Marketo hosted their October ‘20 Release Innovations last week to run through some of the latest functionality that’s set to take the platform by storm over the next quarter. Here’s our view on what some of the features might mean for our clients and their marketing programs!
Account Smart Lists
As you might know, Marketo operates on a ‘Person’ basis when it comes to smart list and filtering criteria, but with ABM becoming more popular as a marketing strategy for B2B companies (something Agent3 knows all too much about!) it’s about time Marketo gave it’s Target Account Management users account-segmenting functionality. We’re now able to leverage Account Smart Lists to gather criteria on our target accounts, and drill-down on the person attributes within those accounts for even better targeting.
More Emails! (Assuming they’re opted in…)
Yep – If your database is big enough, and you have the opt-ins, you can now blast 5 million emails per hour! That’s certainly a lot, and it’s great to see Marketo is increasing its bandwidth for email marketing, which is helpful for business and customer-wide updates (We’d assume a targeted email campaign isn’t going to 5 million people!)
Form Spam Protection
Something the Marketo team mentioned on the webinar was that Marketo is now blocking bots and spam submissions on Marketo forms, leveraging known patterns on behaviour preventing them ever entering your database – at no extra cost! This is something that’ll be a huge help in keeping database numbers low, and your data hygiene clean. I’ll be keen to see how intelligent this is in practice!
Inclusive Naming Updates
Whilst this isn’t a product update per se, it was nice to see the Marketo Engage terminology making a shift to more inclusive naming conventions when it comes to email and marketing technology terminology – Whitelist is becoming Allowlist, and Blacklist is becoming Blocklist. ?
Enhanced Audit Trail
We’ve all had it where an email goes out the door, and something’s different from when it was approved! Maybe the body text has changed, maybe an image is different, or a link is going to the wrong place but trying to figure out how and who the change was made by proves difficult. The Audit Trail typically shows us a high level view of an asset change and who made it, but not what the change was. Now with the enhanced audit trail, we can see exactly what text, image, link, you name it, was changed. Not that we’re in the business of pointing fingers, but it’s still good to know…
Opportunity Custom Fields
When digging through your database and drilling into the Lead Details, you can now see custom fields from the Opportunity object, allowing your Marketing users to see more about the opportunities at hand with your chosen contacts.
Salesforce Sync Errors
If like many of our clients, your Salesforce to Marketo integration struggles from time to time, Marketo has now re-vamped and improved the display of sync errors between the marketing automation platform and your CRM. There’s a bit more information, and some new filterable options that will make it easier (we hope!) to troubleshoot any sync issues that might crop up.
For a full rundown of the new features and functionalities coming, including more on Paid Media Targeting, Administration changes and Adobe integrations, you can see the Marketo Engage October ‘20 Release Notes here.
If you’d like to know how you’ll be able to take advantage of these new capabilities for your organization, speak to one of our certified Marketo specialists. Visit this page for more information or email martech@agent3.com.