This blog post discusses how Salesforce now supports connecting multiple Marketing Cloud Engagement (MCE) instances—also known as Enterprise IDs (EIDs)—to a single Data 360 org. We’ll explore the customer challenges this solves, common use cases, and how this feature simplifies data management while improving scalability and cost efficiency.
Many businesses operate multiple MCE instances due to various reasons like regional businesses, operating unit separations, acquisitions, data residency regulations, legacy implementations / constraints (US/EU), brands, countries, scalability needs, etc… These businesses often wish to consolidate their data into a single Data 360 org while maintaining control over each business unit’s data for security and legal reasons. And the primary reason why they want to consolidate are operational efficiency with unified global view, simplified Data management practices, cost savings and unified customer support.
For example, a company may want to link multiple regional MCE instances to one centrally managed Data 360 org, while still keeping each region’s data separate for privacy and compliance reasons. Currently they face high costs and resource-intensive processes due to needing separate DC organizations for each MCE instance. They aim to avoid the expense and effort of managing multiple DC orgs by linking multiple MCE instances to one DC org. The goal is to simplify management, reduce costs, and avoid the complexity of managing multiple Data 360 orgs.
Use cases:
- Unified Global View: Combine data from different regions and brands into a single location to get a comprehensive 360-degree view of the global business.
- Increased Operational Efficiency: When multiple MCE instances are connected to a single Data 360 org, data management becomes more streamlined, reducing the time and effort required to handle disparate systems. This integration eliminates silos and ensures that teams are working with the same, up-to-date information.
- Unified Reporting and Analytics: A connected system allows for more accurate reporting and analytics. By consolidating data from various marketing cloud instances, businesses can gain deeper insights into the overall performance of marketing efforts, identify trends, and adjust strategies.
- Data Segregation and Control: Despite consolidating multiple MCE instances into a single Data 360 org, maintain control over data by segregating it based on EID/Business Unit (BU) to ensure privacy and regulatory compliance. For example, different business units (e.g., banking, insurance, retail) must handle data independently, with strict access controls to ensure separation of data.
Business Context with Examples:
Example 1: Global Retailer
A global retail company with multiple regional MCE instances (North America, Europe, Asia) can now connect all these instances to a single Data 360 org. By doing so, they get a single view of their global business, allowing them to understand purchasing trends, products and preferences across different regions. However, they maintain the ability to keep the data segregated by region for compliance with local data privacy regulations.
Example 2: Financial Services Firm
A financial institution with separate MCE instances for its banking, insurance, loans, mortgages and asset management businesses could link these disparate businesses to a single Data 360 org to enhance customer engagement, improve marketing efforts, ensure compliance, and offer personalized services that foster trust and long-term relationships. They can aggregate business data across all businesses / products to measure overall performance, while ensuring that sensitive banking data is segregated from insurance data, in compliance with regulatory requirements.
Example 3: E-commerce Platform
An e-commerce company with multiple brands under different MCE instances (e.g., luxury fashion, mass-market retail, home goods) would benefit from centralizing its data into one Data 360 org. This allows them to monitor and analyze customer behavior across all brands and use the insights to optimize marketing campaigns while maintaining brand-specific data privacy.
Example 4: Medical company
A medical company with diverse departments such as Diabetes, Radiology, Surgery, Cardiology, Pharmacy, Finance, and Research aims to integrate, analyze, and leverage data across these divisions. This unified approach will allow the organization to enhance patient care, reduce costs, and optimize operational efficiency. By embracing a data-driven, cost-effective, and patient-centric model, the company strives to provide a comprehensive 360-degree view of each patient. This will enable personalized care, support better decision-making, and lead to improved patient experiences, engagement, and outcomes.
By consolidating MCE instances into a single Data 360 org, businesses not only save costs but also improve the efficiency of their data processes, enhancing decision-making and operational flexibility.
Before Multi EID support in Data 360:
Customers can connect only one MCE instance to a DC org and they can’t connect more than once MCE instance to the same DC org.
In order to connect more than one MCE EID to Data 360, customers need to get separate Data 360 orgs. This leads to customers buying additional Data 360 orgs in order to connect to Multiple MCE / EID instances.
After Multi EID support in Data 360:
The solution involves consolidating multiple MCE instances into a single Data 360 org while maintaining data segregation by EID/BU optionally. This allows businesses to have a unified view of global operations, centralize all business data for analysis and decision-making, and still ensure compliance and privacy by restricting access to data based on specific business units or regulatory requirements. This approach reduces the need for multiple separate Data 360 orgs, cutting costs and simplifying data management.
The solution allows multiple MCE (EIDs) to connect to a single Data 360 org, enabling data ingestion from different MCE instances. Customers can assign and segregate each EID’s data into separate Data Spaces and / or combine data from multiple EIDs into a single Data space (referred as GLOBAL below) when needed as shown in these tables below. They can also segment audiences and create Activation Targets to activate them back into any MCE instance.
For each MCE connection in Data 360, customers can create multiple MCE Data streams and assign each business unit (BU) to one or more Data spaces based on their needs. They can also create multiple Activation Targets for each MCE connection to activate any segment. Customers have control over how they partition their data, using BU mapping and Data Spaces if they prefer to keep the data separate.
Conclusion:
đź’° Cost Savings:
Avoid purchasing multiple Data 360 orgs to support each MCE instance.
⚡ Faster Time to Value:
Quickly ingest and activate data across multiple MCE instances from a single Data 360 org.
🤝 Better Collaboration & Integration:
Enable a unified view across business units while keeping control over data separation.
Help Documents
- Set Up a Marketing Cloud Engagement Connection in Data 360
- Create a Marketing Cloud Engagement Activation Target
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