Marketo August '19 Release Overview

August is often a quiet time for technology companies and that's definitely the case for Marketo's summer release, which is due to ship on the 16th August. The unusually short two month gap between this release and the last one is probably to blame for the lack of updates. There are still several new features, most notably in Sky, but the release notes are definitely on the lighter side after a packed spring release back in June. It's notable that the headline features are all API changes, which rarely excites administrators or end users, but will make a big difference to developers and third parties selling Marketo integrations through LaunchPoint.

Integration

The ability to create, read, update and delete Smart Campaigns through the API has finally been added. This is limited to lifecycle capabilities for now, so creating new campaigns by cloning an existing campaign, changing the basic properties of the campaign or deleting campaigns, but it does make it significantly easier to build integrations. The ability to actually create or change campaign flows or smart list triggers and filters is still missing but will arrive in a future release.  

Also added to the API, is the ability to edit email headers for assets that have been broken from the template. This was always a weird limitation, which won't mean much unless you are developing apps that create email assets in Marketo. The REST API has several strange and somewhat arbitrary limitations. Among the most frustrating is the restriction on editing the subject line, from name, from address and reply address of an email asset programmatically. It is only possible to edit these four attributes through the API if the email in question was created from a template. It is not possible to edit the subject line or sender details if the email has previously been disconnected from a template after the source code was manually edited. That has now been fixed, and as of this release it will be possible to edit the subject line and sender details of all email assets through the API.

The final integration related change will be a lot more relevant to most marketing users. The enhanced webinar provider integration used by event programs to sync registrants and attendees with third-party event platforms has gained support for Zoom and Cvent. This promises to significantly improve the integration between Marketo and both of these widely used event platforms. The Cvent integration is particularly notable as it is the first time that the event provider feature has been used for offline event applications, in the past it was only used for webinar platforms including Zoom. This is a very significant upgrade over the existing API based integration that is somewhat clunky and can cause problems when used for the most complex events such as the major tradeshows and global customer events typically associated with the Cvent platform.

Sky

The headline features are saved for Sky, which takes two major steps to feature parity with the classic UI. Marketo is a modular platform with each area of the platform being migrated to Sky in turn. Marketing Activities, the most commonly used area of Marketo, was migrated at launch over a year ago. This was followed by the new My Marketo home screen and Design Studio at the end of last year. Each of these areas is now close to feature parity with the existing interface, meaning the time has come to migrate the third most commonly used section of Marketo: Lead Database. The ability to create lists and smart lists in Sky was released earlier this year, so most of the needed capabilities already existed. However, now admins and standard users can manage shared and system lists in the database area of the application. The Database area of Marketo is often underused, with it frequently becoming a mess of test lists, one-off data management and reporting queries. However, its presence is an important milestone in the transition from the Classic UI to Sky.

The other new headline capability for Sky is much smaller in scope, but will be much more widely used. In fact, it's absence has been a significant impediment to my personal use of Sky. Marketo users have long been used to right clicking on any folder in the folder tree and creating a local asset in that folder. Among my team, it is the most common way to create an asset or list within a program. Yet, that feature has been frustratingly missing from Sky. Now it is being added back in. I'm delighted. I've switched from Sky to classic more than once out of frustration that the only way to create an asset is through a program rather than a folder.

ABM

There are a couple of important milestones for Marketo ABM in this release. The LinkedIn Account Matching feature is now generally available after being in beta for the last couple of months. This feature allows Marketo users to sync named account lists to LinkedIn for campaign targeting. The synced list is created as an Account level matched audience, with LinkedIn attempting to match the Marketo account names to their LinkedIn profile. Creating a matched audience in this manner drastically simplifies matched audience creation.  

Finally, the previously announced renaming of Account AI to Account Profiling reaches the product itself. This is the heavily promoted AI capability to automate named account selection through Mintigo. Marketing collateral has been using the updated Account Profiling name for months, but the product documentation and in-app configuration page still use the old Account AI branding. This has been fixed.