Marketo New Features Announced

If you are as geeky as us about Marketo, you will love this. After brainstorming with the Macro team, we've summarized here a few exciting innovations in the Marketo marketing automation platform announced at the virtual Adobe Summit this week:

Bi-Directional Sync from Marketo to the Adobe Experience Cloud

You should be able to activate your data from Marketo into the other Adobe products. For example, automatically sync known Marketo smart lists and segments with AA, AAM, AEM, Target, Advertising Cloud and RT-CDP.

The other way around, you should be able to bring into Marketo the audiences for campaigns from AA, AAM and RT-CDP.

Easier Sign-In Across Multiple Instances

Some of our large enterprise clients who have multiple Marketo instances for different Business Units or Regions will love to hear that you will be able to manage all users and who can log in from one place. No need to have different emails for each instance. This is the Adobe Identify system which will allow you to

• Use only one email to log into all Adobe Solutions
• Manage permissions and groups from one place
• Configure Single-Sign-On (SSO) across multiple instances

Account Based Segmentation

You should be able to create Marketo Segments and Smart Lists using Account data.

Currently still in Beta, this is a very promising feature for everyone who wants to better understand their ABM data in Marketo. ABM campaigns are not cheap so having good data can help you better manage the cost of your ABM campaigns.

It’s not clear if this will be available for everyone, or if you need the additional ABM functionality. It is a very much needed and exciting functionality never the less.

Next Generation User Experience (UX)

You probably already noticed in your instance multiple look-and-feels which can be very frustrating. The direction for the UX here to standardize the experience and usability across the rest of the Adobe products. You will see

• New navigation tree with new icons
• Enhanced global search which allows you to quickly find something in your instance
• Ability to change between old and new UX so you can learn at your own pace

At the moment, multiple interfaces are really slowing users down so hope this will be a smooth transition.

Marketo Sales Insight Improved

Very good additions which your sales team will love are the improvements to the Sales Insight. You can now:

• Test email personalization with tokens before sending
• Understand better the deliverability of your sales emails
• Use bulk actions on Accounts and Opportunity tabs to manage data

Parent and Child Batch Campaigns Flow Action

Now you can execute a structure of batch campaign flow actions. Parent campaigns can execute sub-campaign and wait for child campaigns to execute before moving to the next flow action.

• Execute automation programs in series or in parallel
• When in-series guarantees execution of all steps in invoked Campaigns
• Allows both modular editing of workflows, and synchronous execution of those workflows

This feature will be very useful for flow steps with conditions similar to IF statements especially when you want to clean-up your marketing data or update lead lifecycle in batch.

Bots Prevention Improved

Everyone is frustrated when bots bloat your Marketo database, show up in sales notifications or they skew email click-through reporting.

You should have some new features in the never-ending fight against bots:

Prevent Fake Email Clicks

If you pay close attention to your email metrics, you will notice some people love to click all your email links. That is often a bot who is not your engaged MQL. This leads to false triggers and false sales alerts. Now, you should be able to automatically identify and filter out email bot clicks activity.

Stop Bots from Form

Adobe uses a “shield” called Cloudflare Bot Management that detects bots submitting forms and also stops Denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

You will now be able to detect and block bots form submissions based on known patters from ever entering your database. This is usually a pattern in email addresses or names which is detected on server side. 

Help! Bots are invading my instance!

If you still notice bots coming into your instance, then submit a support ticket and ask to check Cloudflare Bot Management as well as the server-side validation.

You can also look at implementing Google Re-captcha v3 which is out now or a “Honey Pot” fields.

Hope you will be able to leverage this improved functionality to scale your marketing operations and make your job easier. Macro team is here to help!