Marketo Winter '19 Release Overview

It may only be the dying days of 2018, but Marketo have already delivered their Winter 2019 release. Their final update of the year rolled out to customers last week, just two months after the previous one. The release of the new Sky UX has mixed up the Marketo schedule this year, with updates to this beta experience happening on a monthly rather than a quarterly basis.

The accelerated release schedule of the new Marketo User Experience has definitely shone through, with each release delivering significant improvements and filling in functionality gaps. Marketo Sky was initially released as an early beta in a limited state, with numerous bugs and only a small subset of features. As a result, it was widely ignored despite the workflow improvements it offers. With this Q4 release, most of the major functionality gaps have been closed, and the new UX can now be set as the default UI if users so desire. This is an important milestone, albeit a little premature as there are still bugs and some smaller missing features such as integration with ReadyTalk or WebEx. The existing 'Classic' UI isn’t going anywhere though, and any features found in it aren’t going away anytime soon. Switching between the two is easy.

The headline of this month's Sky update is the new customisable MyMarketo home page. This is a modular dashboard, which allows users to create their own personalised home screen with useful information and shortcuts. There is a global default MyMarketo screen for new and infrequent users, with power users having the ability to create their own version by selecting from a list of available widgets. The list of widgets currently released is limited, but includes a status widget, modules widget and recent asset widgets. Many more, including a campaign queue widget, are promised for next year.

Of greater importance, is the addition of Smart Lists and Webinar programs to the Sky experience. These are the two most important marketing activities features still missing, although their implementation is similar to existing workflows used elsewhere in Sky. The webinar programs integrate with an updated Webinar framework that allows the integrated webinar platform to be selected and configured from within the Marketo UI. Global Search makes an appearance too, extending the existing Marketing Activities to search into Design Studio. The revised search and tree navigation mechanisms are among the best parts of Sky, so it is good to see them extended to all areas of the application. The ability to search all areas of the app from one screen doesn't exist in the classic UI so is useful, although it will be so when the Database module is added to Sky.

ABM

However, Sky is not the only Marketo product to see an out of band release this year. November saw the launch on AudienceAI, the new account discovery tool first announced at Summit.  This is a new add-on to their ABM product, leveraging AI and machine learning to identify ABM target accounts. Many leading ABM programs are based on complex data models that analyse last deals and existing customers to determine what makes someone a good fit. The results are then used to build a sophisticated predictive scoring model that identifies other accounts with the same attributes. AccountAI does this all for you, removing the need to invest in a separate product such as Lattice Engines or Mintigo. The initial beta launch is used solely to generate target lists for Marketo's existing ABM module automatically, but it is expected to be made available to a broader customer base over time. As with all AI products, what you're buying here is the underlying data model, and its value will be directly linked to the effectiveness of that model.

This month saw another beta capability added to Marketo ABM customers – the integration of persona based segmentation into ABM campaigns. This is hardly a revolutionary capability, as the creation of personas is already possible using Smart Lists and Segmentation, but a dedicated persona creation wizard allows for better reporting options. The feature allows to customers to use the ABM dashboards to view how many contacts they have at their named accounts for each persona, which is certainly useful if you've invested in Marketo for your ABM toolkit. Dedicated platforms provide a more comprehensive feature set, but updates such as this help close the gap. More importantly, this feature does not rely only on job title. Personas can be built from 2 user defined fields as well as title, with groupings and categorisations in the control of the Marketo admin. That in itself is a benefit over the previous approach to personas – as this persona engine can be used in campaign segmentation.

CC Emails

The most useful new functionality in this release though is available to everyone. It is now possible to CC Marketo emails, allowing relevant contacts to be included on emails sent from Marketo. This is a long overdue feature that has been asked for at every customer I've worked with. Account managers and sales reps have always wanted to be copied on Marketo email campaigns to their contacts, and now they can be. It's a reasonable request. Sales own the relationship and want to use the marketing touches to drive the conversations they're having and close deals. It's just not been possible though, as until now no marketing automation platform allows you to copy internal stakeholders on an email sent through their tool. Marketo have broken the mould, by adding the capability to CC email campaigns, similar to how you would CC an email in Outlook. This option has been added to the email editor, so that the recipient's lead or account owner is copied on the email whenever it is sent from Marketo as part of a campaign. This should be used sparingly for large batch sends, but is very useful for nurture campaigns where volumes are lower and adding seeds to the recipient list is less useful due to irregular cadences and always on workflows. This feature is fully supported by the API too, which is even better and not always considered.

Also added to the core platform are some updates to Munchkin web tracking. The tracking opt-out introduced a few months ago has been enhanced, and an option to not track specific pages automatically on page load has been added. There are use cases for this around single-page apps, where the page can reload automatically in whole or part, resulting in duplicate page view activities in the Marketo activity log. There are some improvements to the tracking of web domains that end in non-standard domain endings such as .io. These aren’t always picked up by tracking so can now be specified in the admin configuration within Marketo to ensure that all sites are tracked as they should be.

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