There were quite a few enhancements to the landing page UX — with the biggest callout being the removal of the toggle switch (in other words, the Classic Experience will no longer be available). 

Leverage inferred attributes in operational programs

Many businesses rely on inferred attributes to identify when GDPR or CCPA compliance is required. Inferred attributes allow you to remove fields on forms and can reduce friction, yet there are downsides. 

Inferred attributes aren’t able to accurately capture VPN data. Some legal teams may prefer keeping these fields on forms to avoid any compliance issues.

Why we care: Even if the best practice for data governance policies is to request the country of new people acquired, plenty of companies still rely on inferred data to trigger processes (lead assignment, consent management, etc.). If your company uses that data for any operational program, inbound leads from Dynamic Chat would be included in the operational programs.

Roles and permissions enhance security and control

Roles and permissions were added to Dynamic Chat, enabling admins to limit functionality based on selected user types. 

It sounds trivial, but controlling your team’s roles and permissions is undervalued. Many organizations experience issues resulting from team members having too much or too little access. 

Why we care: Security starts with providing the right access to the right people. Permissions can often be neglected, so this is a great step toward security and control. Allowing admins to assign roles provides a layer of security while still enabling your team to view past chats and data records.

Unlock the ROI of Dynamic Chat through enhanced reporting

Like Email or Engagement Programs, users can select a “Dynamic Chat” program that allows them to track the success and performance of their Dynamic Chat dialogue.

Reporting on the success of Dynamic Chat, in addition to that of other marketing programs, gives users a more comprehensive view of their marketing activities. In addition, users will be able to better gauge the ROI of Dynamic Chat to their business.

Nine additional languages are now supported 

Dynamic Chat users can choose from nine additional languages to display static chat content: French, German, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. 

Marketo sunsetting Classic Experience on landing pages 

Classic Experience on landing pages is being sunset. The new experience offers increased functionality without toggling between the two views, offering a more seamless and integrated experience. 

Why we care: The new UX provides enhanced details for individual assets, particularly the versioning of the asset. This provides a clear ability to view the current live and approved assets while working on an update in a draft version. Users will also have the ability to see in one view key information and settings about each version of the asset (approved vs. draft). 

In addition, the “Used By” tab was enhanced this month. It now lists all assets using a particular landing page template or form template. 

Asset lists in Marketo instances that use landing page templates and global forms for all assets can be long and tedious. The ability to sort assets quickly can speed up an audit or troubleshooting process.

View the complete set of March 2023 Marketo Release Notes here.

This article is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto + MERGE, a marketing operations consultancy.

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The Builder is based on templates and no-code modules allowing non-technical staff to collaborate on landing page creation. Stensul is emphasizing that this is not a repurposed email creation tool but a separate solution.

Why we care. The trend is for vendors who built their business on offering solutions for niche parts of the customer experience to seek its broader application. We have already seen vendors offering sophisticated email content capabilities pivot to offering those capabilities to experiences beyond email. Stensul’s territory is creation rather than content, but it makes sense that the Stensul platform would look to support creation and collaboration in other areas.

This reflects, of course, the need for marketers to think and strategize across multiple channels rather than one, no matter how important the email channel might be.

Dig deeper: Stensul is first email creation platform to integrate with Pardot

Marketo Engage integration. Stensul’s email creation capabilities have for some time been integrated with Adobe Marketo. It’s now announcing an API that will allow users within Stensul to embed Marketo forms in landing pages and upload the HTML to Marketo Marketing Activities with a single click.

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The October release continues a series of Dynamic Chat chatbot enhancements. Previous chatbot enhancements are here. The release of Dynamic Chat is discussed here. 

Dynamic Chat now supports Boolean logic, integers and floating point data 

Dynamic Chat audience targeting was enhanced by adding support for data types that will enable the Marketo chatbot to target based on scores and answers to yes/no questions. Support was added for booleans, integers and floating point data. 

Didn’t get that far in math class? Here’s a quick rundown:

Booleans enable the chatbot to determine whether a field is “True” or “False” and store that value on the record.  

• Why it helps: An organization may use the Boolean logic to ask questions that more accurately route customer calls. For example, if a prospect answers that she is in Canada and wants to speak to a salesperson — both are “true” in this case — her call could be routed automatically to the proper field office. This is known as “truth values” or “truth variables.”

Integer: Integers, commonly referred to as “int,” are whole numbers that can be either positive, negative, or zero. Integers cannot be a fractional number. Examples of integers are -2, 0, 2, 10 and 15.

• Why it helps: Integers could be used to identify highly engaged leads. By leveraging the Lead Score attribute, an integer data type, Dynamic Chat users could define the audience criteria based on their score. In this case, the chat would only appear for leads with scores that meet the Lead Score defined in the audience criteria. 

Float: Short for “floating point,” this is a number with a decimal point. Floats are typically used when more precision is needed.

• Why it helps: This feature will allow users to leverage more existing Marketo fields by syncing native and custom attributes across all three data types for better audience targeting. The data type can also be used to better target key accounts, something that all demand generation teams can appreciate. This increased level of precision will help create more meaningful experiences for both the visitor and the website.

Automated updates to meeting invites 

Scheduling meetings in Dynamic Chat will be enhanced for both web visitors and sales representatives. 

• For visitors: There will be an option to automatically include a Teams or Meet link in Google and Outlook calendar invites. This will be included in every calendar invite sent to visitors.
• For sales representatives: Reps will now receive an automated email notification whenever a meeting is scheduled with them. They will also receive any relevant information about the visitor’s chatbot communications. 

Why we care: Nobody likes back-and-forths, and this update ensures meeting links are posted to both the visitor’s and the sales rep’s calendars. 

It’s also a time saver for Marketo admins and sales reps. Admins no longer have the task of sending conversations generated by Dynamic Chat sessions to sales representatives, and reps won’t have to go into Dynamic Chat to view conversations. 

New roles and permissions announced 

Any Marketo admin knows the frustration of users having too much access to the platform. This can lead to things breaking and ultimately, more work for the Marketo admin. We were excited to hear Dynamic Chat is offering more granular permissions. These custom user roles will aid in governing the visibility and usage of the application. 

The custom user roles are:

• Full access: Designed for more advanced users, this role can take full advantage of Dynamic Chat, like publishing dialogues and editing the color scheme.
• Read-only access: Suitable for sales representatives, this role allows users to view information, but not make changes. This role is still helpful, as the user can view the audience criteria or stream designer.
• Restricted access: This user cannot view or access the Configuration or Integration sections.

Why we care: This update will make sales reps’ lives easier. They’ll be empowered to learn more about their prospects, without the assistance of admins. 

And since only admin-level access users can make revisions to the chat dialogue, unintentional changes will be minimized. 

Backend enhancements to Dynamic Chat 

Marketo will be improving the Dialogue canvas in Dynamic Chat (where the user builds out the chat stream) with the addition of a new feature that organizes the canvas into a clean and coherent format. All this is made possible with the click of a button through Auto Arrange. 

Prior to this update, the canvas was difficult to visually navigate. Now, the canvas can be organized in an organized, easy-to-read format. 

Why we care: We appreciate any update that saves us time. This update will be helpful from a usability standpoint, especially for those with more complex dialogues. Although this update is fairly minor, it will make it easier and more efficient for users to visually navigate their Dialogue Canvas. 

The Auto Arrange button can be found in the top right corner of the canvas (included as the last icon in the screenshot below).

What does it look like in action? Here’s a preview.

View the complete set of October 2022 Marketo Release Notes.

This article is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto + MERGE , a marketing operations consultancy.

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The future is composable

Although the overt theme of Symposium was “Meet every moment” — highlighting the challenge of engaging customers with immediately relevant content at each moment of their journey — the constantly reinforced message from a technology perspective was composability.

While some vendors feel the tension between trying to sell a complete platform to customers and allowing them to pick the components they need to complete their stacks, Sitecore is evidently all-in on composability; the proposition, as Chief Product Officer Dave O’Flanagan put it, that customers should be allowed to assemble “a stack as unique as their business.” This may mean one or 10 Sitecore products in the DX stack, but connections to as many other third-party vendor products as needed.

“We are on a mission to redefine this category with our composable DXP,” said O’Flanagan. Sitecore thus boasts, not just an end-to-end suite of DXP components, but an end-to-end suite of composable products — and it claims to be the only vendor in its space with that specific offering.

This does not mean, however, that Sitecore does not want to be the center, hub, or indeed core of the stack. Sitecore Cloud Portal offers an opportunity for administrators to manage the stack — including permissions, product access and payments. What’s notable is that the Portal allows the management not just of the Sitecore modules, but also third-party products in the stack (a demo slide showed Salesforce and Marketo, for example).

Introducing three new products

Sitecore announced the addition of three new modules to its product portfolio: Sitecore Search, Sitecore Connect and Content Hub One.

Sitecore Search

This is an AI-driven and personalized search engine, capable of searching content beyond just text. It will predict relevant search results (using autocomplete) and promote content based either on the customer’s behavior and search needs or business objectives.

As a plug-and-play solution it can be deployed on a website within hours. Marketing teams, said O’Flanagan, can manage the search experience without technical knowledge. On the composability theme again Search can be deployed to index any CMS, Sitecore or not.

Sitecore Connect

Emphasizing the composability of its product offering, Sitecore Connect, developed in partnership with Workato, is aimed at allowing brands to integrate Sitecore products with existing solutions within the martech stack. It promises a low/no code drag-and-drop UI. It expects to offer more than 1,000 connectors.

O’Flanagan readily admits that building a unique, composed stack, rather than adopting a monolithic suite, can introduce complexity. Connect aims to “solve some of the integration ‘tax’ of the composable DXP,” he said.

Content Hub One

Content Hub, Sitecore’s existing CMS solution, enables content planning, creation, production and managment within a single collaborative system. Content Hub One is an agile, headless iteration of Content Hub, available to brands wanting to deploy a holistic content strategy across a wide range of channels: web, mobile, smart screen displays, voice assistants, etc.

The offering envisages developers building front-ends for content delivery while marketers work in parallel to create the content.

Sitecore also said it was improving editing interfaces and testing capabilities within the Sitecore Experience Manager (XM) Cloud which offers Sitecore’s core CMS, along with other capabilities, as a native cloud product. (SItec’s traditional Platform DXP will continue to be available on private cloud with a subscription.

Consumers are ready for the metaverse

Sitecore also unveiled research at Symposium suggesting that consumer expectations for metaverse-type experiences are growing, even as the metaverse itself is still in the early stages of development.

• Perhaps surprisingly, almost 90% of consumers believe the metaverse will be important to the way they shop and interact with brands.
• Almost 80% expect to spend more time in the metaverse than on social media apps.
• Around 70% of marketers expect to develop metaverse-like experiences in 2023.
• Of those, around half anticipate devoting 10-25% of their marketing budget to those experiences.

The data was based on a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers aged 18-70, and jus over 300 brand marketers.

Accenture partnership enhanced

Sitecore also announced an extension of its partnership with Accenture. Accenture, in part through its majority owned consultancy Avanade, has a long history of working with SItecore implementations and collaborations.

Sitecore will become a member of Accenture’s relative exclusive strategic platform group

Dig deeper: Sitecore transitions core solution to a modern cloud architecture

A fast pace

In 2020, when he joined Sitecore as CEO, Steve Tzikakis outlined his vision to MarTech: “We now need to become a ‘billion-dollar company.’ That’s not so much a financial objective, it’s more a behavioral change. The pace with which we release products, the integration of our products, the level of service we provide to our customers, how we operate with our partners and taking advantage of our biggest asset, our own employees.”

Product releases are coming at a fast pace and attention is being paid to integration through the Connect offering. It will be interesting to see the extent to which the bet on composability pays off.

The post Sitecore adds new products to its composable DXP appeared first on MarTech.

Marketo introduced: 

• A new solution for preventing bots from form stuffing and other nefarious activities. It’s called on Google to help. 
• A forms permissions capability aimed at ensuring forms are properly reviewed and limiting who has permission to publishing/updating.  
• A slew of Dynamic Chat features that improve customer experience and make chat more useful.
• Enhanced access and permission controls for Sales Insights Actions users.

Limit nefarious bot activity with Google v3 CAPTCHA integration

We’ve all experienced it. On any given day, your database grows far more than normal. When that happens, it’s likely pesky bots targeted your Marketo forms, resulting in thousands of phony submissions. 

Monitoring your database (and you should be!) for bot-generated submissions has been a time-suck. 

To address the issue, Marketo is releasing a new integration with Google reCAPTCHA v3. reCAPTCHA uses a “risk analysis engine and adaptive challenges to keep malicious software from engaging in abusive activities on your website,” (e.g., form stuffing and fraudulent log-ins) according to Google.

This implementation of CAPTCHA scores form submissions on the likelihood of bot activity, Steven Vanderberg, Product Manager at Adobe Marketo, told us. reCAPTCHA v3 determines if the form was legitimately completed based on that score and flags those that received failing grades for further verification, e.g., a confirmation code sent by SMS. 

Bottom line: Legitimate users can log in, make purchases, view pages or create accounts. Fake users will be blocked. 

Your teams can create workflows that exclude suspicious leads from campaigns and automatically delete submissions from potential bots.

reCAPTCHA is free up to 1 million assessments per month and the integration was available on September 6th. 

Read more: Check out the article for a deep dive into this feature. There’s a video overview here. 

Ensure forms are reviewed before they’re made live with Form Permission Control 

(Almost) every Marketo shop has experienced it. An insufficiently trained user releases an updated form before it’s been reviewed. 

With Marketo’s Approve Form Permission capabilities, managers can decide which user roles can push and approve changes to form assets. 

Important: Existing roles that can approve changes will inherit that permission. Make sure to review permissions for each role in your company. 

Enhanced visitor routing, custom avatars among the Dynamic Chat additions

Dynamic Chat features continue to roll out. Functionality released in August will be available in the next 90 days.  

Advanced calendar routing rules are aimed at improving user experience. They let you route visitors to the appropriate teams and people when scheduling appointments from chat.

Your chatbot avatar can be customized to meet branding guidelines with the new Custom Chatbot Avatar feature. 

Ever want to shut chat off? Users can now enable (and disable) all dialogues at once with the global on/off switch. 

Sales teams can now use Dynamic Chat in their prospecting efforts. We chatted with Sreekanth Reddy, Senior Product Manager at Adobe Marketo, to dig deeper into what this means for users.

Book a meeting: Now, you can add your Sales team to Dynamic Chat as users. This way, they are able to connect their calendars to enable visitors to book meetings with them.

Routing: Users are now able to launch custom routing rules where you can use lead and company attributes to define criteria based on which sales representative is resolved for a lead.

Marketo Sales Insight (MSI): All interactions within Dynamic Chat are now able to be logged as new activities in MSI. Documentation of these new activities is also now available in the MSI panel in Salesforce CRM.

Sales Insight Actions

Marketo enhanced access and permission control in Sales Insight Actions last month. 

• Admins can set permissions allowing or preventing access to this feature. 
• Admins have the feature by default.

(Unfamiliar with Sales Insight Actions? It’s an integration with Salesforce that enables salespeople to interact with prospects armed with data from Salesforce and intelligence about recent behaviors from Marketo.)

Marketo Release Notes is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto + MERGE, a marketing operations consultancy.

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We’ll also share the latest on Dynamic Chat, updates on email bot activity filtering and new API enhancements.

Veeva’s native CRM integration with Marketo

We’ve been digging into Veeva integrations with both Marketo and Salesforce, and now Adobe has pushed forward a native integration. For those unfamiliar with Veeva, read on. 

Veeva offers cloud-based solutions for life sciences, providing data, software services, and an extensive ecosystem of partners to support the most critical functions from research and development to commercial. 

More specifically, Veeva CRM is a communication platform built to assist sales professionals in developing relationships with key stakeholders. Through Veeva CRM, users can view important notifications, next best actions, and HCP profiles. 

Veeva CRM provides a centralized database of provider accounts and contacts to help sales professionals:

• Prepare for meetings.
• Send external communications.
• Access marketing collateral relevant to the deal.
• View communication history with prospects.
• Create reports to identify progress and monitor progress made.

Veeva CRM is built on Salesforce, meaning Veeva customers can access the Salesforce app exchange, native Salesforce integrations, and the Salesforce endpoint. This means Veeva CRM users are able to utilize Salesforce standard objects. 

Why we care. When data can be passed between systems in a low-friction environment, field sales representatives are able to contact hard-to-reach HCPs through automated Marketo programs. News, clinical support, and other valuable content can be automatically delivered. Most importantly, these messages can be delivered at the right time and place with greater visibility into the customer life cycle. 

Here’s what’s possible with a Veeva CRM integration with Marketo:

• Track and measure HCP behavior and interests in real-time, enabling relevant experiences that create differentiation through engagement.
• Follow-up sales call with automated messaging based on call content and responses.
• Launch campaigns to educate HCPs and create awareness for new products. 
• Launch cross-channel nurture campaigns
  • Sales can be alerted when an HCP is ready to begin sampling and prescribing the new product based on their scoring threshold.

The continued evolution of Dynamic Chat 

For those unfamiliar, Marketo has launched this new offering included in all Marketo Engage bundles at no additional cost. The phased rollout began earlier this year, and the goal is to have Dynamic Chat available to all customers in Q4 of this year.

As defined by Marketo, Dynamic Chat empowers users to drive engagement and conversions with interactive, personalized conversations for every web visitor.

Through Dynamic Chat, marketers can:

• Automatically collect submitted lead information. 
• Gain access to behavior metrics, such as:
  • Time on page
  • Time on site
  • Page scroll percentage (this helps gauge when chat dialogue should appear on the page). 
• Share impactful content via attaching PDFs to the chat. 
• Select the exact pages to have chat appear and deselect unqualifying pages. 
• Schedule sales meetings.

Users can either select one of the predesigned templates or create their own from scratch to get started. There are currently templates for lead generation, lead qualification, and event registration. 

Even better, marketers can customize the chat box to match their brand guidelines (color scheme and fonts). 

Why we care. The possibilities are endless with Dynamic Chat. There is the potential to simplify your martech stack and also take advantage of features like chat engagement data to generate relevant ads to get more ROI from your paid ad strategy.

Since Dynamic Chat is natively integrated with Marketo, all engagement and lead info will be pushed into Marketo in real-time. Not to mention, marketers can engage with both known and anonymous web visitors with personalized and qualifying conversations at scale. 

API enhancements 

There were a few announcements around form updates and API access for CRM-enabled subscriptions on the API front. We tapped into the knowledge of Perkuto + MERGE’s Senior Technical Expert, Paul Ferrer to learn more about these enhancements.

Expanded access for CRM-enabled subscriptions 

This is welcome news as it allows Marketo to be a single source for all data instead of needing to manage separate connections to Marketo and the CRM. This should simplify extracting information from external analytics platforms.

Form updates 

1. Support for “hidden” data types in Forms.
2. Support multiple comparison values for “isNot Form” via rules.
3. Allow setting of display and submitted values in select lists separately.

All three updates to the form field APIs greatly expand the capabilities for maintaining and creating your forms remotely. Hidden fields can now be added and updated, picklist values can be maintained consistently and we get additional logic options via API. All great news!

Allow setting of Disable Open Tracking on Create or Update Email

We’ll never say no to more options when it comes to managing assets via API. Programmatically disabling open tracking on emails will further enable you to manage email assets in bulk.

Bye-bye, bots 

Another highlight of this month’s release is the filtering of bot activity. Users are now able to prevent inaccurate email reporting and unintended sales alerts through email bot filtering.

Marketo announced two new attributes to email click and email open activities that will highlight bot activity. These attributes are labeled as “is bot activity” and “bot activity pattern.” 

We were also introduced to more sophisticated patterns that call out bot activities, which are: 

• Hidden link IPs/UAs: identifying clicks and opens generated from bots clicking the hidden link.
• Proximity patterns: clicks or opens happening at nearly the same time to identify bot activity.

Asset Expiration is now available 

Last but not least, we were excited to hear a key feature from Marketo Sky would be carried over into Marketo.

Marketo users are now able to set expiration dates on landing pages, deactivate trigger campaigns, and stop recurring batch campaigns. This means no more expired event registration pages with the ability to automatically unpublish landing pages. Control of asset deactivation can be assigned to specific user roles through new permission.

View the complete set of May 2022 Marketo Release Notes.

This article is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto + MERGE , a marketing operations consultancy.

Ever wonder how frequently marketing software is replaced?
Here’s the answer.

Download the 2022 MarTech Replacement Survey!

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What Ceros does. Ceros offers a collaborative digital canvas for the creation of interactive and animated content with no coding required. It offers industry-specific templates and preset animations. It already integrates with a wide range of CMSs.

Building a connected creative stack. These integrations will facilitate the distribution of content created in Ceros to sales teams within the sales enablement tools they use daily. They come in addition to a series of other recent Ceros integrations:

• With Adobe Marketo Engage and HubSpot, allowing users to deploy forms or other assets from their marketing automation systems within Ceros creative experiences.
• With the Getty Images stock image and video library and the Noun Project SVG icon library.
• With social platforms including Pinterest and Snap.

Why we care. It’s about standing out from the crowd. Prospects are bombarded with digital content, from websites and landing pages to white papers and eBooks. Ceros’s interactive content offering is one of the solutions out there that supports the creation of experiences that can be engaging, drawing longer user attention spans and reinforcing brand identity.

We see Ceros gradually extending its solution, now across sales as well as marketing organizations, to increase the efficiency of the connected creative stack.

The post Ceros announces new integrations with sales enablement platforms appeared first on MarTech.

As chat software users ourselves, we’re advocates of using conversational marketing to engage with website visitors and are looking forward to this feature. It’s one more way we can engage with prospects; and personalize messaging. For example, you might upload your target account list and create a unique conversation with them versus all other visitors. Or, you can tailor messaging to return website visitors versus first-time visitors.

It’s not often companies provide added value like this Marketo chat functionality without charging for the feature as an add-on or upsell. This seems to be the exception versus the norm so I’m feeling obligated to give Marketo a pat on the back.

Chat in the Hat

As mentioned, Marketo has announced its intention to get into the chat game, joining others including Drift, ZoomInfo, Intercom, and LiveChat to name a few. According to Marketo, the 1:1 personalized conversations will include the ability to book meetings directly in the chat, lead routing, starter templates, and drag-and-drop conversation creation. 

In our recent 2022 study of Marketo users, 49.2% of respondents said chat integration is important or extremely important for their business. Clearly, there is room for growth when it comes to proving the importance of chat to current Marketo users. By comparison, 74.4% of respondents said attribution is important or extremely important for their business. Source: 2022 Marketo User Study

Dig deeper: Drift extends offerings across customer lifecycle

Why we care. Looking to peer-to-peer review site G2 for a lay of the land, we found 422 companies listed under the category “live chat software.” Marketo does seem to be entering a competitive space. Regardless, their intention to include this feature within all packages will certainly turn heads amongst the competition.

The business side of me is having fun running through all of the future scenarios. Could there be a consolidation of MarTech with this feature addition? In other words, those who previously used a third party chat platform can potentially achieve the same goal using Marketo. Or, will dedicated chat software tools like Drift continue to win as a result of their extreme focus on delivering the best chat experience to the market? 

According to Marketo, “Dynamic Chat is included in all Marketo Engage packages and will be rolled out to all Marketo Engage users this year”. At Adobe Summit, we learned a phased rollout to all customers will occur in the next 6 months. It’s also unclear if the platform was “build or buy”. Either way, as users of chat functionality, we look forward to testing Marketo’s version of dynamic chat. 

Bot Activity 2.0

When Marketo released their bot activity filter on emails, we didn’t hesitate to enable this feature. As a refresher, go to Admin > Email and select the bot activity tab to active/deactivate the filtering of bot activity. After making the change, we found the impact to be fairly low and we’ve heard similar from our clients.

And now, the feature has been expanded to log activities identified as bots and both filter and trigger based on these activities. In the same location, there is a new toggle to turn on called “Log Bot Activity.”  

Why we care. This new feature will allow you the ability to filter and trigger actions based on activities that are identified as being performed by bots. You will find “Is Bot Activity” and “Bot Activity Pattern” as new constraints as seen in the example below. 

According to VP of Consulting at Perkuto + MERGE, Judi Cousineau, a use case for this functionality includes removing scoring and lifecycle changes if the activity was performed by a bot. Amanda Giacobassi, Director of Solutions Architecture at Perkuto + MERGE adds, “You might negatively score people with bot behavior, or use the filter constraints to exclude contacts with bot activity from your email audience lists.”

Next-Gen Experience Automation

By the way, Next-Gen Experience Automation is “Before & After” for my fellow Wheel of Fortune fans. 

The Next Generation Experience will receive a design and usability update for the import program workflow. The release didn’t indicate too many details as to what we might expect, so we look forward to learning more in the next release webinar.

For Experience Automation updates, users will have the ability to expand connectivity between Marketo and their MarTech stack. This is done by authoring customized flow steps for use in Smart Campaigns which comes with what Marketo calls, Self-Service Flow Steps (Beta). 

And, the Smart Campaign Priority Override provides users with the ability to prioritize campaigns; overriding the standard campaign priority ranking. This update will free up processing resources for other high-priority tasks, according to Marketo.

Why we care. Amanda provided a few call outs related to these updates:

• Import Program Workflow: She shares our curiosity about the usability enhancements; wondering if they will be UI enhancements only? What a real cliff-hanger.
• Self-Service Flow Steps: From what we know so far, she believes this will not open up the API to the smart campaign UI (e.g. something that would allow creating and editing custom object records in the UI), but rather making webhook type functionality available in batch and executable campaigns.
• Smart Campaign Priority Override:. According to Amanda, “This will be immediately useful for enterprise level organizations who have issues with operational campaigns taking too long to run. This might be a nice approach to order management concerns as well.”

API Enhancements

The next batch of API enhancements includes:

• Return Disable Open Tracking Status of Emails
• Retrieve Dynamic Content Subject Lines from Email
• Program Member Custom Fields CRUD
• Bulk Custom Object Export updatedAt Filter
• Expose Head Start Setting for Email Programs
• Selective Program Tag Update

Why we care. Our subject matter expert, Amanda, believes open tracking and dynamic content subject lines will have a positive impact on external reporting. She also cites the custom object export and head start setting as interesting related to work in enterprise automation platforms like Workato. Having less impact overall, she notes program member custom fields and tag updates given they are rarely used in UI as is.

View the complete set of March 2022 Marketo Release Notes.

This article is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto + MERGE , a marketing operations consultancy.

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Below you will find a list of 16 notable marketing automation vendors that we profiled in recent MarTech Intelligence Reports on B2B marketing automation platforms.

These platforms offer a wide range of advanced features, including AI-based predictive lead scoring and product recommendations, ABM and social media campaign integration. They also integrate seamlessly with many third-party CRM and other point solutions to offer extended capabilities. The key to ensuring ROI is to make sure the platform is easy to use and scale and is suited to your organization’s goals. Platform vendors offer extensive training programs, online communities and strategic consulting services to encourage more comprehensive platform use and create a higher return on marketing automation investments.

Here is our list, which is organized alphabetically and not in any order of importance. For information on pricing and a deeper feature breakdown on several of these platforms, download the MarTech Intelligence Report.

Acoustic

Founded in 2019 after IBM Watson Marketing separated from IBM as a standalone company, Acoustic powers thousands of marketing teams in more than 70 countries, sending more than 4 billion messages every week. It is currently backed by Centerbridge Partners and employs 900 people.

Target customers

B2B and B2C upper mid-market and enterprise marketing teams, supporting retailers, banks, insurance, ecommerce, education, travel, hospitality, media, manufacturing and entertainment. Some key customers are Cuisinart, Harlequin, PayPal, Republic Services, USO and Wiley.

Product overview

The company’s Acoustic Campaign platform offers the following capabilities:

• Drag-and-drop composing experience enables marketers of all levels to build emails without writing a single line of code.
• Automated journey programs enables marketers to execute at scale automated, multi-step campaigns across the entire customer journey (email, SMS, mobile push, social, web).
• Lead capture, nurturing and scoring models deliver high-quality leads while decreasing customer acquisition costs.
• Built-in Litmus integration enables marketers with a Litmus account to preview different email clients, including Gmail, Outlook, and iPhone and Android platforms, and receives reports such as geo-location (including city, state, and country), and average engagement time and preferred email client or device.
• Inbox Monitoring helps clients ensure maximum deliverability to Inboxes across providers and, thus, engagement.
• Mobile app messaging campaigns capture mobile insights in real-time and drive personalized mobile experiences (push notifications and in-app messages) to each contact.
• SMS campaigns reach customers quickly with personalized, targeted messages.
• Social campaigns enable marketers to reach existing segments in social channels or to expand to reach new contacts that resemble existing profiles.
• Dynamic content makes it easier for marketers to highly personalize content and messages based on customer preferences.
• Budgeting and planning leverage marketing, CRM and finance systems to measure, track and optimize marketing performance.

Artificial intelligence is used throughout the Acoustic Marketing Cloud. Here are a few ways AI is leveraged in the platform:

• Acoustic Campaign saves marketers time and helps them be alerted of any unexpected changes in email metrics with anomaly detection for emails in a journey program.
• Seamless content management with automatic application of metadata tags to digital marketing assets.
• Anomaly and struggle detection to optimize the customer experience across digital channels like websites, landing pages, and mobile apps.
• Preferred location feature allows marketers to leverage AI-determined personal locations (such as “home” and “work”) to communicate personalized messages and offers while maintaining customer privacy.
• Predictive weather events uses large datasets to build relative triggers that can personalize customer engagements.

Acoustic also powers digital experiences through a built-in headless CMS. Here are those features:

• Marketers use the CMS to build landing pages, lead capture forms, and campaigns.
• The CMS is linked to Marketing Automation, so updates are synced across channels.
• All content leverages the built-in personalization engine to tailor content and offers to individual customers.

Explore marketing automation solutions from vendors like Marketo, HubSpot, Salesforce and more in the full MarTech Intelligence Report on marketing automation platforms.

Click here to download!

Acquia Campaign Studio

Boston-based Acquia, perhaps known best for its Drupal content management system, was founded in 2007 and was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in September 2019. I has 1,400 employees across several major global cities. Acquia made three acquisitions in 2019: Mautic (May), Cohesion (September) and AgilOne (December). Acquia acquired Widen in September 2021.

Target customers

Acquia targets mid-market and enterprise businesses, and several of its most notable marketing automation customers are Shake Shack, Lids, ParkNow and Applause.

Product overview

• Acquia Campaign Studio (formerly Mautic, which it bought in 2019) is a customer journey orchestration solution that allows brands to align their digital strategies, create, orchestrate and deliver exceptional customer experiences across all channels.
• Offers a drag-and-drop interface that allows marketers to orchestrate the customer journey by defining different journeys that respond to what customers are doing in real-time. This includes cross-channel, multi-touch and multi-wave campaigns.
• Marketers can build individually personalized content quickly through a drag-and-drop Email Builder, from scratch or from a template, execute and monitor all aspects of their campaign directly; helping boost engagement, loyalty and customer lifetime value.
• With Acquia Campaign Studio, organizations can onboard any channel and orchestrate seamless, one-to-one customer experiences everywhere. This includes email, SMS, push notifications, landing pages, web push and personalization, social media, ad tech, direct mail, and emerging channels like voice, IoT and digital signage.

ActiveCampaign

Chicago-based ActiveCampaign was founded in 2003 and employs more than 1,000 people. It has secured $360 million in three rounds of venture capital funding, including $240 million in April 2020. ActiveCampaign has customers in 170 countries worldwide.

Target customers

ActiveCampaign serves SMBs to enterprises in all industries across B2B, B2C and ecommerce. Key customers include Hipcooks, Iconosquare, Koia, McCrindle, Party Headphones and Thinkific.

Product overview

ActiveCampaign’s Customer Experience Automation (CXA) platform provides businesses of all sizes access to 600+ pre-built automations that combine email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and machine learning for powerful segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, and text. Also, over 70% of ActiveCampaign’s customers use its 870+ integrations including Shopify, Square, Facebook, Eventbrite, WordPress, and Salesforce.

Its CXA platform removes the barriers created by legacy email, marketing automation, CRM, and service and support solutions and helps businesses deliver a connected customer experience without forcing them into an all-in-one marketing solution.

Businesses can use ActiveCampaign to orchestrate personalized automations across their technology stack for omnichannel engagement.

Use cases focus on marketing and sales teams leveraging the platform across the customer lifecycle to improve communication strategies, including:

• Removing customers from a promotional campaign if there is an open ticket.
• Passing automatically qualified leads over to the sales team, nurturing leads/customers via branching, dynamic email flows depending on their demographic data.
• Sending customers an email that contains product information pertinent to each customer based on their previous purchases.
• Connecting the CRM to the rest of the business then leveraging customer data from marketing and success interactions to automate personalized nurture emails, SMS messages, and chats through channels like Conversations or WhatsApp.
• Automating repetitive tasks like moving a lead through a pipeline, adding tags based on their responsiveness, or passing deals to a manager when help is needed.

Act-On Software

Portland-based Act-On considers itself the only independent and marketing-focused automation vendor in the market. Founded in 2008, Act-on currently employs 200 people across its Portland and Reading, U.K. offices. It has raised a total of $74M in venture funding.

Target customers

Emerging growth and mid-market B2B and B2C companies seeking a highly configurable and powerful marketing automation platform, growth marketers looking to extend marketing performance across customer experiences, and buyers in a variety of industries that include business and financial services, manufacturing, higher education, insurance and technology. Key customers include RLH, Sharp, RSA Canada, Avery Dennison, Simpleview and Oregon State University.

Product overview

• Offers a highly configurable platform that sets users up for success and adapts as their business needs evolve.
• Delivers intuitive inbound and outbound multichannel marketing, contact capture, scoring, segmentation, targeting and lead nurturing.
• Open ecosystem for simple integration of the technology stack, with native CRM integrations for Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Sugar CRM, and NetSuite.
• Designed to empower growth marketers to deliver consistent customer experiences, drive product adoption and advocacy.
• Act-On also says its customers enjoy the best email deliverability rates in the industry. It also offers deep integrations with event planning solutions and SMS messaging directly from within the product.

Dotdigital

Founded in 1999, London-based dotdigital began as a digital agency and has evolved to serve marketing and communications professionals with its Engagement Cloud. It is a public company traded on the London StockExchange and employs 350 people across several global headquarters.

Target customers

Dotdigital works with customers ranging from SMBs to mid-market companies to enterprises. Some key clients include British Airways, USA Rugby, Copa Air, Surf Outfitter, Bearpaw and Monin.

Product overview

• Users can import data, build segments and triggers, and create relevant marketing campaigns that engage customers on their favorite channels. In addition to email marketing, dotdigital supports the personalization of marketing messages across SMS, push notifications, live chat and social ads.
• Users of the platform can use contact/lead scoring capabilities to score leads based on a range of data points and actions.
• Integrations with the likes of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce ensure that newly acquired contacts are synced with CRM platforms.
• ABM activities can be automated with dotdigital’s program builder. With it, marketers can orchestrate end-to-end nurture campaigns and, for example, add contacts who meet a particular lead score as they engage with marketing communications to an address book of sales-ready leads.

HubSpot

Founded in 2006, Cambridge-based HubSpot is perhaps best known for its customer relationship management (CRM), but its software services have grown well beyond CRM. The company has 4,000 employees, is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange and has offices across the world.

Target customers

HubSpot serves B2B and B2C customers, mostly mid-market and scaling SMBs. However, the company is more recently serving enterprise businesses. Some key clients include SurveyMonkey, Classpass, DoorDash, Airstream, Care.com and Randstad.

Product overview

The HubSpot Growth Platform is a full software stack for marketing, sales and customer success, with a free CRM at its core. The platform components are:

• HubSpot Marketing Hub: Includes tools for lead capture and management, scoring, nurturing, analytics, A/B testing, blogging, content management, social monitoring and publishing, email marketing and paid advertising. Offers rules-based or predictive lead scoring for any data point including email and website actions, social media metrics and form captures. Scoring systems can be tested as well as segmented in a customer’s database. Additional functionality includes the ability to trigger campaigns, profile and lead scoring changes, and notifications when particular prospect behaviors occur.
• HubSpot Sales Hub: Sales productivity software for sales teams at growing businesses. The software includes email tracking from the user’s inbox, notifications when leads view site pages, and in-line information on competitor sites and emails users receive. Can be used to schedule emails and follow-ups from within the user’s inbox.
• HubSpot Service Hub: A service tool for growing businesses that want to prioritize the needs of the customer. Tools include a unified inbox called Conversations, knowledge base tools, and customer feedback measures.
• HubSpot CRM: A CRM and growth tool for businesses that are just starting to formalize their sales process. Helps align sales teams and supports business growth by organizing details about an organization’s contacts, companies, sales process and customers in one place.
• HubSpot CMS: Uses a personalization engine to customize the website experience for each visitor. Includes free one-click SSL, as well as a web application firewall for added security.

Keap

Chandler, Arizona-based Keap was founded in 2001 and has 400 employees. Its investors include Bain Capital Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Signal Peak Ventures, and Mohr Davidow Ventures

Target customers

Keap primarily serves small businesses with two to 25 employees. Key clients include The Bestseller Academy, Skillastics, Artist Management Services, Magic Evan, Brooklyn Music Factory and Advocates 4 Angels.

Product overview

• Keep centralizes customer information in a suite of tools including CRM, sales automation, marketing automation, ecommerce, payments, analytics and mobile solutions.
• Marketing automation tools that offer contact management, contact segmentation (tags), saved searches, tasks, Web forms, landing pages, company records, lead scoring, customizable dashboard, pipeline management, advanced automation, or an easy automation builder.
• Keap also supports Automated list management for email engagement monitoring and data migration services.

Mailchimp

Founded in 2001, privately owned Mailchimp has 1,200 employees. Headquarted in Atlanta, Mailchimp has additional offices in Brooklyn, Oakland, California, Santa Monica, California and Vancouver, Canada.

Target customers

The company says it targets Fortune 100 companies, though most customers are small businesses, particularly in the commerce and technology industries. Key clients include Dollar Shave Club, GitHub, Magnolia Market, Chronicle Books, TEDTalks and UrbanSitter.

Product overview

• Mailchimp provides marketing tools for email, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, landing pages, Google remarketing ads, sign-up forms, postcards, customer relationship management, websites and organic social posting.
• When it comes to lead generation and analytics, the platform includes behavioral targeting, segmentation, predicted demographics, tags and contact profiles, a lookalike audience finder, lead management and an audience dashboard.
• Integrations give users the option to connect the collaboration and task management tools of their choice to the Mailchimp account.

Adobe Marketo

Marketo was acquired by San Jose-based Adobe in October 2018. Its parent company Adobe was founded in 1982. It has 22,634 employees and more than 13,000 customers around the world.

Target customers

Marketo Engage is designed for SMB to enterprise-level B2B marketers and some B2C considered-purchase marketers in a variety of industries, including technology, business services, healthcare, financial services, education, manufacturing, and telco. Key clients include CenturyLink, Charles Schwab, GE Panasonic, RingCentral and Roche.

Product overview

Cloud-based Marketo Engage features 10 major capabilities for:

• Marketing automation to create, automate, and measure campaigns across channels.
• Account insights and profiling to identify the right target accounts using data and AI.
• Email to engage customers with relevant conversations in minutes.
• Mobile to communicate with customers using mobile devices.
• Social integration to identify potential and current customers.
• Targeted, personalized display ads.
• Dynamic interactions with customers on a web site.
• Marketing analytics to prove and improve business impact.
• Predictive content.
• Marketo Sales Connect to coordinate sales and marketing.

Marketo Engage natively performs basic data cleansing.

• Data deduplication feature finds and merges duplicate users in the database.
• Users can set up automated workflows for data normalization.
• More advanced data deduplication and data cleansing enabled through turnkey integrations with a number of LaunchPoint partners, including RingLead, ReachForce, StrikeIron, and CRMFusion.

Account-Based Marketing offers unified lead and account-based strategies.

• Account Smart Lists leverage AI and predictive scoring reveal best-fit accounts for campaign activation.
• Personalized experiences are automated across accounts with intelligent account nurturing.
• Account-based insights delivered to sales offering full visibility across the buying team.

Sales Partnership shares customer intelligence across every touch of the buyer journey.

• Multi-attribute lead scoring across sales and marketing touches.
• Real-time data capture and bi-directional data integration sync with CRM.
• Power multiple sales engagement capabilities and digital sales playbooks.
• Prioritized lead and account engagement scores.
• Supported sales engagements and channels include email, phone, sales and marketing nurture campaigns, preloaded email templates, suggested email categories, cross-channel personalization.
• Individual and team performance data.

Maropost

Toronto-based Maropost was founded in 2011 and has more than 270 Employees. It acquired ecommerce platform Neto in March 2021 for more than $60 million and subsequently rebranded the platform Maropost Commerce Cloud.

Target customers

Maropost serves Small- to medium-sized ecommerce companies seeking to automate their marketing and ecommerce functions. Key customers include BioTRUST, Haymarket Media Group, Leaf Group and Shop.com.

Product overview

Maropost is a multichannel engagement platform designed to assist marketers in segmenting their audiences, personalizing their messages, and ensuring email delivery to inboxes.

Users can develop and schedule dynamic content based on unified customer data.

Cloud-based, marketing automation capabilities are optimized to support retention-based marketing strategies. The platform also enables personalized web experiences, data-driven emails, simplified mobile interactions, and social campaign alignment.

Also, automated product features allow marketers to focus on more strategic needs.

Oracle Eloqua

Austin-based Oracle was founded in 1977 and it acquired Eloqua in December 2012 The company, which trades publicly on the New York Stock Exchange, has 135,000 employees and offers suites of integrated applications plus infrastructure through its Oracle Cloud offering.

Target customers

Oracle Eloqua is marketed to:

• B2B or B2B2C organizations that are enterprise, mid-market or small businesses that require nurturing / lead scoring for large considered purchases or long sales cycles.
• Sales and/or marketing departments who are looking to align internally and personalize the digital customer experience.
• Industries include, but are not limited to: High tech, manufacturing, financial services and insurance, travel and transportation, consumer packaged goods, and media and communication.

Key clients include DocuSign, Panasonic, Mack Trucks, Movember, Kansas City Chiefs and the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Product overview

Oracle Eloqua is a marketing automation solution for cross-channel campaign orchestration that nurtures leads across each stage of the buying process using bestin-class applications to drive sales with:

• Campaign orchestration to create dynamic campaigns that intrigue buyers and adapt the multi-touch experience based on a buyer’s real-time activities.
• Targeting and segmentation capabilities that allow users to create rich customer profiles and target the right individuals with the most relevant information throughout the sales cycle.
• Lead management capabilities that are customizable and leverage key data points while driving high-quality leads.
• Sales and marketing alignment with unified buyer intelligence to identify, prioritize, and track high-valued opportunities and top-tier accounts across the sales cycle.
• Data management and activation that allow marketers to take the next best action with a contact based on real-time digital behaviors.
• Asset management for design and re-purposing compelling emails, landing pages and content blocks that engage customers and efficiently manage assets across teams and campaigns.
• Marketing measurement and insights through flexible and powerful out-of-thebox reporting and detailed dashboards.
• Advanced intelligence capabilities that apply data science to observed behaviors and adapt experiences to the learned preferences of each individual.

Oracle Eloqua’s data management capabilities allow for data deduplication, normalization, and augmentation to keep data clean and updated. Eloqua enables integration with dozens of third parties to complete account and contact data ensuring it’s up to date in the system.

Salesforce Pardot

San Francisco-based Salesforce was founded in 2007 but it purchased Pardot in 2013. It has offices in more than 30 countries.

Target customers

Salesforce serves

High-growth companies to enterprise-level organizations across all industries, market segments, and geographies. Key customers include Emerald, McAfee, NBC Universal, Sika, Valpa and Wartsila.

Product overview

Salesforce Pardot aligns marketing and sales teams to generate more pipeline, empower sales to close more deals and grow customer relationships at scale. Key components include Marketing Analytics to help marketers understand and improve marketing ROI, Artificial Intelligence to unlock the next level of productivity and effectiveness, and account-based Marketing (ABM) to target and grow key accounts.

Built on the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, organizations are provided with the key ingredients to drive demand. The seamless integration and visibility of data enriched by AI across marketing and sales create a frictionless customer experience between digital and human touchpoints.

Primary use cases focus on:

• Demand generation campaigns and journeys.
• Lead management.
• Account-based marketing.
• Lifecycle Marketing (upsell/cross-sell).
• Account relationship building and management.
• Adoption marketing.
• Marketing, sales, and service alignment.
• Sales alerts.
• Marketing content and campaigns for sales.
• Sales insights and analytics.
• B2B marketing analytics and attribution.

SharpSpring

Gainesville, Florida-based SharpSpring was founded in 2012 and has about 230 employees. In 2019 it acquired Perfect Audience, a digital advertising platform. SharpSpring was acquired by Constant Contact in October 2021. Constant Contact is headquartered in Waltham, Massachussetts.

Target customers

SharpSpring caters to SMBs and marketing agencies, including digital marketing, advertising, web design and public relations firms. Top verticals include creative, technology, professional/financial services, legal, manufacturing, healthcare, education and travel/hospitality. Key clients include Cleartail Marketing, Core Integrated Marketing, Funnelbud, mXtr Automation, Phobos & Actor and Ulistic.

Product overview

A cloud-based sales and marketing revenue growth platform built for marketing agencies and small to mid-sized businesses. The platform provides a comprehensive suite of tools that allow users to track the complete buyer’s journey with end-to-end ROI, while delivering targeted communication at critical conversion points along the way.

Provides comprehensive solutions for sales and marketing teams of any size.

Feature highlights include:

• CRM: Contact Manager, Opportunities, Pipelines.
• Life of the Lead: A historical record of each contact’s engagement with the brand, from first site visit to every form-fill and beyond.
• Contact Record: SharpSpring’s contact record gives a comprehensive “work station” to empower users to log notes, launch and log phone calls, launch emails, update/store contact information, review campaign membership, list membership, historical engagements in a linear format (Life of the Lead), etc.
• Multiple device tracking: Monitor lead behavior across every known mobile, tablet and desktop device.

Sugar Market

Cupertino, California-based SugarCRM was founded in 2004. SugarCRM acquired Salesfusion in May 2019 and rebranded that marketing automation platform as Sugar Market. Today it is a key pillar of the Sugar CX suite of products and services. SugarCRM has 500 Employees. SugarCRM acquired Node Inc. in August 2020 to gain predictive customer intelligence to democratize AI.

Target customers

Sugar Market is intended for small to medium-sized enterprises, typically with headcount between 100-2,500 full-time employees and a marketing organization of 5-15 people (maybe a division or region of a larger organization). It serves both B2B and B2C customers across a variety of industries with strong experience in software, manufacturing, professional and financial services, and recruitment. Key clients include Seco Tools, Moorepay, SiteLock, Ogilvy, The Home Store and The Adecco Group.

Product overview

Sugar Market is a multichannel marketing automation platform that allows users to connect and engage with customers wherever they happen to be.

Built-in inbound and outbound email marketing tools, social media management capabilities, AI-driven predictive analytics and lead scoring, and Google Ads management tools.

A cloud-based solution that is pre-integrated into nine leading sales automation solutions, including Sugar Sell, Sugar Enterprise and Sugar Professional.

Thryv

Dallas-based Thryv was founded in 2013 and has 2,400 employees. Thryv Holdings is publicly held, trading on the Nasdaq exchange under “THRY.” It acquired Melbourne, Australia-based Sensis in March 2021, which was then
rebranded as Thryv in September 2021.

Target customers

Thryv serves micro-businesses and SMBs in professional services verticals, including legal, business, wellness, physical fitness and pets.

Product overview

Thryv is a SaaS customer experience platform for growing small businesses and franchises that want to streamline all aspects of their day-to-day workflows.

Includes a CRM, centralized inbox, automated marketing, social media management, payment processing, document storage, client portal, online appointment scheduling, synced calendar, online presence and listings management, email and SMS marketing, Google My Business optimization and reputation management.

It launched ThryvPay in October 2020 to provide service-based businesses with payment processing services. The platform also allows users to accept payments via PayPal, Square and Stripe.

Unica

Unica is owned by Sunnydale, California-based HCL Technologies, which was founded in 1976 and has 155,000 employees today. The company acquired select IBM products for security, marketing, commerce, and digital solutions in June 2019. HCL took full ownership of the research and development, sales, marketing, delivery, and support for AppScan, BigFix, Commerce, Connections, Digital Experience (Portal and Content Manager), Notes Domino, and Unica.

Target customers

Unica serves enterprise and midsize companies in the banking, financial services, insurance, retail, healthcare, telco, and travel and hospitality markets.

Product overview

The HCL Software Unica Suite is an enterprise-class, integrated cloud-native marketing platform designed to deliver precision marketing at scale and help marketing strategists achieve goals around revenue targets, increased wallet share, customer loyalty and more.

With nine fully integrated key modules and in-built optimization, the platform provides marketing practitioners end to end marketing capabilities to engage and deliver highly personalized customer experience across a wide variety of outbound, inbound, social and adtech channels – direct mail, email, SMS, Push, WhatsApp, website, call center, IVR mobile, ATM, Kiosk, POS, LinkedIn, Google AdManager and Facebook. It simplifies the execution of complex marketing programs with a business-friendly UI/UX and seamlessly integrates with homegrown and third-party marketing technology applications.

Unica can be deployed through Docker framework or natively, on-premise or on any cloud of your choice. This marketing automation solution is highly scalable, robust and secure, while providing a single marketing system of record to implement omnichannel marketing strategies.

Use cases focus on:

• Customer experience orchestration.
• Automated outbound campaigns.
• Omnichannel personalization and optimization.
• Personalized targeting across dig

The post 16 marketing automation platforms your organization should consider appeared first on MarTech.

On a personal note, I can finally stop thinking about Tom Cruise’s Vanilla Sky every time I read about Marketo Sky.

Now that we have that out of the way– let’s jump into the January 2022 Marketo Release Notes along with a few more references to popular culture along the way.

Landing page details facelift

According to Adobe, the next-generation experience will allow users to discover landing page asset details more efficiently.

So how can you view the next-generation experience? On your landing page view, you will see a notification bar allowing users to toggle between old and new experiences.

Dig deeper: A marketer’s guide to Marketo today

The order of the drop-down list values under “landing page actions” has changed, and the UI has been updated with three buttons; notably, there is an “approve draft” option, so you don’t have to go to the landing page actions drop-down list. 

Information such as “created by/date” and “last modified by/date” are helpful additions to the landing page details page.

Why we care. Small changes in user experience may not make a huge impact. However, they all add up over time, resulting in improved efficiency. If we’re talking facelifts, this falls into the non-invasive surgery category versus a complete face swap like in “Face/Off,” the 1997 film starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.

The overall organization of the landing page details seems intuitive and improves the user experience.

AEP to Marketo connector for new lead creation

The ability to create net new leads from Adobe Experience Platform has arrived. When sending audience segments from AEP to Marketo, people who aren’t already in your database will be automatically added once you’ve completed the setup below.

When creating a destination, there is a new drop-down option. Previously, there was only the option to match existing Marketo people only. Now, users can match existing people and create the missing people in Marketo.

Here are the steps to take to enable this feature:

1. From the destinations catalog, activate your Marketo Engage destination.
2. Choose your account and make your destination. Select the new option for matching existing people and create the missing people in Marketo.
3. Once the destination is created, you can add segments.
4. Here, you will choose which segment you want to send to Marketo with additional mappings for the new people you will be creating in Marketo (email, first name, last name, and company name). Mapping these four fields to the source field is required for the connector to work correctly.
5. Lastly, you will need to sync a segment from Marketo to AEP.

Why we care. For AEP users, the ability to create new people in Marketo by populating a segment will likely eliminate the need for manual list uploads. Automating list upload tasks is a great way to increase marketing operations efficiency.

Getting tighter with form rules

Landing page and form security has been enhanced so that users can create global form validation rules in Admin.

In Admin, you can create new rules for the form, including the error message to show if someone violates the rule. For example, you can block a specific domain from submitting a form. If someone from the domain tries to submit the form, they will receive the error message you define in Admin.

There is a built-in rule-set that will block 2,000+ free consumer domains! You can activate this with a single click. The rule is populated in your instance (right now), and it’s called: Consumer Email Domain Blocklist. Note: This is where all the Marketo admins run to view the new Global Form Validation Rule option in Admin.

Why we care. We love this update and plan to test right away to see if we can eliminate any unwanted form fills and encourage website visitors to use their business email versus a free consumer domain like gmail.com.

First of all, what is Sales Connect?

So what is Sales Connect anyway? First, a bit of history. Sales Connect was formerly Toutapp, acquired by Marketo in April 2019. It’s a paid add-on with your Marketo instance.

David Desrosiers, VP of product for our Marketo campaign operations tool, Jeto, explained, “The product falls into the sales enablement category, similar to tools like Salesloft. This Marketo Add-On for sales engagement helps manage calls, email nurture, and track activity– surfacing engagement signals and ultimately prospects.”

Now that you better understand the product, the feature release includes new call outcomes. Call reasons have been released to allow sales teams to log fully customizable values like “left voicemail” or “demo booked.”

Why we care. Desrosiers also explained, “Sales Connect acts like a mini CRM perhaps for customers without a CRM and definitely for customers without SFDC– since features are overlapping with SFDC Marketo Sales Insight.

It allows users to “push” leads to Marketo Campaigns individually, and more recently (2021) in bulk. Plus, users can track real-time prospect activity on a dashboard (sales and marketing related engagement actions).”

With more insights, outbound sales teams can better prioritize leads and efforts. In Salesforce, there will be two new custom activity fields, call outcome and call reason. This matters because it will enhance reporting capabilities. For example, compare positive call outcomes to campaigns to relate call outcomes to campaigns.

New governance capabilities will allow team leaders to mandate a call reason and call outcome in the Sales Dialer, as seen below before a call is completed. Admins can adjust the settings as needed, including customizing the list of call outcomes and call reasons.

Lastly, additional metadata will be captured and stored, including tracking activity like emails, calls, and meetings. According to Adobe, this feature enhancement will build alignment and visibility across sales teams. More metadata around sales activity will allow for better reporting with advanced segmentation based on metadata.

New features are making marketing automation platforms more powerful than ever. Learn about trends and capabilities of marketing automation software in the latest edition of this MarTech Intelligence Report.

Click here to download!

My type of sales insight

For those with Sales Insight (a paid add-on), a new column has been introduced on Sales Insight to identify the type of prospect in the Best Bets view. The new column is called type and will differentiate between prospects and leads. You will also notice the standard Adobe branding with the latest update and an updated API version.

Why we care. Previously, a seller could not differentiate between leads & contacts on the Best Bets tab. The branding and API updates are not expected to impact your work, other than retired older API versions.

Microsoft Dynamics users getting some love

Dynamics users will benefit from a few updates. Adobe describes those as follows:

1. Syncing of the Multi-Select Optionset Field Type
2. Server to Server (S2S) Authentication for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Online
3. Sales Insight for Microsoft Dynamic/Updated Account Layout

Why we care. According to Adobe, these features will help users capture more granular contact information and bi-directionally sync data fields with multi-select options set fields. Think about use cases related to topics of interest or preferred modes of communication. As a result, Marketo users can use these fields within Smart List.

Related to S2S, documentation has not caught up with reality. For Dynamics integrations, Adobe and Microsoft both sent out notices that Basic Authentication will not be sufficient as of April. For integrations where the Marketo native connection was set up with Username/Password only, clients must upgrade to OAuth connections (using client ID and client secret).

S2S is one of the two connection protocols Marketo offers for OAuth (the new one). The other method is Resource Owner Password Credential (ROPC, already familiar to us as the method we had previously been using with OAuth connections).

This feature will allow sales teams to track activities both at the contact and account level– plus, view behaviors and surface engaged prospects with the Sales Insight enhancements. We are waiting to see evidence of Account level insights in our Sandbox instance of MSI.

View the January ’22 release innovations webinar here.

The post Bye, bye Marketo Sky: What matters in Marketo’s January 2022 release appeared first on MarTech.