Marketo June '20 Release Overview

It feels like a long time since the last Marketo release. Mid February brought new APIs and new features to the Microsoft Dynamics integration but little else. Last weekend brought a much bigger release with multiple game changing features, but also more APIs and yet more enhancements to the Microsoft Dynamics integration. As always with Marketo, some of those new features are paid add-ons, but the biggest changes are available to everyone.

Program Member Custom Fields

New features are often described by vendors as revolutionary or game changing, but rarely are. The addition of Program Member Custom Fields is one feature that lives up that billing. It enables the storage of campaign specific information at the program level in Marketo. This can include session details, asset download information or source tracking information. All this data is typically campaign specific and is generally captured through form submits and reported on at a per campaign basis.

Handling campaign specific contact data has been difficult in the past because Marketo can only store form responses at the person level. If someone registers for two events in the same day, then much of the tracking or session information from the first event is lost because the person fields for these details get overwritten after the second event registration and for all subsequent campaign responses. This makes reporting much more difficult, particularly for information that isn't synced downstream to CRM or sent to event organisers using email alerts or third-party integrations. Storing the same tracking or event information at the program level solves this problem, but is not without limitations.

Program member fields only make sense in the context of a program, so adding them to Design Studio forms isn't possible at the moment. Also, you can't define different fields for each program. The new update allows the creation of 20 fields at the system level that are available to any program to store data related to that specific program. Neither of these are serious limitations and can be solved with easy workarounds. The most important thing is that data stored in Program Member fields can be used in the same ways as other fields by local assets, local forms, Smart Campaigns, list uploads or through the API.

Adobe Integration

Marketo's integration with the rest of the Adobe portfolio reaches another milestone in this release, with the ability to sync static lists to the rest of the Adobe Experience Cloud. The primary use case here is the syncing of Marketo lead lists to audiences in Adobe Audience Manager for retargeting in ad campaigns. However, syncing Marketo lists with Ad Cloud, AEM and Target are all supported too, as is a direct connection with Adobe's Platform CDP that underlies their entire Cloud portfolio. An Adobe Analytics sync is also possible using Analytics' integration with Audience Manager as an intermediary.

There are a variety of use cases for this functionality based around Marketo's ability to orchestrate B2B multi-channel campaigns. The most used will be retargeting form submissions or outbound campaign responses through digital advertising. The Target integration means that lead status or other contact details stored in Marketo can be used to define segments for web personalisation, whereas the Analytics integration allows email opens or clicks to be sent to Analytics for reporting purposes.

All this requires cookie matching to work, specifically matching Marketo's Munchkin tracking cookies to Adobe's ECID cookie. This means that Marketo can only sync known leads that have visited a webpage tracked by both Adobe and Marketo. That's not unusual in the context of AdTech integrations but does limit the scope of the integration to the minority of the Marketo database that have recent web activity tracked by Munchkin. As such, expect the size of the Audience Manager list to be substantially smaller than the Marketo original. Secondly, Marketo can only sync static lists as per other advertising integrations. Smart lists can not be synced by this integration.

Predictive Audiences

Another long promised Adobe integration also finally sees the limelight. AI is an important differentiator for Adobe, as they have been at the forefront of the move to add AI capabilities to marketing technology. A whole host of Adobe Sensei branded AI features for Marketo are expected over the next 12 months. The first of these to be released is Predictive Audiences, which uses lookalike matching to build email invite lists for event campaigns, thus allowing marketers to meet event registration targets when they're otherwise struggling to do so. As such, it is heavily linked to last year's event goal features that are only available on the most expensive subscription tiers. This feature is similarly restricted to the same group of customers.

Predictive Audiences identifies people in the Marketo database who match the profile of people who attended or registered for similar events in the past. These contacts can then be added to a Smart List for inclusion in the next event invite. As with most AI features, the effectiveness of this capability will vary according to the number of event campaigns run through Marketo as well as how much this feature is used. It is an interesting capability though, but the real benefits of Adobe's Sensei AI offering will land in future updates.

Dynamics Integration

Microsoft Dynamics users have long complained that they have far fewer integration options than Marketo customers using Salesforce. Until this year, there were 7 Salesforce sync actions for Marketo Smart Campaigns compared to 1 Microsoft sync action. February saw the Change Owner flow step being introduced to the Dynamics integration, finally allowing Marketo to reassign lead records. The much more widely used Create Task step has been introduced in this release, allowing Marketo to create activities for lead or account owners to follow-up contact requests or other high priority form submissions. This substantially equalises the two integrations with Campaign integration now being the obvious feature gap. Campaigns work a little differently in Dynamics compared to Salesforce, but there is no reason why a future Marketo release won't see full campaign response integration between Dynamics and Marketo, just as exists right now for Salesforce.

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