Marketo provides system upgrades one to three times a quarter. As an end of year gift, Marketo has a new December 2014 release, which has a ton of tiny changes designed to make your life easier. In reviewing this list, I know it will make my life a lot easier. These changes are not ground breaking, however, they are key requests from the Community that make the day to day much better for everyone.
Sales Insight Reports: now you can view email performance by Sales Rep (Lead Owner)! Marketo says emails sent through any of the official plug ins (SFDC, MSD, Outlook, and Gmail) will be tracked. This a big enhancement for organizations that rely heavily on MSI’s email tool. I know there were a few requests for this awhile back and I’m sure those folks are ecstatic right now.
Facebook Custom Audiences: If you have the Social Package, you can now create or update Facebook Custom Audiences from any Static List or Smart list. There is a new FB icon at the button of the Lead View, if you have the package. I know this was bit of thorn in the side for Social users.
Cloning Across Workspaces: For those of us dealing with Enterprise systems with Workspaces and Lead Partitions, this is a game changer. A while ago, this was a highly used feature, allowing local marketing users to clone in prebuilt assets to modify for local use. What I mean here is that a regionally distributed system with Workspaces might have Global Campaigns that are centrally built. For a while, you could clone the assets or a Program, but earlier this year, this feature disappeared, forcing users to use Sharing or Program Import to pull in entire Programs. Marketo has heard us and brought this feature back as Program Clone from Workspace to Workspace. So if you have access to a Default or Center of Excellence Workspace, you can clone that over to your local Workspace. Right now, however, assets cannot be cloned separately from the Program.
Reference Workspace Smart Lists: another thorn in the side for Workspace users was the inability to have a central set of Smart Lists. You would have to clone the List into the WS, or Share it and Clone it over, before using the filters. Now you can refer to a Smart List that is Shared from another WS. Marketo did not display the naming for this, however, it might use a two dot scheme like “Workspace.Smart List” or “Workspace.Program.Smart List”.
Link Tracking with Email Scripting: another small change that has a big impact, this now permits proper link wrapping with Marketo tokens and tracking in Email (Link) Performance Reports.
Token Encoding Setting: in March 2015, Marketo will make this the default. This behavior is at the Field level, so you’ll need to go to Admin > Field Management to turn this on now. Individual fields can be toggled on or off. this feature is only for Lead and Company tokens. Marketo says this is “HTML encoded” as a security precaution. I suspect this means it will be harder for an attacker to see the token name and only see the displayed value.
List Import now has new file encoding: UTF-16, Shift-JIS, EUC-JP, EUC-CN to support non Western Languages.
REST API Call Additions: if you care about these, you now can use Get Lead Partitions, Associate Lead, and Merge Lead, further enabling custom workflows and integrations. See the developer site for details.
RCE is getting the new Marketo GUI skin!
Real Time Personalization: RTP has two key features this month. First is the Named Accounts function, allowing imports of a list of Named Accounts to RTP as a Segment tool. It is possible to import the list as CSV or to plug it in manually. Marketo’s screenshot indicates you can have up to 10,000 Named Accounts. What is less clear is if you can add Account data to that list as well or if you need to have name variations (IBM, International Business Machines) to ensure a proper match. Second, RTP now has a slider if you are using an In Zone Campaign.
This update is an important one because it addresses many small things that I know users have been requesting for months. Any user will find these enhancements make the daily use of Marketo that much easier and more enjoyable. Marketo did not mention a specific date for the release; usually the release is scheduled on a Friday in the middle of the month, so expect features on or around December 19.
I know I’m looking forward to it!