Marketing Cloud and ExactTarget: what the product is now, what the pieces are called, and the audit to run first

ExactTarget was an email marketing platform that Salesforce acquired in 2013 and rebranded as Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The email engine you are using today is the descendant of that platform, and the product most people mean by Marketing Cloud is now called Marketing Cloud Engagement. Marketing Cloud itself has become an umbrella covering several separately licensed products, so the first useful thing to establish in any conversation is which one you actually have. If your account sends email and SMS and builds journeys, you have Engagement. The ExactTarget name survives in old documentation, in legacy endpoint hostnames and in the vocabulary of anybody who has worked with it for more than a decade.

This page covers the platform, its components and a first audit. For the email practice itself rather than the tool, see email deliverability, list health and the flows that earn.

The names, old and current

What people say	What it is now	What it does
ExactTarget	Marketing Cloud Engagement	Email, SMS, push, journeys, automation
Pardot	Marketing Cloud Account Engagement	B2B marketing automation and lead nurture
Interaction Studio	Marketing Cloud Personalization	Real time personalisation on web and app
Datorama	Marketing Cloud Intelligence	Marketing reporting across channels and platforms
Customer Data Platform	Data Cloud	Unified profiles fed into the other products

Engagement and Account Engagement are different products with different data models, different editors and different licences, and choosing the wrong one is the most expensive mistake in this ecosystem. Engagement suits high volume consumer messaging; Account Engagement suits B2B nurture tied to Sales Cloud. Salesforce documents the current line up on its Marketing Cloud Engagement page, and the detail sits in Salesforce Help.

The studios inside Engagement

• Email Studio. The original ExactTarget engine: subscribers, lists, data extensions, templates, test sends and tracking.
• Content Builder. The current content system, with reusable blocks and a shared asset library. Older accounts often still hold Classic Content, and migrating it is a project in its own right.
• Journey Builder. Multi step, multi channel journeys triggered by an entry event, with waits, decision splits and goals.
• Automation Studio. Scheduled and file triggered automations: imports, SQL queries, file transfers, sends. Most of the real work in a mature instance happens here.
• Mobile Studio. SMS, push and group messaging.
• CloudPages. Landing pages, preference centres and forms hosted inside the platform.
• Contact Builder. Where the data model lives: data extensions, attribute groups and the relationships between them.
• Einstein features. Send time optimisation, engagement scoring and content selection, licensed by edition.

The data model, which is where newcomers get stuck

Marketing Cloud has two overlapping concepts for people, and understanding the difference saves weeks:

• Lists and subscribers are the older model. A subscriber has a subscriber key and a status, and the list is a flat membership.
• Data extensions are tables you define, and they are what any serious implementation uses. They can be sendable, related to a subscriber key, and queried with SQL.
• The subscriber key is the identifier that stitches everything together. Choose it deliberately, use a stable customer identifier rather than an email address, and never change the convention afterwards.
• Business units partition an enterprise account by brand, market or division, each with its own senders, content and permissions, under a parent account.

Three languages do the dynamic work: AMPscript for personalisation inside emails and CloudPages, server side JavaScript for the cases AMPscript cannot reach, and SQL inside query activities for building audiences. A query activity writing to a sendable data extension on a schedule, feeding a journey, is the core pattern of almost every well built instance:

SELECT c.SubscriberKey, c.EmailAddress, c.FirstName, o.LastOrderDate
FROM Contacts c
JOIN Orders o ON o.SubscriberKey = c.SubscriberKey
WHERE o.LastOrderDate < DATEADD(day, -90, GETDATE())
  AND c.OptInStatus = 'subscribed'

The first week audit when you inherit an instance

1. List the business units and who has access to each. Remove the people who have left.
2. Find every active automation in Automation Studio and record its schedule, its activities and its owner. Instances accumulate automations nobody remembers building.
3. List running journeys and their entry sources. Paused and draft versions sitting alongside live ones are the most common cause of duplicate sends.
4. Check the sending domains and authentication. Confirm the sender authentication setup, the from addresses in use and that reply handling goes somewhere a human reads.
5. Audit consent. Where opt in status is stored, how unsubscribes are written back, and whether the preference centre matches what your privacy notice promises.
6. Review the data extension sprawl. Name every sendable extension, find the ones no automation writes to any more, and document the subscriber key convention before you touch anything.
7. Pull twelve months of send performance and compare it against sector norms rather than against last month. The context is in email marketing benchmarks.
8. Confirm the integration to Sales Cloud or your CRM, in both directions, including which system is authoritative for a contact's consent.

What to fix first

• Duplicate and overlapping sends. Build a suppression rule and a send frequency cap before you build anything new.
• Hard coded content. Replace copies of near identical emails with one Content Builder template and blocks.
• Unmonitored automations. Add error notifications so a failed import is an alert rather than a quiet gap in a journey.
• Reporting that nobody reads. Decide the three numbers the programme is judged on, then build one report. The discipline is in a measurement plan you can keep.
• The calendar. Journeys and campaigns in one place, visible to the people who ask for sends. A simple structure is in the content calendar template.

Where people get stuck on Marketing Cloud and ExactTarget

Is ExactTarget the same as Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Yes, in lineage. ExactTarget was acquired by Salesforce in 2013 and became Marketing Cloud, now sold as Marketing Cloud Engagement. If a colleague says ExactTarget, they mean the email and journey platform you are logged into.

What is the difference between Marketing Cloud and Pardot?

Pardot, now Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, is built for B2B lead nurture tied closely to Sales Cloud. Marketing Cloud Engagement is built for high volume multichannel messaging with a flexible data model. Pick on volume, on channel mix and on whether your audience is leads or consumers.

Do I need to learn AMPscript?

Learn enough to read it, which is a day's work and pays for itself the first time you debug a personalisation string. Deeper AMPscript and server side JavaScript belong to whoever owns the technical build.

How do I find out which Marketing Cloud products we own?

Check the account's edition and licence details with your Salesforce account team, and look at which apps appear in the platform menu. Studios you can open are studios you are paying for.

Is Marketing Cloud worth it for a small list?

It earns its cost when you have multiple brands or markets, complex data, high volume, or journeys that span channels. For a single brand sending a weekly newsletter, a simpler platform does the job with far less administration.

Where does the data model live?

In Contact Builder: data extensions, attribute groups and the links between them. Document it once, keep the document current, and every future build gets faster.

The channel this platform does not reach

Marketing Cloud sends email, SMS and push, and the audit above makes sure those work. It does not reach the moment a customer asks an assistant for a vendor comparison and reads an answer you did not send.

If you are the one who inherited the instance, add that to the picture you give leadership: the journeys are measured, and the comparison step before them is not. Ask the buying question in your category and note who is named. AI Knows Us puts that evidence in a form you can show next to journey reports.