Marketo Summer and Winter Release 2016 Thoughts

Marketo has been hard at work at several key enhancements for marketers of all types. As many are about to be released on September 23, I thought I would discuss these and how they can be helpful to marketers and marketing technologists. The enhancements are a combination of technical back-end upgrades; ideas we’ve been waiting for; and larger visionary projects.

Summer 2016 – September Release

Account Based Marketing Module – released September 13

This is Marketo’s long awaited entry into ABM. In the past month, I’ve seen two demos that include great tools such as

• Lead to Account Matching – but this isn’t going to auto convert SFDC Leads to Contacts. It’s more about associating the leads based on various fields so that you can communicate to them using Marketo. A big step.
• Reporting – this includes engagement data and Interesting Moments.
• RTP Integration – better target people by Account, Stage, and other criteria. Marketo is also releasing the ability to Schedule RTP campaigns….although this also appears in the December release…

While I’ll keep the rest under wraps for the big release, do keep in mind this is a paid add-on based on the number of Accounts you decide to track.

[Update: Sept 17, 2016] Now that the big release has occurred, you can check out more on Marketo’s site. Marketo handles all the key areas of ABM. You need really good data in your system because you will create a big smart list of Account names, domains, etc for Marketo to track. Tracking and targeting will include this list and then allow you to reference it using a special set of Filters and Triggers. This should bring together matching Leads and Contacts. The ABM tool will also try to rank Accounts based on total Contact/Lead Score along with other activity, like Interesting Moments. From the demos I have seen, parts of this do not happen automatically. Marketo documentation hints at many new features such as Named Account Filters, Triggers, and RCE Dimensions. Note that Engagio’s “play” concept is not a part of the new ABM tool. You can easily build out personalized nurtures and call tasks in Marketo based on Named Accounts. I do recommend this at least through MQL or SAL.

Moving to ABM represents a big change to how Marketo’s system thinks and I expect it will be an iterative process over the next year.

Audit Trail

Wow, as an administrator and architect of these systems for a long time, the Audit trail is probably the most exciting change. Now we can finally see full details of who changed an Asset, Flow, etc and why. How many times have you, your team, or consultants changed something accidentally (or intentionally), but the basic log info told you nothing about who or what. In the past, I had to call Support to ask for a specific log for a specific Asset. Now I can resolve these questions fast myself. I see this as not just a move toward a more robust system, but as a tool for better training.

Email 2.0 Updates and API access

I’ll let Pierce Ujainwalla of Knak and Gregoire Michel discuss the details, it’s great to see Marketo is incrementally adding capabilities and fixing bugs the Nation asked for. With API access, Email 2.0 becomes much more flexible for a variety of external plug-ins that create highly complex emails.

Miscellaneous and Helpful Updates

• Multiple Branding Domains – for all of the B2C or multi-brand businesses, this can be a big help to choose specific domains so spam filters don’t see you as a threat.
• Program Tokens!  The long awaited ability to select a Program ID, Name, or Description for placement into assets and flows is happening! This change will help add richness to Interesting Moments and flexibility to flows.
• Enterprise Key for MS Outlook MSI Plugin – now IT can use one key to install the Outlook plugin instead of calling you everytime.
• New SMS Integration – While this is a Vibes Launchpoint release, it represents a new addition to the SMS integrations that have been fairly limited so far. Now there are 17 providers in the ecosystem with varying degrees of capability.

Fall 2016 – December Release

Miscellaneous changes

• Is Anonymous finally going away – this is the next step in the long running changes to Munchkin. At this point, it shouldn’t affect anyone, but you should double check that you’ve prepared properly for removing Is Anonymous TRUE or FALSE properly.
• MS Support – Edge and Outlook 2016 now supported. For all of us Mac lovers, Outlook can finally be useful again.
• Program Creation and Cloning with the REST API – this could be a big deal for some large scale operations.  Think of externally built app that walks inexperienced Marketo users through a process and it just creates the right things in Marketo. I know of some custom work out there and I’m sure this will make it better.
• MS Dynamics errors now appear in Notifications – helpful for all of the MS Dynamics people out there.
• Custom Objects continues to become a more robust database option. Database pros will no doubt love this.

Email Headstart

Looks like this is coming out of Beta to ensure large email sends actually get released at the time intended. As we all know, large sends will actually begin at the scheduled time, however, emails could take hours to reach the entire list. Looks like only Email Send programs can use this right now. Will Engagements be next?

Thoughts on the Roadmap

With a large community and a desire to stay visionary, Marketo’s product managers have a lot to contend with and limited resources, just like at your company. Many of the Summer and Winter updates are incremental changes that help a small portion of the Marketo Nation, while a few like ABM and Audit Trail can benefit many of us. However, many features marketers want continue to have fallen behind under Ideas. Features that would mean a reduction in the complex logic workarounds we find in the Forums as well as UI enhancements. I would really love to see Marketo spend at least one Release Cycle a year working through these continuing requests. Be sure to go to Ideas and vote up your favorites today.