Get Smart with Marketo’s Q4 Release

For the past few years, Marketo has put out releases fast and furiously on a monthly basis. For many customers, it became difficult to keep track of all the new goodies.

Starting this quarter, Marketo is moving to a quarterly release cycle. Check out the goodies you’ll start seeing on October 23, 2015, which includes added intelligence with automated Smart Lists, more power with custom objects and additional mobile friendliness.

My personal favorite: Scheduled Smart Lists significantly enhance the way marketers provide intelligence to Sales. Learn why below.

Marketing Automation 

Below are features as documented in Marketo’s What’s New and announcement from Cheryl Chavez, VP of Product Experience.

Subscribe to Smart List for Added Intelligence

For additional intelligence, schedule Smart Lists to be sent directly to your inbox, enabling marketers to send lead lists to the Marketing and Sales teams on a scheduled basis.

RevEngine Insider Insights: This is my favorite feature of the year as it’s been high on the feature request list for years. Now Marketo customers can send automated lead lists to Marketing and Sales to provide another level of intelligence. For example, marketers can currently send alerts when a lead turns into an MQL. We all know alerts can get lost (and a little irritating if too many are sent). The scheduled Smart Lists features complement alerts by providing a daily or weekly recap of activity.

These lists are especially important for Salesforce organizations where reps work both Leads and Contacts, yet cannot run detailed reports of both at the same time within the CRM. Now marketers can use one Marketo report to share the intelligence. A few use cases:

  • This Week’s MQLs – Get a snapshot of all the new MQLs that hit your system this week sent to your inbox. Include a column that provides the current status so you can see if that MQL moved along your lifecycle success path.
  • Aging MQLs – Leads sitting in the system too long? How about sending a note to your Sales team with the aging leads. This is great for adding to your No Lead Left Behind Strategy—these capabilities will immediately become part of our clients’ No Lead Left Behind programs.
  • Today’s New Leads. Get a snapshot of any leads created today sent to the inbox of Marketing and Sales.
  • Today’s Webinar Signups. Wonder who signed up for the webinar today? Get a daily recap.

There are so many uses for this feature, look for a future post.

Marketo Custom Objects 

Create Marketo custom objects in the admin section. This allows organizations to create a 1:N custom object in Marketo and connect it to a lead or company. As an additional feature, admins can add new fields to the custom object sync without disabling and enabling your entire custom object.

RevEngine Insider Insights: Organizations with advanced needs around syncing custom data with Marketo have been waiting for this feature for quite some time. For example, we recently began working with a client who has a custom CRM that Marketo didn’t support. Now they can add custom opportunity objects from that CRM to Marketo.

Marketo Mobile Enhancements  

View statistics on emails sent through smart campaigns with your mobile device.

RevEngine Insider Insights: In the summer of 2015, Marketo released capabilities to enable marketers to work from their smart devices. Marketo added more capabilities to enhance that experience.

Marketo Insights for Gmail Chrome 

New release for the Gmail Marketo Sales Insight extension: Emails sent through Google Mail are logged in Marketo and tracked in real-time.

RevEngine Insider Insights: More and more businesses are switching over to Google for their business applications. In fact, Google has over 5 million business users on its apps, which is as many followers as @TigerWoods.  Adding capabilities for Sales Insight for companies using Gmail makes sense.

 Rich-Text Editor Improvements 

After receiving feedback, Marketo completed an initial set of changes to the updated text editor including:

  • Maximize/minimize button added to the HTML source editor.
  • Pre-existing table properties are now identified and displayed in the Table Properties dialog.
  • Both rows of buttons are now shown by default.
  • And more!

RevEngine Insider Insights: Marketo recently reworked its editor, which left a couple of issues. Nothing earth shattering here but this release cleans some of those issues up.

Security Changes 

Configure your subscription’s inactive session timeout from login settings in admin. Also, max password attempts reduced to 5. 

RevEngine Insider Insights: I always found it a little strange why there was no inactivity security time limit setting. Well, now it’s here.

Search by URL of Landing Page in Design Studio

In the Design Studio Landing page grid, you can now search by page URL to find your landing pages. This is also exportable.

RevEngine Insider Insights: It doesn’t happen often but if you have ever tried to track down a URL in Marketo, you’d be better off searching for the Titanic.  This enhancement is ideal for when you want to retire pages on your site and want to locate them in Marketo.

Real-Time Personalization

A few of the new features include:

  • Content Analysis — Ability to see which content is performing best.
  • Clone Campaign  Clone your personalized web campaigns.
  • Content Analytics — See the metrics and performance of your web content and recommended content.

RevEngine Insider Insights: Marketo is betting heavily on the Real-Time Personalization (RTP) module that personalizes the web experience for visitors. For example, if a person is visiting your site from a finance institution, RTP can serve up a financial case study to provide a more relevant experience.

This release continues to build on those capabilities as more companies begin adopting the solution.

IE 11 Support

Marketo now supports the Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 browser and is deprecating support for IE 9 by the end of 2015.

RevEngine Insider Insights: We always recommend Chrome but if you are using IE, version 11 is now supported.

Other Enhancements

  • Microsoft Dynamics Enhancements
    • Validate Sync — A new admin tool that allows you to check your sync configuration.
    • New Dynamics Plug-In — With improved performance characteristics.
  • Lightning Support for Marketo Sales Insight — Support for Salesforce’s legacy framework and the new Lightning UI.

See the complete What’s New.

What’s your favorite feature? Feel free to comment below.

The post Get Smart with Marketo’s Q4 Release appeared first on RevEngine Marketing.

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