Marketo Engage May '21 Release Overview

It's the small things that matter the most. The return of drag and drop in the folder tree was heartedly welcomed by Marketo users last month. Accompanying this was an unexpected bonus: coloured icons in the folder tree. When the new folder tree was launched last year, the program, asset and folder icons were changed to black and white in line with other Adobe products. This made it hard to distinguish program types and program status. The re-introduction of drag and drop was announced at the time, but the icon colour change was not. Thus the surprise and delight when the refreshed icons greeted the most recent wave of Marketo enterprise clients migrated to the new UI.

These updates are all part of the reskinning of the Marketo Engage platform to fit into the wider Adobe Experience Cloud. That is an ongoing process. Subsequent releases this year will see additional updates to the UI, introducing many of the features already found in Marketo Sky to the wider user base. Among those Sky features making the cut are global search and advanced tree filters, both of which are in this week's release. That's not to say the new Adobe UI is the same as Marketo Sky. It's not, but from what we've seen so far, it takes a lot of inspiration from the experimental Marketo UX first announced in 2018.

Incoming

Perhaps the biggest UX change to Marketo will arrive this summer. Marketo's login system is transitioning over to use Adobe IDs, allowing Marketo to use the same logins as AEM, Adobe Analytics and the rest of the Adobe product family. It's a very disruptive change. One that was expected to happen eventually but is perhaps happening sooner than expected. The shift to Adobe ID sign-ins will be for new Marketo customers only at first, with existing customers being required to transition over gradually throughout the next 18 months. This does mean that Marketo access will now be managed from the Adobe Admin Console, which many Marketo admins won't have access to today.

There is plenty of upside to the hassle of UI changes and new logins. Last week's Adobe Summit brought plenty of teasers for future releases. Integration with the newly announced B2B Adobe Experience Platform stole the show, which promises to deliver a unified view of your account and contact universe. That data can then be used to segment and target campaigns in any Adobe Experience Cloud application and beyond. Marketo is now one of those apps, and the new platform will also deliver improved audience sync with other Adobe apps. The existing audience sync relies on cookie matching, so it typically only matches a small part of the typical Marketo list with the app from which it's integrated.

Execute Campaign

More immediately is this week's release. It's the largest release for some time, including many new features for the base Marketo platform. The most significant change is the new Execute Campaign flow action for smart campaigns. This allows smart campaigns to add people to other smart campaigns. In practice, Marketo users will be able to build nested or modular campaigns that can be reused across a series of flows. The existing Request Campaign flow action already does this, but with one crucial difference. When Request Campaign is used, contacts continue flowing through the existing smart campaign at the same as they flow through the requested campaign. The Execute Campaign flow step pauses people in the original campaign until they finish flowing through the executed campaign. They only resume their journey through the initial campaign after they've finished with the executed campaign.

There are definite use cases for data normalisation here, in situations where people need to have their data cleaned before they're scored or routed to CRM. Lead routing is another use case for customers who manage this in Marketo. Architecting such flows to run in order has been tricky in the past, but this makes it much more manageable. You no longer need to use wait steps or rely on hope and pray to get smart campaigns to run in the correct order.

Account Smart Lists

For ABM users, account smart lists are now in general availability. This significantly improves the usefulness of the ABM module by allowing you to run account based workflows precisely as you would lead based campaigns. Account smart lists can be built using the full range of account filters, as well as the activity and attributes of any people linked to the account.

Using this capability, it is possible to create dynamic target account lists or run cross-channel ABM campaigns directly from Marketo. Account based sales alerts, ABM nurture campaigns or integration with LinkedIn account audiences are all available using this capability. Adobe have talked a lot about account based experiences recently, but only now Marketo can deliver them, allowing the platform to compete more directly with dedicated ABM vendors such as Demandbase.

Bot Protection

Forms are receiving a boost too, with the arrival of improved spam protection. This is based on improved bot detection and stronger server-side validation of form submissions. The validation changes have blocked some well-used but unsupported methods of integrating external forms with Marketo, namely posting a third-party form directly to the Marketo forms endpoint. Instead, form embeds or the official forms API must be used by developers when posting website forms to Marketo. A communication about this change went out to all Marketo users at the beginning of the year to give users time to update their forms to use the supported methods.

The improved bot detection also benefits reporting. Email security packages often validate all links in incoming emails for security or phishing threats. These opens and clicks can be detected by ESPs as real click-throughs unless specifically filtered out. Marketo hasn't done a good job of this in the past, but that changes this week. Bot clicks can now be excluded from email performance reports using a new admin setting, ensuring more accurate campaign results for everyone. This applies to MSI emails as well as regular marketing and operational emails.

An additional security improvement comes in the form of sensitive data fields. This new setting allows admins to block form pre-fill for potentially sensitive person or company fields on forms. Data in fields marked this way can't then be exposed on landing pages. This will be most commonly used to protect PII information in companies with strict security requirements.

Lead Updates

Then there's the vast array of API updates affecting the bulk APIs in particular. It is now possible to export custom object records using the bulk API, while the bulk lead API has been improved. There's also a new program members API, which allows you to create, update and export program members in bulk. An enhanced metadata API allows fields to be created by the API. While nested event programs can now be created by the API, correcting a previous inconsistency.

Finally, it is now possible to search for leads by ID in Marketo. A frustrating oversight with a workaround that is no longer needed. When viewing a lead, it is now possible to run single flow actions from the lead details screen. Enhancing a useful but oft-forgotten function and exposing it to a wider audience. That's a general trend in this release. Long may it continue.

These are not the only updates coming this month. There are enhancements to Bizible and the Microsoft Dynamics sync too. For full details of what's in the current release, view the release notes on Marketo Docs.