Marketo Engage August '22 Release Overview

It's been a busy year for Marketo, with the general release of dynamic chat to all Marketo Engage customers marking the introduction of a major new product area for many customers. The new capability has been gradually rolling out to all instances over recent weeks. This chatbot capability is not yet as sophisticated as dedicated competitors. However, it is good enough for basic use cases. Furthermore, every release has brought subsequent enhancements to the chat capabilities, and this month is no exception. Custom avatars and the ability to view chat transcripts are the new capabilities introduced this time. Sales teams will benefit too, as chatbot interactions will now be displayed in the Marketo Sales Insight plugin for Salesforce and Dynamics 365.

UX

The other ongoing change to Marketo is purely cosmetic. The next generation user experience has been gradually rolled out since last year. Every release sees an additional screen updated to the new style. Initially, the new UI was disabled by default. In the spring, it was enabled by default for all Marketo customers. Now, it's being extended to design studio with a refresh of the images and files screens, as well as the snippets screens being updated to the new layout.

There are two more important UI changes in this month's Marketo release. The first affects the asset editor screens, which are finally being updated to have the same Adobe branding and colour system as the rest of the application. That removes a slightly jarring inconsistency, given they're the only part of the UI which still uses the old Marketo purple background.

From a functionality perspective, a slight change to the program interface should make a noticeable difference. It may not be universally popular though. The list of folders in the move and clone dialogues will no longer be arranged in alphabetical order. Instead, the complete folder hierarchy will be displayed in the same order as the main folder tree allowing users to navigate down the tree when selecting the new location for a program. This may be slightly slower for those with complex hierarchies, but makes it easier to identify what all the folders in the list are supposed to be. The change only affects assets saved globally in the main folder tree, folders within a program will still be listed in alphabetical order purely because there are fewer of them.

Forms

The new release introduces several new enhancements for Marketo forms. Security teams will appreciate the introduction of native support for captcha v3. This will increase the security of Marketo forms and lower spam submissions without negatively impacting the user experience. The new versions of captcha are invisible to users in most circumstances, only appearing if suspicious behaviour is detected. They're also optional, and can be disabled on some or all forms if conversion rates are impacted by the change.

It's always been possible to integrate captcha into Marketo forms using a combination of custom JavaScript and webhooks. However, this isn't natively supported and has its downsides. The new built-in capability will make implementing captcha simpler for everyone, and will also automatically block contacts who fail captcha from entering the database. Custom solutions don’t do this. They only delete spam form submissions after they've made it into Marketo, which has risks and can skew reporting.

Also being introduced is a new user permission for approving forms. This eliminates one of the major inconsistencies in Marketo user security. Until now, it hasn’t been possible to restrict users from approving changes to forms. The theory was that restricting approvals to landing pages was sufficient, given that updates to form fields require re-approving all landing pages using the form as well. However, it is now far more common to use Marketo form embeds on the website than it is to use Marketo forms on Marketo landing pages. When the embed code is used, any changes to Marketo forms are automatically updated on the website as soon as the form is saved and approved. This can be a problem for companies that require a power user to review any changes before they go live. For emails and landing pages it is possible to enforce this workflow by restricting approval permissions to the delegated users. In the past, this hasn’t been possible with forms. Now it is, which will please Marketo admins that have a strong focus on QA.

These are not the only updates this month. There are API and munchkin tracking enhancements too. For full details of what's in the current release, view the release notes on Adobe Experience League.