The May release is almost here! This release is packed with long awaited updates based on Marketo user requests and feedback, some of which were posted as ideas on the Marketo Community as far back as a decade ago!
With spring in the air and major changes on the horizon, we are definitely feeling the Adobe customer love. Here’s our favorite new features, why we love them, and our thoughts on how you can leverage them to make marketing operations more efficient (and your life a little easier!).
Before we jump into what’s coming, let’s talk about recent improvements to the Marketo Engage User Experience:
- Drag and drop went away with the new experience, but it’s back and working as well as ever. If you haven’t tried to drag and drop Smart Lists or Programs into folders— give it a try!
- Colors are back in the main folder tree panel which is a huge visual improvement to easily discern different types of programs and assets.
Now for some upcoming changes, why we love them and what they could mean for you.
1. Execute Campaign Flow Steps
From Marketo: Streamline campaign creation workflows and improve campaign performance with a new flow step for Smart Campaigns. Create and save centralized, template campaigns for repetitive tasks in your workspace, such as country code normalization, to be called and run from any Smart Campaign via the new “Execute Campaign” flow step. Linked campaigns will run in the designated order and ensure task completion before advancing to the next flow step. Quickly edit the flow in just one centralized campaign to update every Smart Campaign that’s using it to streamline data management, lead scoring and routing workflows.
Why we love it
One of the primary ways we help our clients is by doing a deep dive into ‘order of operations’ and sync timing between Marketo and CRM. This includes auditing what happens in each system minute by minute and in what order to ensure a successful sync where the lead lands properly in CRM and gets routed based on the conditions’. We are already dreaming up ways to optimize order of operations with this functionality. Let us know how you plan to use it or reach out to us to brainstorm how it can be applied for your instance.
2. Filter-out Email Bots Activity
From Marketo: Prevent unintended sales alerts and inaccurate email reporting through the new email bot activity filtering capability. Identify and filter out opens and clicks that can be associated with email bots inspecting links leading to false triggers and sales alerts, or incorrect reporting.
Why we love it
Identifying email bot activity has been a struggle for marketers for a long time. This new feature will improve the quality of information within Marketo, allowing for more accurate email reporting. Is this a familiar sight
These activities were performed by a spam filter. Currently, Marketo can’t differentiate between bot activity and real human engagement. Without filtering out bot activity, email open and click metrics could be inflated and inaccurate. Thankfully, this new release promises to provide this filtering capability, allowing marketers to ignore the noise and focus on the actual engagement. Come May, we’ll get a better sense of which leads are truly engaging, prevent ice cold leads from being prematurely sent to Sales and ensure lead nurturing is reflective of how prospects are engaging in the inbox.
This update is sure to be one which Marketo users will welcome with open arms, but could be a shock to the system if you’ve been including bot activity in your reporting when your metrics suddenly change.
Pro tip: Start setting expectations now with your team on the potential impact this will have on reporting so that it’s not a surprise. Be sure to accentuate the positive, which is that you’ll have more accurate reporting on actual human engagement with bot clicks removed.
3. Block Spam Form Submissions
From Marketo: Protect your Marketo Engage database from junk leads that trigger invalid alerts to sales, campaign backlogs, and create unwanted activities. The new validation mechanism rejects invalid form submissions and stops bot attacks. Your data is cleaner, and your marketing campaigns run as intended, minimizing the risk of sending unqualified leads to sales.
Why we love it
Who doesn’t like clean data? With this newest update, your Marketo Engage database will be better protected from invalid form submissions from those pesky bot attacks— resulting in better Sales and Marketing alignment as well as downstream reporting. Cleaner data means smoother sailing for everyone.
We hope you are as excited about testing out these new features as we are. Looking for more information? Check out the May release notes. If you need help with incorporating these new features or simply need clarification on how to leverage the new features yourself please reach out.
What are your favorite features? Let us know!
The post Marketo Engage May Release: Our Favorite New Features appeared first on Demand Spring.
