, and video to personalize messages and drive stronger engagement. This expansion beyond text-only messaging opens new creative possibilities for mobile marketing.
High Throughput Sending (HTS) can now be enabled by default for all journeys within a business unit. This setting, which previously required a support case to implement, can significantly improve message delivery performance.
However, it’s important to note that HTS has some limitations:
The Winter ’26 release introduces a valuable data recovery feature in Contact Builder that addresses a common pain point for marketers.
A new “Cleared Data” folder has been added to the Recycle Bin in Contact Builder. When records are removed from a data extension using the Clear Records button, they’re now moved to this folder and retained for 30 days.
This feature allows marketers to recover accidentally cleared data by restoring it into a new data extension, providing an important safety net for data management. This functionality will be gradually rolled out starting in November 2025.
The Winter ’26 release brings several significant improvements to WhatsApp messaging capabilities, expanding what marketers can accomplish through this channel.
New blockout window functionality allows marketers to restrict message delivery during certain times of day. This helps:
WhatsApp messaging becomes more engaging with several new capabilities:
Additionally, users of WhatsApp Direct can now access Meta’s latest APIs designed specifically for marketing use cases, helping streamline campaign execution and improve deliverability rates.
The Winter ’26 release includes important updates to Einstein Engagement Scoring and audit capabilities.
Einstein Engagement Scoring now offers greater flexibility with the ability to enable or disable the feature at the business unit level. Marketers can also control web engagement tracking by toggling web conversions on or off within Einstein Engagement Scoring.
Advanced Audit Trail now tracks which users created, updated, or deleted Automation Studio activities. This provides detailed action logs for various activities including file transfers, queries, data operations, scripts, and journey events.
Basic Audit Trail has been expanded to include tracking for changes to installed packages, allowing monitoring of modifications to package components, permissions, client secrets, and other package-related elements.
As the Winter ’26 release approaches, organizations should take several steps to prepare for a smooth transition:
While Marketing Cloud Engagement+ is now available for purchase, organizations should carefully consider implementation requirements, as data migration may be necessary when adopting this enhanced environment.
The Marketing Cloud Engagement Winter ’26 release represents a significant evolution in Salesforce’s marketing technology stack. With powerful AI integration through Agentforce, enhanced journey and flow capabilities, improved data access, and expanded messaging options, marketers gain unprecedented tools for creating personalized, effective customer experiences.
As these features roll out between October and November 2025, organizations that proactively explore and implement these capabilities will gain competitive advantages in their marketing operations. The integration between Marketing Cloud Next and Marketing Cloud Engagement particularly stands out as a transformative development that will shape marketing strategies for years to come.
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