Over the past few weeks, we have heard from people within the Marketo User Groups, attendees from our Top Tips Sessions, and polled the 50+ consultants at Digital Pi to understand what everyone is looking for as Marketo Engage grows.
Discussions featured requests, or wishlist items, for additional capabilities they would love to see in Marketo and how they were working around them in the meantime.
Let’s jump into eight of these “wishlist items” in no particular order…
Wish 1: Better Visualization of Marketo Workflows
Wish Details: “A picture tells a thousand words” is an old proverb. This request revolves around the desire for Marketo to provide better visuals around workflows and nurturing paths. The power of the flow steps within Marketo is very strong but this doesn’t translate well or help when the practitioner needs to show a visualization to another person or team [EX: Presenting a new nurture path to the Sales group].
“Wouldn’t it be great to be able to push a button and auto-magically get a visualization of a workflow?” was one comment.
From a usability perspective, there was also discussion around flow steps and how the flow step method has worked well for years. One Marketo user said “we all have that plugged into our Marketo brains” while someone else suggested that the branching of decisions could be made more intuitive with drag and drop capabilities. This would show what happens when different decisions are made (Similar to the Advanced Report Build Modeler).
Final thought: Could Marketo add a “standard mode” and “visual mode” to satisfy both needs?
Workarounds: Some users are leveraging PowerPoint or Visio to recreate the workflows in order to paint the picture for others or to help architect the workflow prior to building it.
Wish 2: New Marketo Chat Capabilities
Wish Details: A different user wished Marketo had an integrated chat function that captured information and routed leads. While this wishlist item came partially true in 2022 with the introduction of Dynamic Chat, there are still elements missing leaving the group wishing for more.
The group was interested in finding out how others were using the feature. To recap the discussion here’s a basic break down of the Dynamic Chat have and have-nots:
| Current Dynamic Chat Capabilities: | Features Lacking in Current Dynamic Chat |
| Create a dynamic conversation | Real-time chat capability |
| Connect conversation data to Marketo for tracking and management | Ability to route leads with parameters |
| Set up meetings with Sales Reps with basic round-robin lead assigning | |
| Offer content as a complement to standard forms |
Workarounds: Marketo users have been using alternative chat solutions like Drift and Qualified that offer deeper capabilities however, some are going to try the automated bot-like capabilities of Marketo to test the waters. One major advantage to Dynamic Chat is the price: currently, it’s free with a Marketo Engage subscription. Stay tuned.
Wish 3: Spambot Management
Wish Details: It was exciting to hear how some people got their wish come true for spambot management with the August 2022 release as spambots and other illegitimate leads has been an issue for a while.
Several people lamented how Google leads will come in containing bogus information. Anyone that gets “leads” from emails like “ubweubwu@uuvyu.com” understands the pain.
The new CAPTCHA feature evaluates the validity of form submissions using reCAPTCHA v3 to score incoming form traffic. Users can build marketing workflows to automatically exclude, quarantine, or delete suspicious bot traffic.
Workaround: A past workaround was to create a hidden honeypot field to help determine if the form fill was completed by a human or a bot. Now users can use this new recapture method to address this need.
Wish 4: Search by User ID
Wish Details: Can Marketo offer a way to search a user by ID making it easier to identify duplicates with the same email address?
This wish comes true instantly as this feature already exists in Marketo. Simply go to the search box of the Database section and type in the user ID. Make sure to prepend with “[Id].”
Wish 5: Content Tagging for Better Attribution.
Wish Details: Marketo Programs offer a great way to capture information about specific initiatives like webinars, white papers, ebooks, trade shows and display advertising. The challenge is that Marketo treats all of those programs the same from an attribution perspective. This is not helpful when trying to understand the different vehicles that bring success to marketing investment. For example, if someone is part of a Google display ad program (source) that drove someone to an ebook program (asset), that member attribution would be double counted.
Could Marketo create a tagging mechanism that allows marketers the ability to track the sources and assets differently? Or create a different type of program that isn’t counted towards attribution? Or offer the ability to weigh each program differently which would solve a number of reporting challenges?
Workaround: Some companies are creating content programs without giving success to those programs – the attribution credit doesn’t show up within Advanced Report Builder. This is a whack-a-mole solution where one solution addresses one issue while creating another.
Wish 6: Webhook Batch
Wish Details: When this feature was brought up, everybody nodded in agreement. Why does a webhook have to be used as a trigger only? For example, if someone wants to batch a nightly data cleansing webhook campaign against a list of new webinar registrants, a nightly batch campaign won’t trigger the webhook.
The belief is that Marketo has implemented this feature to reduce potential performance issues around massive webhook batches, which makes sense, but leaves the group wanting more.
Workaround: The accepted workaround is to use a batch campaign to activate a trigger campaign creating two campaigns instead of one.
EX: A user could create a nightly batch data cleansing campaign that adds someone to a list like “Nightly Data Cleanse.” A separate trigger campaign could fire when someone is added to that “Nightly Data Cleanse” list that triggers the webhook to the external data cleansing services.
Wish 6: GDPR Out of the Box
Wish Details: Marketo does not offer any standard compliance capabilities out of the box besides the unsubscribe process. Marketo offers great flexibility to create a GDPR compliance policy but it’s very custom. Many companies need this advanced flexibility while some do not.
Could Marketo offer a checkbox for users to add GDPR compliance to any form?
Workaround: Users must create custom policies, workflows and/or forms for GDPR management.
Wish 7: Dynamic Language Translation.
Wish Details: One person we spoke with manages hundreds of forms with numerous languages. How can the company leverage some kind of auto-translation for forms? The workaround is very manual at the moment and the company is managing all the forms and pages separately.
Workaround: There are some custom solutions to streamline this translation process using tokens, global forms and custom code. There is a lot of upfront work to streamline these processes but the long term benefit brings greater efficiency and reduced errors.
Wish 8: Compliance Tracking for Sales Insight
Wish Details: Another person we polled runs marketing operations for a financial institution that needs to keep track of every single message sent by its financial professionals. When rolling out Sales Insight, the complete message must be logged from a compliance perspective.
Is there a way to automatically archive messages in a compliant manner that are sent to recipients via Sales Insight? Some kind of BCC?
Workaround: TBD
What did we miss? Any workarounds to suggest?