Marketo Spring 19 Release Overview

It's Spring next week and to mark the new season Marketo are rolling out their Spring '19 release, just in time for Adobe Summit at the end of the month. Marketo's quarterly releases are not as important as they used to be because the platform's major focus areas such as Sky and Bizible follow a monthly or bi-monthly schedule. There are still some useful enhancements to the core platform this week, although the top priority is definitely the new Marketo Sky user experience. Expect a lot of discussion about Sky during the Marketo Day at Adobe's annual customer conference, because the effort to get customers to adopt the new UI has now started.

Marketo Sky

Sky was granted general availability status at the end of last year, after the ability to create all program types was made available in it. This ignored the fact that many other features, particularly on the design studio side, were still missing. A standard marketing user can build a basic campaign in Sky, but the majority of admin and power user features have yet to be migrated over from the classic UI. The functionality available in Sky does work without show-stopping bugs, although some advanced options such as Script Tokens are broken and require dropping back to Marketo Classic.

Adobe are making rapid progress in closing the gap between the old UX and the new UX after a slow start. Sky is light years ahead of where it was six months ago. Every monthly release brings a long list of new and enhanced features. Already this quarter Marketo Sky has received two major updates, gaining the ability to create landing page templates and integrate webinar programs with additional platforms. Now the full suite of email program functionality such as A/B testing will be added to Sky.

The real focus though has been on bug fixes and improving Smart Campaign usability within the new UI. Sky is a substantial improvement when navigating the tree and creating programs, but there are still occasional options missing elsewhere. This particularly affects Smart Campaigns, where some scenarios workflow creation can take longer than under the Classic experience. The shortcuts that power users use to create or edit campaigns quickly have no alternative in Sky. Some of these usability gaps were closed last month, with an update to picklist handling and flow choices. More enhancements in this area are being made, as well as additional reporting on recipient time zone sends which doesn't exist in the old UI.

Core Platform

For users of the old UI, the headline feature for this release is custom communication limits. Marketo has long had the ability to limit the number of emails sent to individual recipients on a daily or weekly basis, so long as that limit is up to 5 per day and 15 per week. The problem is that this is a global setting – it is set at the system level and applies to all emails sent to the entire lead database. It even applies to seed lists. Customers have frequently chosen not to use the feature because of this lack of granularity. The only way to work-around it was to ignore the limit on a per campaign basis, which defeats the point of having it in the first place. More flexibility in setting the limit is definitely welcome.

Also welcome is a minor update to the Secure Tracking Links add-on. For security-conscious customers, Marketo offers the ability to enable HTTPS on your email tracking domain. This goes alongside the Secure Landing Pages add-on to enable HTTPS landing pages, which guarantee that the connection between visitors' web browsers and your Marketo instance is encrypted, protecting any data entered on Marketo forms from hackers or eavesdroppers. In the era of GDPR and data protection, purchasing and configuring both capabilities should be a basic requirement for all Marketo customers. However, the secure email tracking link capability has always suffered from one crippling limitation. Whilst you could purchase the add-on and enable email links to work over HTTPS, Marketo never actually updated the emails it sent to put HTTPS in the links themselves, effectively making the Secure Tracking Links add-on entirely pointless for most customers. This has now been fixed. If you have the Secure Tracking Links add-on enabled, then Marketo will now rewrite the links in your emails so that they are HTTPS. Better late than never, but the system should have worked like this from day one.

AccountAI

Another of Marketo's new products goes GA in this release. The AccountAI add-on is now available for all customers to purchase. It adds predictive capabilities to the ABM module, identifying accounts in your Marketo database that should be added to your Named Account List because they fit your Ideal Customer Profile. The underlying technology that makes this possible is powered by Mintigo and their new 'AI' branded predictive lead scoring engine. To configure the model, all you need to do is give it a Smart List containing contacts that fit your ideal customer profile. The list of matching accounts can then be reviewed and tuned by adjusting the weightings used by the model and promoting accounts into your named account list. This is definitely an interesting capability, but it faces plenty of competition among ABM vendors, many of which have more sophisticated feature sets. In practice though, Account AI is a repackaging of Mintigo's existing predictive account scoring features for Marketo customers. Ultimately, the success or failure of the product rests upon the accuracy of the data model that powers it, and the quality of the data that is used by customers to configure it. If you intend to adopt the feature, using good data and an accurate representation of your ideal customer profile to train the model is critical.

Bizible & Sales Engage

Marketo have been putting a lot of effort into selling Bizible's ROI reporting tools to their customer base, so it is good to see some useful additions to the product in this release. The CRM connector is now API based rather than package based, which reduces the complexity of the integration and eliminates barriers to implementation in locked down environments. It also introduces two new features, the most important of which is the ability to pull in campaign costs from CRM campaigns for offline activities. The platform currently pulls costs for digital activities from Marketo or from the advertising platforms that it integrates with, but this previously left a reporting gap for offline activities that only have their costs logged in Salesforce or Dynamics. Multi-currency support is also now available in Bizible, pulling in the currency conversions from your CRM so that reports are automatically displayed in the correct currency for your local teams. This will allow for much wider adoption of Bizible among decentralised organisations. There are also additional segmentation capabilities in Discover, allowing for more granular drill-downs when reviewing dashboards.

Sales Engage gets a pair of compliance enhancements. There is much better unsubscribe management, with the ability to block specific email domains from being contacted using the product. Also, Sales Engage will now verify if recipients are unsubscribed in the Marketo Lead Database before sending an email. Sales Engage emails will not be sent if they are, regardless of where they are sent from. With the advent of GDPR, there has been an increase in companies using Sales automation tools such as Sales Engage to bypass privacy and compliance requirements. Ensuring that Sales Engage respects marketing unsubscribes goes a long way to preventing this. Additional auditing has been added too, with better visibility of all the contacts and campaigns in an instance as well as the changes made to them. Admins will also be able to end campaigns that were activated by other users.

These are not the only updates coming this month. There are numerous enhancements to Sky and a new Get Smart Campaigns API. For full details of what's in the current release, view the release notes that can be found on Marketo Docs.