Marketo Fall '18 Release Overview

Fresh from the news of their impending acquisition by Adobe, this month marks a major milestone for Marketo. They kicked off October with a rebrand, launching a refreshed website sporting a brand new logo. Now it's time for a slightly delayed Q3 release, that features a substantial update to Marketo Sky and a number of product launches.

Marketo Sky

The Fall release is headlined by the first significant update to Marketo Sky. This is the new product user experience first launched in a limited form back in May. Since then it has received monthly updates that have gradually migrated existing features from the old user experience to the new. Throughout this time it has remained limited to a small selection of program and asset configuration screens in the Marketing Activities area of the product. This month marks the debut of Design Studio and email programs within the new UI. Sky is still nowhere near ready for customers to use instead of the existing UI, but there is definite progress.

Over recent months there have been a number of small but useful improvements within Sky, including the ability to hide the navigation tree in the UI, as well as updated icons within that tree. The ability to hide the tree is long overdue, and does make a big difference on a laptop screen. In the most recent release was the addition of the full system navigation to Sky, complete with subscription information and a main menu. This has made a significant difference in making Sky look like a working product, rather than just an early mock-up. Perhaps the biggest addition in recent months was the new Marketing Activities home page, which uses a dashboard style design to provide a list of recently edited assets and scheduled campaigns, both of which can be filtered by program and asset type. This is a useful feature, particularly given finding this information in the classic UI can be difficult.

Sales Engage

After launching last quarter, the new Sales Tool product gets a much deeper integration with Salesforce, and crucially gains support for Salesforce Lightning Experience. This allows Sales Engage to be embedded directly into Salesforce within both the Classic and Lightning UIs, allowing the lead discovery and sales acceleration functionality within the tool to be available directly in the system Sales most want it.

Sales Engage also gets an updated version of the ToutApp Outlook plugin that uses Microsoft's Office 365 extensions framework so that the plugin is available within Outlook across Windows, Mac and the Web. As part of this, Outlook emails can be included as engagements in a Sales campaign, thus allowing true 1 to 1 personalisation and the improved deliverability that comes with sending email through corporate mail servers rather than Marketo's bulk mail servers. Using this capability still retains all the response tracking capabilities found in a marketing email. Existing plugin features such as lead discovery, calendar integration and Outlook email templates are still available in the new release across all the supported Outlook versions.

Sales Engage also gets a refreshed admin UI, particularly in relation to Salesforce settings, as well as real-time password validation when setting a password. This latter function extends the existing Marketo password validation workflow to Sales Engage and the ToutApp product that Sales Engage is based on.

Other Updates

The Marketing Performance Insights reporting add-on gets another comprehensive update in this release, with a multitude of small UI enhancements as well as support for ABM Named Accounts and engagement activity dates when filtering reports. The time range of reporting has been extended to the full 24 months of reporting data that Marketo has available. Like all the major marketing automation platforms, activity data is deleted after this timeframe due to GDPR considerations. The most significant UI change though is that MPI now alerts users if the report they’re viewing is being limited by missing data. A notification centre has been added to the UI (already available in the main Marketo product and Sky), with alerts and notifications detailing the gaps. Where possible instructions will be given on how to fill those gaps. For instance, a link will be provided to populate missing acquisition date and program details for affected contacts.

Marketo's web personalisation tools gain support for workspaces, allowing web personalisation assets to be restricted to Marketo users within specific business units or regions. Workspaces are the primary mechanism for controlling user access to asset folders, so seeing this extended to RTP is long overdue.

This quarter's API update fixes an odd oversight in the lead API. Until now, it has not been possible to view the out of the box email status fields using the lead APIs. This has now been corrected, with fields such as unsubscribe, black list and marketing suspended fields all accessible to the API.

These are not the only updates coming this month. There are major updates to Bizible, as well as additional product updates due in the next few weeks. However, for full details of what's in the current release, view the release notes that can be found on Marketo Docs.