Marketo’s August Release Review

In keeping with our mission to share with you the best ways to use Marketo, I will go through some of the latest feature updates. There were some big ones this summer including Engagement Programs, Text Only Emails, and even new View as Webpage tokens. Engagement Programs were groundbreaking, but many of the other updates were longstanding gripes we all had with Marketo. With these new ways to handle testing and old triggers, Marketo users everywhere save their time for awesome nurturing planning.

Let’s take a look at some of the new features.

Text Only Emails in Marketo

Sending a nice, non spammy email in a simple text format was just not possible before. You had to send both HTML and text, or just HTML. Naturally this can cause issues with Spam filters as well as make it harder to create an email that looks like it came from a sales person. (btw, I decided I do not like those fake emails).

With the new text only email feature, you can now enter any email, change Email Settings to “Text Only” and type up a friendly email without all the trimmings.

This is an easy step to take:

1. Create a new email.
2. Press “Edit Settings”
3. Check “Text Only”
4. Save.

Remember, anything you put in the HTML side is ignored.

Trigger Campaign Cleanup

I wish I had thought of this one! In the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo, I mention that the best practice is to clean up Marketo every 6 months. Cleanup involves archiving old events, webinars, etc. Cleanup should also include deleting old assets and turning off listen campaigns. Now Marketo prompts you to do this every quarter, giving you a 1 week warning. So if that whitepaper expired a year ago and no one has filled out the form in 6 months, that trigger is being deactivated. That’s service! The part Marketo didn’t mention is that shutting down unused triggers speeds up the system for everyone.

Trigger Campaign Cleanup is now best practice – and automated! Here’s what mine currently looks like. Good thing I checked since all  of my trigger systems are going offline today.

New System Tokens!

For a very long time, a common newbie question has been “How do I move the Unsubscribe Link?” and its follow up, “How do I move the View as Web Page Link?”

View as Web Page: In the past, you had to go to Admin > Email and adjust the defaults, being careful to avoid changing the actual token link code.

%mkt_webview_url%?mkt_tok=##MKT_TOK##

Dan Reed posted a View as Web Page solution several months ago that allowed you to use the token however you wanted.

a href="http://[LandingPageCNAME.YourDomain].com/index.php/email/emailWebview?%mkt_webview_url%?mkt_tok=##MKT_TOK##"

Marketo just made this super easy by letting you use a single token anywhere in the email to generate the correct URL for View as Web Page. Instead of Dan’s solution, just drop this code into your Text version or in the URL on the HTML side. You can easily drop this into any Email Template, just remember that any existing emails based on that template will be put into Approved with Draft.

{{system.view​AsWebpageLink}}

This token works the same way Forward to Friend does.

Similarly, Unsubscribe links were a bit hard to deal with. We could have used a couple of solutions.

1. Dan’s solution should work for Unsubscribe links as well.
2. If you created a Subscription Management page, you can edit the system-wide default to that page. Go to Admin > Email and replace the link and text with your page’s URL. Just remember to copy the existing text and save it somewhere!
3. You can remove the system default and code the link you want into your Template. Of course, you better place a link to your Subscription Management page or else!

The new, better way is to use the unsubscribe system token!

{{system.unsubscribeLink}}

Just drop that into any URL or text email and you’re done!

Take a look at how to do this since this isn’t done in the docs:

And look at your handiwork:

That’s it for today! Remember to sign up for future updates because we’re going to talk about Engagement Program testing as well as more discussions with marketing automation agencies. Be ready for the Fall push with Marketo!