It's a New Year and the first Marketing Cloud Release of the year is now live! Trust continues to be at the core of everything we do and it will be a special focus for us over the next few months.

Not only will we deliver new technology, but in this release, Marketing Cloud will give customers greater control over every step of the process. This improvement results in more peace of mind when creating marketing automations. Marketing Cloud will also provide more transparency to customers about their chosen actions for marketing activities to better steer customers toward their intended results and avoid potential errors.

This release is about helping customers with decisions before they make them and before these decisions affect a large amount of their customers and data. Marketing Cloud will provide more guidance on how to manage data and journeys, resulting in more visibility and actions that can be taken on the part of the customer.

We have our January 2017 New Feature Overview for customers on Wednesday, February 8th. This webinar will cover the awesome new features in the January 2017 Release. Don't miss out--register now with this link!

Let's jump into the highlights for this release:

New Android App: Customers can now run their business from their Android device! This new version includes an easy-to-use Lightning experience, starting with the most used functionality of the iOS version of the Mobile App. This app is available now in the Google Play Store. Learn more!

New Home Dashboard for iOS: Customers can now leverage the home dashboard on their iOS mobile devices to see how their daily and weekly marketing campaigns are performing. Customers can set up daily or weekly reminders to check on their marketing efforts, and so much more. Be sure to keep your app updated in the Apple App Store. Learn more!

New Themed Templates for Content Builder: This feature allows customers to create emails even faster and provides them with a perfect place to start their email creation with newly formatted themes. Learn more!

Lightning Overview Enhancement for Automation Studio: The Automation Studio Overview page is now enhanced with Lightning! This update brings alignment with the other Salesforce Clouds and Marketing Cloud applications. Customers will experience improved performance and and an increase in overall usability. Learn more!

URL Redirect for Email Studio: This update allows customers to configure when links in their email sends expire and where expired links redirect, and Marketing Cloud helps customers accomplish this with an easy-to-use interface. Learn more!

Journey Builder Email Personalization Update: Customers will now be able to leverage event data as the source for email personalization instead of contact data from the event data extension. This change only impacts the Journey Builder Email Activity in new Journeys and new versions of existing Journeys created or modified after this release. Learn more!

Journey History Tab: This release replaces the Journey Builder Contacts tab in the main Journey Builder navigation bar with a Journey Builder History tab. This gives customers a running status of all of their journeys as well as the ability to confirm that it is functioning as expected. Learn more!

Step-Level SQL Query Limit: This release limits the number of SQL Query activities added to a single step of an automation to 20. This limit prevents unlimited query activities from running concurrently and leading to increased system strain and performance risk and errors for customers. Learn more!

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