8 Marketo Wishlist Items - What's Yours?

Thanks all who attended last week’s BMUG session at the Merkle offices in downtown Boston. After almost two years of being stuck in COVID land, it was great to finally get together in person. In addition to a roundtable discussion on Marketo's latest release and Adobe Summit ‘23, the group also discussed additional capabilities they would love to see in Marketo and how they were working around them.?

Let's jump into eight of these “wishlist items” and feedback, three of which have partially come true. This is not a comprehensive list so I'm sure we are missing a number of top requests. In no particular order…

Wish 1: Better Visualization of Marketo Workflows

Wish Details: “A picture tells a thousand words” is an old proverb. This request revolves around the desire for Marketo to provide better visuals around workflows and nurturing paths. The power of the flow steps within Marketo is very strong but this doesn't translate well or help when the practitioner needs to show a visualization to another person or team [EX: Presenting a new nurture path to the Sales group].

“Wouldn't it be great to be able to push a button and auto-magically get a visualization of a workflow?” was one comment.?

From a usability perspective, there was also discussion around flow steps and how the flow step method has worked well for years. One member said “we all have that plugged into our Marketo brains” while someone else suggested that the branching of decisions could be made more intuitive with drag and drop capabilities. This would show what happens when different decisions are made (Similar to the Advanced Report Build Modeler).

Final thought: Could Marketo add a “standard mode” and “visual mode” to satisfy both needs?

Workarounds: Some of the members are leveraging PowerPoint or Visio to recreate the workflows in order to paint the picture for others or to help architect the workflow prior to building it.?

Wish 2: New Marketo Chat Capabilities

Wish Details: One member wished Marketo had an integrated chat function that captured information and routed leads. While this wishlist item came partially true in 2022 with the introduction of Dynamic Chat, there are still elements missing leaving the group wishing for more. It should be noted that Adobe is actively building new Dynamic Chat features in its regular Marketo updates.

The group was interested in finding out how others were using the feature. To recap the discussion here’s a basic break down of the Dynamic Chat have and have-nots:

Current Dynamic Chat Capabilities:

• Create a dynamic conversation
• Connect conversation data to Marketo for tracking and management
• Offer content as a complement to standard forms
• Set up meetings with Sales Reps with basic round-robin lead assigning

Features Currently Lacking in Current Dynamic Chat:?

• Real-time chat capability
• Ability to route leads with parameters (Note that additional routing capabilities were added in September 2022).

Workarounds: Members have been using alternative chat solutions like Drift and Qualified that offer deeper capabilities however, some are going to try the automated bot-like capabilities of Marketo to test the waters. One major advantage to Dynamic Chat is the price: currently it’s free with a Marketo Engage subscription. Stay tuned.

More info on Dynamic Chat

Wish 3: Spambot Management?

Wish Details: It was exciting to hear how BMUG members got their wish come true for spambot management with the August 2022 release as spambots and other illegitimate leads have been an issue for a while.?

Several members lamented how Google leads will come in containing bogus information.? Anyone that gets “leads” from emails like “[email protected]” understands the pain.

The new CAPTCHA feature evaluates the validity of form submissions using reCAPTCHA v3 to score incoming form traffic. Users can build marketing workflows to automatically exclude, quarantine, or delete suspicious bot traffic.

Workaround: A past workaround was to create a hidden honeypot field to help determine if the form fill was completed by a human or a bot. Now users can use this new recapture method to address this need.

Wish 4: Search by User ID

Wish Details: Can Marketo offer a way to search a user by ID making it easier to identify duplicates with the same email address?

This wish comes true instantly as this feature already exists in Marketo. Simply go to the search box of the Database section and type in the user ID. Make sure to prepend with “[Id].”

Wish 5: Content Tagging for Better Attribution.?

Wish Details: Marketo Programs offer a great way to capture information about specific initiatives like webinars, white papers, ebooks, trade shows and display advertising. The challenge is that Marketo treats all of those programs the same from an attribution perspective. This is not helpful when trying to understand the different vehicles that bring success to marketing investment. For example, if someone is part of a Google display ad program (source) that drove someone to an ebook program (asset), that member attribution would be double counted.?

Could Marketo create a tagging mechanism that allows marketers the ability to track the sources and assets differently? Or create a different type of program that isn’t counted towards attribution? Or offer the ability to weigh each program differently which would solve a number of reporting challenges?

Workaround: Some companies are creating content programs without giving success to those programs - the attribution credit doesn’t show up within Advanced Report Builder. This is a whack-a-mole solution where one solution addresses one issue while creating another.

Wish 6: Webhook Batch

Wish Details: When this feature was brought up, everybody nodded in agreement. Why does a webhook have to be used as a trigger only? For example, if someone wants to batch a nightly data cleansing webhook campaign against a list of new webinar registrants, a nightly batch campaign won’t trigger the webhook.?

The belief is that Marketo has implemented this feature to reduce potential performance issues around massive webhook batches, which makes sense, but leaves the group wanting more.

Workaround: The accepted workaround is to use a batch campaign to activate a trigger campaign creating two campaigns instead of one.

EX: A user could create a nightly batch data cleansing campaign that adds someone to a list like “Nightly Data Cleanse.” A separate trigger campaign could fire when someone is added to that “Nightly Data Cleanse” list that triggers the webhook to the external data cleansing services.

Wish 6: GDPR Out of the Box?

Wish Details: Marketo does not offer any standard compliance capabilities out of the box besides the unsubscribe process. Marketo offers great flexibility to create a GDPR compliance policy but it's very custom. Many companies need this advanced flexibility while some do not.?

Could Marketo offer a checkbox for users to add GDPR compliance to any form? Or just make it some kind of global setting?

Workaround: Users must create custom policies, workflows and/or forms for GDPR management.

Wish 7: Dynamic Language Translation?

Wish Details: One of the BMUG member’s manages hundreds of forms with numerous languages. How can the company leverage some kind of auto translation for forms? The workaround is very manual at the moment and the company is managing all the forms and pages separately.?

Workaround: There are some custom solutions to streamline this translation process using tokens, global forms and custom code. There is a lot of upfront work to streamline these processes but the long term benefit brings greater efficiency and reduced errors.?

Wish 8: Compliance Tracking for Sales Insight?

Wish Details: One of the BMUG members runs marketing operations for a financial institution which needs to keep track of every single message sent by its financial professionals. When rolling out Sales Insight, the complete message must be logged from a compliance perspective.

Is there a way to automatically archive messages in a compliant manner that are sent to recipients via Sales Insight? Some kind of BCC?

Workaround: TBD

Conclusion

Marketo is extremely powerful and the user base is passionate about leveraging the application to do amazing things in marketing. This community's passion shines whenever new features are discussed. Although popular in the community, we didn't get to features like Auto-Save disable or Undo or a Recycle bin. See other Top Requests in the Ideas section of the Marketo community.

What did we miss? Any workarounds to suggest?

Next BMUG Meeting: December at TBD location