Your Marketing Cloud keeps running.
The real question is what to move first.
Size your setup, pick your path, and add Next where the gain is clearest.
Four ways forward. Pick one on purpose.
Salesforce’s own advice is to keep what works while you add Next. The gain is worth planning for: fewer integrations to maintain, marketing on the same platform as sales and service, and B2B and B2C in one place. Every Engagement team lands on one of these four paths, and the pilot tells you which one fits.
Stay for now
Fits a script-heavy setup that works well. Set a review date, and stop building new CloudPages in the meantime.
Run both side by side
Proven journeys keep sending from Engagement while new work starts in Next. MCE+ is Salesforce’s stepping stone for this path: both products in one licence, with credits shared between them.
Start new units on Next
Launching a new brand, market or business unit? It is the lowest-risk place to learn the platform.
Move
Fits a simple setup: few templates, light scripting, and identity already keyed to the CRM.
How big is your move? Look at what has no equivalent.
Template count says little. The effort sits in the parts of your setup that work differently in Next, and that is the first thing we map in a pilot.
Carries over
- Running journeys. They keep sending, and can be triggered from Next flows.
- Formatting AMPscript. Conditions, dates, text and number formatting.
- Your Salesforce org. Users, permissions, sales and service data.
Gets rebuilt
- Templates and content blocks. By hand, as there is no conversion tool yet.
- Data extensions. Remodelled as Data 360 objects.
- Automation Studio SQL. As Data 360 transformations or flows.
- Business units. As data spaces.
No direct equivalent
- AMPscript lookups. Data reaches the message through data graphs instead.
- Server-side JavaScript. Logic moves to flows or integrations.
- CloudPages. Preference centres and forms move to Experience Cloud or your website.
A quick first estimate: count the emails that use AMPscript lookups, your CloudPages and your server-side JavaScript. The higher those numbers, the longer you will want to run both side by side.
Two ways to move forward
Take the Engagement readiness pack
Salesforce offers its own MCE+ action plan. Ours is independent, puts consent and cost on the table, and can honestly end in “not yet”.
- The 60-day pilot plan, adapted for Engagement teams
- The sizing columns as a worksheet for your own setup
- Readiness questions for your architect and marketing operations
Get the Engagement readiness pack
Tell us who you are, and both PDFs open straight away. We may follow up once with a short note, never a sequence.
Your Engagement readiness pack
Both documents open in a new tab. Share them with your team.
Or run the 60-day pilot with us
Marketing Cloud Next is new for most Nordic teams, and local references are few. We would rather build them with you than wait for them.
- A senior Atcore team, from assessment to decision
- A defined 60-day scope with a clear decision point: continue, pause or stay
- Shared, anonymised learnings from the other pilot teams
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What Engagement teams ask us
Answers updated as the product evolves. Last updated October 2026.
Salesforce architect“What happens to our data extensions and subscriber keys?”+
Data extensions are remodelled as Data 360 objects, and subscriber keys resolve into unified profiles. Matching that is too loose merges people; too tight, and it duplicates them. We test identity on your real data before anything is rebuilt.
Email developer“Will our AMPscript still work?”+
The formatting parts do: conditions, dates, text and number formatting. Lookups that fetch data at send time do not, because in Next the data reaches the message through data graphs. That is why emails with lookups are the first thing to count.
Marketing automation manager“Can we keep Journey Builder while we try Next?”+
Yes. Journeys keep sending from Engagement and can be triggered from Next flows, so new work can start in Next without rebuilding what already works.
Head of CRM“How does MCE+ change what we pay?”+
MCE+ replaces SuperMessages with credits shared across Engagement and Next. In the pilot, we measure the actual use.
Not seeing your question?
Rather ask a person?
ded@atcore.com
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