Salesforce Marketing Glossary

Salesforce marketing projects bring together several products, each with its own vocabulary, and some terms mean different things in different products. This glossary gives short, practical definitions of the terms we use most in workshops and design documents. Product names reflect current Salesforce naming; where a product has been renamed, the older name is noted.

Marketing Cloud Engagement

Marketing Cloud Engagement: Salesforce's established marketing platform for email, SMS, mobile push and journeys, including Email Studio, Journey Builder, Automation Studio, Contact Builder and CloudPages.

Business unit: A separate area within a Marketing Cloud Engagement account with its own users, content, data and sending settings, often used for brands, regions or divisions.

Subscriber Key: The unique identifier for a contact in Marketing Cloud Engagement. It should be a stable ID, such as a CRM Contact or Lead ID, rather than an email address that may change.

Contact Builder: The tool for defining how contact data is structured and related, including attribute groups and data extension relationships.

Data extension: A table that stores data in Marketing Cloud Engagement. It has defined fields, data types and optionally a primary key.

Sendable data extension: A data extension with a field mapped to the subscriber relationship, so it can be used as the audience for a send or journey.

Primary key: One or more fields that uniquely identify each row in a data extension. Rows with a matching key are updated rather than duplicated when data is upserted.

All Subscribers list: The master list of email subscribers in an account, holding each subscriber's overall subscription status.

Publication list: A list used to manage opt-outs for a category of communication, such as a newsletter, when sending to data extensions.

Journey Builder: The tool for designing multi-step, event-driven or scheduled customer journeys with waits, splits and messages.

Entry source: What brings contacts into a journey, such as a data extension, an API event, a CRM record change or a Data Cloud segment.

Decision split: A journey step that routes contacts down different paths based on their data at that moment.

Engagement split: A journey step that routes contacts based on whether they opened or clicked a previous email in the journey.

Automation Studio: The tool for scheduling and chaining back-end activities, such as file imports, SQL queries, extracts and scheduled sends.

Query Activity: An Automation Studio activity that runs a SQL query (a subset of T-SQL) and writes the results to a target data extension.

Data views: System tables, such as _Sent, _Open, _Click and _Bounce, that hold recent send and engagement data and can be queried with SQL. Retention is limited, so check current details in Salesforce Help.

AMPscript: Marketing Cloud's scripting language for personalising emails, SMS and CloudPages at send or render time.

Server-side JavaScript (SSJS): A JavaScript-based language that runs on Marketing Cloud servers, used for more complex logic, API calls and script activities.

CloudPages: Hosted web pages in Marketing Cloud Engagement, often used for preference centres, forms and landing pages.

Send classification: A setting that combines a sender profile (the from name and address) with a delivery profile (the IP address, header and footer) and marks a send as commercial or transactional.

Sender Authentication Package (SAP): A Marketing Cloud Engagement product bundle that brands sending with your own domain, typically including a private domain and a dedicated IP. Check current packaging with Salesforce.

Marketing Cloud Connect: The connector that links Marketing Cloud Engagement with Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, synchronising selected objects and allowing sends to CRM records.

Synchronised data extension: A read-only data extension that holds CRM data brought across by Marketing Cloud Connect.

Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Next

Data Cloud: Salesforce's customer data platform, now branded Data 360, which ingests, harmonises and unifies customer data and makes it available for segmentation, insights, activation and AI.

Marketing Cloud Next: Salesforce's newer marketing application, built on the core Salesforce platform and Data Cloud, with segmentation, journeys and content managed alongside CRM data.

Data stream: A configured connection that brings data from a source into Data Cloud on a schedule or as it arrives.

Data Lake Object (DLO): The storage object where ingested data lands, keeping the structure of the source. See DLO vs DMO explained.

Data Model Object (DMO): An object in the harmonised data model, such as Individual or Contact Point Email, to which DLO fields are mapped.

Customer 360 Data Model: Salesforce's standard set of DMOs and relationships used to harmonise data from different sources.

Identity resolution: The process of linking source records that belong to the same person into a unified profile, using match and reconciliation rules.

Match rule: A rule that decides which records refer to the same individual, for example an exact match on normalised email address.

Reconciliation rule: A rule that decides which source value is kept on the unified profile when sources disagree, such as most recent or most frequent.

Unified Individual: The resolved profile produced by identity resolution, linking all matched source records.

Calculated insight: A metric defined with SQL over data model objects, such as total spend in the last 12 months, usable in segments and activation.

Data transform: A batch or streaming process that cleans, reshapes or combines data inside Data Cloud before or after mapping.

Segment: A defined audience built from Data Cloud data using filters and insights.

Activation: Publishing a segment, with chosen attributes, to an activation target.

Activation target: A destination for activated segments, such as Marketing Cloud Engagement, cloud storage or an advertising platform.

Data federation (zero copy): Querying data held in a supported external data platform without copying it into Data Cloud.

Account Engagement

Account Engagement: Salesforce's B2B marketing automation product, formerly called Pardot, closely integrated with Sales Cloud.

Prospect: A person record in Account Engagement, usually synchronised with a Salesforce Lead or Contact.

Score: A number that reflects a prospect's level of engagement, increased by activities such as form submissions and page views.

Grade: A letter that reflects how well a prospect fits your ideal customer profile, based on criteria such as role, industry or company size.

Engagement Studio: The tool for building automated nurture programmes with actions, triggers and rules.

Form handler: A way to post data from an externally hosted form into Account Engagement. See forms vs form handlers.

Completion action: An action that runs automatically when a prospect completes something, such as submitting a form.

Automation rule: A rule that applies actions to prospects who meet defined criteria, either once or repeatedly.

Connected campaigns: The alignment of Account Engagement campaigns with Salesforce campaigns, so engagement and influence can be reported in one place.

Salesforce platform

Flow: Salesforce's declarative automation tool for record-triggered, scheduled, screen and autolaunched processes.

Apex: Salesforce's strongly typed programming language for server-side logic, triggers and integrations.

Lightning Web Components (LWC): Salesforce's framework for building user interface components with standard web technologies.

Named Credential: A setup record that stores an endpoint and its authentication configuration, so code and flows can call external systems without holding secrets.

External ID: A field marked as a unique identifier from another system, used to upsert records without knowing their Salesforce IDs.

Agentforce: Salesforce's platform for building and running AI agents that can take actions in Salesforce, grounded in your data.

Deliverability and consent

SPF: A DNS record that lists the servers allowed to send email for a domain.

DKIM: A cryptographic signature on outgoing email that lets receivers verify it was not altered and came from the signing domain.

DMARC: A DNS policy that tells receivers how to treat mail that fails SPF or DKIM alignment, and where to send reports. See SPF, DKIM and DMARC for Marketing Cloud.

Double opt-in: A consent process in which a subscriber confirms their sign-up, usually by clicking a link in a confirmation email.

Holdout group: A randomly selected part of the audience that does not receive a message, used as a comparison to measure the message's real effect.