Marketo June '19 Release Overview
It seems to be the season for marketing automation vendors to deprecate legacy features. Hot on the heels of Oracle killing off their legacy email editor in Eloqua, Adobe have now made the same announcement for Marketo. They will be retiring their legacy "Email Editor 1.0" at the end of the year. This doesn't affect very many Marketo users, as most long-standing customers migrated to the newer Email Editor 2.0 years ago. The difference between Marketo and Eloqua is the amount of notice given to affected customers. The migration was only announced a few weeks ago but is being kicked-off this week. On Tuesday June 18th, all remaining users of Email Editor 1.0 will be forcibly migrated to the newer Email Editor 2.0.
The upgrade is supposed to be seamless, as the new editor is backwards compatible with templates created for the old editor. This is generally true, but only if your old templates are coded correctly. The new editor is not as forgiving with syntax errors as the old one and will break if you use the wrong tags or code an editable section within another editable section. The old editor would typically work in this situation. If you are one of the customers affected by the forced migration, then the change should not be too disruptive. There are some visual and layout changes, but the new email editor can pretty much be used in exactly the same way as the old one. However, you are strongly encouraged to explore the extra features found in Email Editor 2.0 such as modules and variables as they enable designers to create much more creative email templates with a broader range of customisation options. This gives marketers much more flexibility when designing campaigns, while still staying on brand and on message.
There is a second deadline that Marketo users who have previously made the upgrade to Email Editor 2.0 need to be aware of. When the new editor is enabled, existing emails created using the old editor are not migrated to email editor 2.0 until they are opened and saved within Marketo. This has allowed users to continue using old emails in existing campaigns without having to worry about migrating them, while leaving open the possibility of doing so in future should the asset need to be edited. Marketo have now imposed a deadline after which assets built using Email Editor 1.0 won't be migrated. From December, the old email editor 1.0 and the APIs related to it will be removed. After this date, emails created using this editor will not be usable unless they have previously been migrated. Marketo customers are strongly encouraged to identify any emails that were created by the old editor and re-approve them between now and the end of November.
Event Goals
The removal of this old functionality is balanced by plenty of new features coming to Marketo Sky in this and future releases. Any new features going forward will only be released in the Sky user experience, which means that customers should familiarise themselves with this interface and be prepared to switch between the new and old UIs as required. There are still reasons to use the old UI in places, but by sticking to it exclusively, Marketo users are missing out on a lot of useful functionality.
This month sees the most useful Sky enhancement yet affecting one of the most widely used features in Marketo. It is now possible to set a registration limit on event registrations for Event Programs. A maximum number of permitted registrants can be configured as part of program settings, reflecting any capacity constraints that may apply to an event. When the desired number of registered program members is reached, any new form submissions for the event will be added to a waiting list, and the visitor redirected to a 'Registration Full' landing page specified as part of the event setup. This extra landing page for waitlisted registrants should be added to any event program templates and considered as part of program builds going forward.
This won't be useful for all events, as not every event will have a fixed capacity. Every event, both offline or online, will have a registration target. This target can now be specified in the event program settings regardless of whether you're using event caps or not. Marketo allows you to list both registration and attendee targets for an event, which can then be monitored in Sky from My Marketo or the program dashboard. In addition, the system will notify you when the registration target is reached as well as when there is a risk your targets won't be met. This will allow event organisers to take proactive action to drive registrations for underperforming events through Marketo using an extra email blast or outside of Marketo by way of additional social activity or sales incentives.
Marketo Sky
Whilst useful, the event functionality is not the coolest feature update for Sky this quarter, That title belongs to the other big feature this month, namely, the ability to edit images directly within Marketo. Users browsing images in Design Studio will notice a brand new 'Edit Image' button when viewing an asset. This opens up the image in the Adobe Creative Cloud online image editors also included in some of Adobe's other online services. These editors are limited, but are perfectly serviceable for simple changes such as image resizing, cropping or colour retouching. Major image editing will still require the assistance of a designer with Photoshop or Illustrator expertise, but this should reduce lead times for the simple fixes. The biggest use case here is definitely the ability to text on banner images, assuming that the banners have been created in the right format to make the text editable. Banner text is a constant pain point for every email marketing team I've worked with.
Image editing may be the most prominent Sky UX update, but there are a high number of smaller updates to the Sky user interface as Marketo seek to bring it up to feature parity with the old UI. These are continuing to happen every month in small incremental releases that have a major impact on usability when added up. The missing Create Task flow step was added in May and the missing CRM system smart list criteria will be added this month. Test Engagement Streams has also been added back into the new UI, and the My Marketo dashboard is continuing to gain new widgets. The default dashboard now boasts an Expiring Soon widget that lists expiring landing pages and emails as well as an optional Community blog widget.
The navigation options in Sky have been significantly enhanced as well. At the beginning of the quarter, the date filter in the navigation tree was broken out from the rest of the filters and is now displayed prominently at the top of the tree so that users are always aware that old assets are hidden in the default view. Numerous new options have been added to the right-hand application navigation bar, including a recently viewed history list, a heavily upgraded global search and additional links to all application modules rather than just the ones released in Sky. The ability to select multiple assets and run mass actions on the selected assets has been added back into Design Studio, when the emails, forms or landing page nodes have been selected in the tree. This also affects images too. Furthermore, the image details card in Design Studio has got a significant update and is now much clearer and more useful than the equivalent feature in the old UI.
Other Applications
Elsewhere, Marketo Sales Connect, the new name for the Sales Engage Sales automation add-on, gets quite a few new updates. These include enhanced settings screens, vastly improved system email customisation and the ability to bulk add contacts to a Sales Engage campaign from within Salesforce.
Bizible gets additional contact, account and campaign level drill-down options in the discover dashboards. This allows you to see the full range of activity for each opportunity and view attribution information right down to the most granular level possible. On top of this, multi-currency support has been added for Bizible customers integrated with Microsoft Dynamics following on from the release of this same feature for Salesforce customers at the beginning of the year. Finally, Bizible now integrates with Drift, allowing conversations taking place on this market-leading chatbot platform to be included in revenue attribution reports. Drift is one of three vendors to launch brand new integrations with Marketo Engage this month. Demandbase and Liveramp are the other two.
Finally, Marketo customers using bulk exports to export data for archiving or analysis should be aware of an integration enhancement. Marketo will now supply the checksum for any file retrieved using the bulk extract rest API, allowing customers to verify that the downloaded file has been extracted correctly. IT departments should be made aware of this change, as it will improve the reliability of any integration developed using the bulk extract APIs.