Marketo June 22 Release Overview

2022 has been a busy year for the Marketo development team. The launch of dynamic chat earlier in the year was a significant milestone for the platform. In parallel, the gradual rollout of the next generation user interface has been proceeding at a regular cadence. On top of this, a set of major new developer capabilities will drastically expand the power and flexibility of Marketo workflows.

Self-Service Flow Steps

Marketo has been able to integrate external services into smart campaign workflows for a very long time. The Call Webhook flow step allows the platform to call to external applications directly within a trigger campaign. This capability is used by custom CRM integrations, consent management databases and requests to third-party applications. It's a key mechanism for embedding Marketo into the wider tech stack.

However, webhooks are a very limited capability. They're an open standard but not one that is widely implemented. Most third-party apps have custom interfaces into their API that are more feature-rich and more secure. The release of self-serve flow steps allows Marketo to integrate those services directly into any smart campaign workflow.

Most importantly, the new self-service flow steps can be used in any type of smart campaign. This is relevant for two reasons. Firstly, it increases the flexibility of the platform. Custom integrations can be requested from batch campaigns and executable campaigns for the first time. That will be a valuable boost for companies struggling not to exceed Marketo API limits, which is a common problem for instances with large numbers of integrations. The new capabilities will help reduce the burden on the API by allowing custom integrations in batch campaigns. As a result, multiple contacts can now be combined into a single request, saving time and server resources on both sides.

Webhooks still have their place in the Marketo ecosystem. They're even getting enhancements in this release too. Marketo webhooks now support a broader range of request types for improved compatibility with more web services. Within the platform, they'll remain a great way of pushing low volumes of simple API calls to external systems. For more complex requests, the new self-service steps are a better fit.

Tracking & Validation

The global form validation rule feature introduced late last year becomes much more useful in this release. While a great idea, this capability has been limited by a distinct lack of flexibility. In particular, any configured rules could only be applied to all forms or none. It wasn't possible to apply a rule only to specific forms. This restriction is partially removed in this release because it is now possible to exclude particular forms from a configured rule. That means that rules blocking the submission of personal email addresses can be applied to lead capture forms on the website but don't have to apply to business-critical system forms.

From a GDPR perspective, this change is highly important because it allows companies to collect opt-outs or update email preferences for any person subscribed using their personal email address. Until now, this hasn't been possible when a global form validation rule was enabled. This new feature fixes that, allowing Marketo users to restrict data collection to business email addresses only when it makes sense. Just remember that any enabled global form validation rules are applied to all new forms by default.

Elsewhere, a small but useful enhancement to email tracking should eliminate a frustrating oversight that catches out many Marketo users. Until now, it has not been possible to track clicks on mailto or tel links. These are the types of link used when linking to an email address or a phone number rather than a web page. That limitation has been corrected. Future email sends will track clicks on these links, allowing them to appear in reporting for the first time.

UI Updates

UI updates have been a major theme in Marketo this year. Last month saw the new UI enabled by default where it has been implemented, as well as the refresh of the Email Template screens in design studio. This month, there are no new changes to the next generation user experience. Instead, custom object users will see a small but welcome change. The create and update dates for individual custom object records will now be visible in the Marketo UI. This will help with data validation when viewing custom objects in the person detail screens.

Finally, there are some small permission changes for Marketo Sales Insight (MSI) in Salesforce. The MSI plugin is licensed per user, but it has always been challenging to actually enforce these license limits in Salesforce. That's because there is no way to restrict MSI access by user in Salesforce, only by security profile. A new Salesforce permission has been released to correct this problem, enabling better compliance with Adobe license terms for those companies using MSI.

These are not the only updates this month. There are reporting and routing enhancements to Dynamic Chat too. For full details of what's in the current release, view the release notes on Adobe Experience League.