Marketo Spring 18 Release Overview

It's been a big quarter for Marketo. It started at the end of April with their annual Marketing Nation Summit in San Francisco, where they made several major product reveals that are now beginning to see the light of day. It concludes with an otherwise quiet Spring Release that marks the launch of two major releases.

Sales Engage

Last week saw the GA of Marketo Sales Engage, their new Sales engagement tool. Sales Engage isn't actually a new product. It's the latest version of ToutApp, a sales automation tool they purchased last year. At summit it was given a rebrand and a fresh lick of paint, but Marketo are doing their very best to pretend that Sales Engage is a totally new product.

This insistence is purely for marketing reasons. ToutApp already works pretty well if your business uses both Marketo or Salesforce. It is deeply integrated into both Salesforce and the Marketo core product, requiring both to function to its full potential. This is due to its signature feature, the live feed, which pulls in all the information both systems have about each contact and displays them in an easily digestible view for reps to follow up on. This is going to be enhanced over time with interesting moments and scoring capabilities similar to the Marketo Sales Insight plugin.

The other prominent feature that Sales Engage brings to Marketo is playbooks and multi-step Sales Campaigns. These are created within the app and can be integrated with Marketo marketing campaigns for end to end automation of the entire funnel. Many sales reps struggle with the marketing-centric UX of the equivalent Sales Insight functionality, so it is hoped that the marketing first nature of Sales Engage will result in higher adoption for the campaign integration features of Marketo.

GDPR Compliance

The enforcement deadline may have passed, but the main features in Marketo's spring release relate to GDPR compliance.

ToutApp and Sales Engage have gained a compliance card on their contact screens, allowing reps to specify the legal basis for adding or updating data in the tool. It's a small thing, but the need to track the consent status of self-sourced contacts in CRM systems was a discussion point in most companies GDPR planning. This nicely solves this requirement, or it would if the fields were mandatory and used sales-centric terminology rather than the somewhat dry legal terms that few non-lawyers genuinely understand. Hopefully, this will be updated in a future release.

Marketers are also getting two critically important GDPR compliance features in this relief. Both relate to Marketo's munchkin website tracking capabilities: IP anonymisation and contact opt-out.

The opt-out is query string based, and relies on 'marketo_opt_out=true' being added to the end of the web page URL. This is a useful first step for organisations with strict compliance requirements, but does not cater for brands with strict opt-in requirements surrounding tracking in the same way that Eloqua's strict mode does.

In practice, the IP anonymisation is probably more useful, as it mirrors Google Analytics preferred solution to the tracking consent dilemma. GA has had the capability to mask the IP of the visitors it tracks for a while. The concept is that without an IP address or a known contact association, website tracking doesn't require an opt in as it's not possible to link the data with a person's details. Some lawyers may disagree with this view, particularly with changes to European Privacy laws in the pipeline, so check first. However, it certainly doesn't hinder compliance.

Other Updates

Marketo's Content^AI functionality gets a significant update too. Previously, the technology that drives this feature used clicks as it's success metric. Now Content^AI can be optimised to maximise Opens or Conversions instead. This is a small but significant milestone in the journey to developing a truly flexible automated content journey.

Marketo's new Performance Insights reporting suite gets some updates following customer feedback, with the aim of enhancing usability and making the data presented more flexible and relevant to users. Details are in the release notes.

Along the lines of the existing Slack integration, Marketo is getting an integration with Facebook Workplace. It allows Marketo to post notifications and Interesting Moments into a customer's Facebook Workplace. A fairly popular feature, and a useful way of updating Sales and the wider marketing team on Campaign Activity.

Also related to integrations is a small but important addition to the API. The ability for the API to create, read, update and delete static lists makes data upload tools and event integrations significantly more flexible.

Marketo Sky

Lastly, by far the most prominent update in this release actually rolled out last month. That being the Open Beta of the brand new Marketo Sky Next-Gen UX. This has attracted a lot of interest in the Marketo user community, but it's still early days. Beta is probably an inaccurate term for the current state of Sky, as it is far from feature complete. However, Marketo have moved their entire development focus from the existing UX to Sky, so updates are expected frequently. In the meantime, it is worth Marketo admins taking a look at Sky, even if it isn't yet ready for end users to use. At this stage, there are still too many missing features for anything beyond testing and providing developer feedback. The excitement is justified though as the new UX definitely has potential to be a significant improvement over the current UI.

The Spring '18 release of Marketo is scheduled for June 29th. Contents of the release are subject to change. Full details can be found in the official release notes.