Beyond the Launch: How Marketo Engage’s Email Designer Has Evolved

Transcript

how Marketo engages email designer has evolved.

Thank you so much, Stephanie, and welcome everybody. I’m actually kind of impressed with the number of attendees that are looking forward to hearing more about the new email designer and how it’s actually matured over the last year.

Little bit about myself to start off with.

My name is Karthik Heysum. I’m the Adobe B2B Technology Lead at JTF. And as such, I work with a team of consultants to deliver great solutions within the Adobe B2B stack for a whole range of customers in different industries. This is my third year as a Marketo Champion. At the end of last year, my fellow champions actually decided I was the Champion of the Year. And I’m also a member of the Adobe Customer Advisory Board for B2B customer journeys.

And I’ve actually been pretty involved in helping Adobe bring that new email designer to the level where it is today.

Before we really dive in, I would like to get a little bit of a sense for the audience, whether you’ve been using the new email designer yourself yet. So if you can take a second to respond to the poll.

I am personally in the group of I have tested it extensively I can say, I haven’t sent real marketing emails just yet.

What have we got in the audience? A lot of people that are in the same boat as myself, some people that are actually using it live, but the majority have yet to start using it and want to learn more. That’s exactly what you can do today.

So I think that’s a very good starting point.

So looking at my own journey, even at the very start when it was first announced that there will be a new email designer, I signed up for the beta. And my first experience was a bit twofold because I think the new UX is absolutely brilliant. And it’s a great improvement over the way people are currently working with templates.

But there were also, we start off with some concerns, particularly about governance around styling. And that’s why I decided even at my previous employer, also at my current employer, not to implement the new email designer just yet.

So I advise most of my customers to wait, but I think we’re now at a stage with the features that have been deployed in November, that has changed. And I think we’re there with the features that are currently available to say that this is a really powerful tool and we’re ready to start deploying it. So, as I said, I’m in the same boat as about a third of the audience today.

And I would like to talk you through some of the core concepts, what is the new email designer and also what has changed compared to the first launch. But I’ll also have a further deep dive into the different branding and governance aspects.

I’ll talk you through some of the examples that I can show you from experience up to now. And I’ll talk through some best practices, but let’s start with the core concepts. What is the new email designer? And this is a brief overview of a lot of things that the new email designer delivers. It reaches use case parity. I would say that in quite a few ways, there’s a lot of improvements compared to the old email editor.

And a lot of what’s here on the page, I will be talking about in the slides. What I do want to highlight is the integrations that are in here. On the left hand side, you can see AEM, the digital asset manager there, Adobe Express, Adobe Firefly, Adobe Gen Studio.

And those integrations will help you right there in the email editing experience to have a far more seamless content production engine.

There’s also integrations with litmus and with spam assessment. So if you have licenses there, you can actually, again, from within the context of your email, validate some of the aspects of your email before you send out the end product to make sure that your deliverability is the best it can be.

Now, I would like to start with a like for like comparison. On the left hand side, we’ve got the old email editor. And on the right hand side, we’ve got the new email editor with more or less similar template features. And some of the differences that I would like to highlight are in the old editor, you used to work with modules and a module would be a content block that is completely pre-configured where you can change the content to a certain extent, also change the styling, but those blocks were pretty predefined. Another area that I would like to highlight are some of the email settings, like the from name, from email address, reply to the branding domain, but actually also a little bit higher, the email settings that are in there, which makes the screen a little bit confusing.

On the right hand side, you see a user experience that is much cleaner and more modern, but also rather than modules, what you see is over here, just content blocks, but it’s structures and content blocks that you can use to actually build out the email that offer a lot more flexibility than the fixed modules that you had in the old editor. And when it comes to those email settings, I actually like to go to the next screen because what I like a lot is the fact that the email settings, even the ones that in the old editor were underneath the email settings menu, are visible in one central screen. Before you start editing the email content, you can do the entire configuration for your email right there in the open plain view. And that includes marking the email as operational or not, including the viewer’s webpage link, the preheader that a lot of people forget the option to add a CC field if you wanted.

So I like that as a much cleaner experience and a lot more transparent as well.

Now, when you do go into that email content editor, this is the screen that you end up with. And I’d like to sort of walk you through from left to right what’s available there.

On the left hand side, you start with different elements that you can add onto your canvas, like fragments, also assets like images, but not a couple of hidden things in there are the structure tree. So in the center, you’ve got the canvas, but in the tree, you can go drilling down to the lowest level to be very precise in where you want to make edits. But one of the best features in there, I think, is the URL overview. So nobody has any excuse anymore for broken links in an email. With that URL overview, you open up a pop up that will show you all of the links that are in your email, where you can validate whether all of them have a correct link in there. And at the individual link level, you can toggle off and on whether you want tracking to be enabled or not.

Moving a little bit further to the right, that’s where we got the structures and the contents. So you drag in a structure, depending on the number of columns you want in that area.

And structures in that way are sort of the new modules, but the language is completely different from old to new. So that’s something that you will have to get used to in the migration. And in a structure, you add content elements. So you add text and or an image and or a button, and you can combine different content elements in those columns within your structure.

And once you’ve added content elements to your structure, the canvas is where you edit. And you can see that there’s a contextual menu that pops up as you hover over the canvas. It will also highlight what sort of structure you’re in. And in the top right corner, you can see that you can also toggle between light and dark mode so that you can see the impact when you’re editing the content on those two different modes.

Yet a little bit further to the right is where you can change the settings for all of your content elements. That’s also where you can add, for instance, links or customize your social buttons module, et cetera. So that’s more of a configuration area, but it can be a lot more because going all the way down to the right rail, you can toggle between that settings menu to actually three new features. The AI assistant was there in first version as well, but three features that will really make a difference compared to the old email editor. And I will address all three of them. But before I do, I would like to start with the AI assistant but when talking about the AI assistant, I would like to understand a little bit on how your content creation process works. So our question is, do Marketo users in your organization create and optimize email content? So are your Marketo users only operational users that receive content from field marketers and put it into Marketo? Or do you also have Marketo users that are involved in content creation? I asked the question because we see quite a few different organizational models and depending on how that process works, the value of the AI assistant is inside of Marketo is more or less. It’s actually good to see that almost half of the people that Marketo users have the freedom to edit and optimize the email content. So that means that quite a lot of you will actually be able to benefit from that AI assistant.

If there’s any big changes, and there’s actually different variations there as well. There’s not that many people that have no freedom. That’s only one in five. So that’s good to see.

So let’s have a look at what the AI assistant can do for you. On that right rail, you see in black, the icon that is highlighted, that’s the two stars. That’s where your AI assistant lives. And that’s where that right hand panel will change to what you see on the screen here. And you can use the AI assistant on a subject line, you can use it on the entire email, or you can use it on a very specific content element. So a text area or a whole structure. And the whole idea of that panel is you provide a clear prompt. And if you struggle writing a good prompt, there’s actually a prompt library available that can help you get started. And then for text and or images, you can define further settings. That’s what I also unfolded for the text settings in the screenshot, where you can define what is my audience? So what’s my buy-in group? Where in the customer journey are they? What is my communication strategy? What’s the tone of voice that I want to use? And then besides the text settings, you can also upload reference content. So if you’re promoting a white paper, you can upload that actual white paper to give the AI assistant as much context as you can possibly provide so that the AI assistant can give you different variations that are as relevant to your use case as is possible.

The one thing that I did notice when I played around with the AI assistant is don’t use it on an entire email template and expect it to generate a very brief webinar invitation.

So trim down the structure of your email to what you want it to be, and then ask the AI assistant to help you with the content. I used a very long email template for a webinar invite, and I got a lot of variations of content for that call to action in all the different modules that were there. So do the structure yourself, let the AI assistant focus on the content.

Another icon that you could see on that right rail, and you can see it highlighted again in black at the bottom of the screenshot on the left, is collaboration workflows. So you build your email as a first draft, maybe you even get the AI assistant to help you create variations. And then through that collaboration thread, you can tag your colleagues, ask for input, have a conversation, and all of that is actually stored in the context of that email so that you can always refer back to it later. So it provides you with an audit trail directly there inside your email.

Now the third item on that very right rail is actually the brand themes, which is part of a larger concept of the governance and brand consistency. So bear with me while I go through that in a bit more structured way.

Because in terms of governance, the first thing to be aware of is that not every user will be able to see the new email designer right now. If you have email template approval rights also on the existing email designer, you will be able to see the new email designer as a standard. If you don’t, you can actually be activated on the new email designer, but a Marketo admin will have to add you to the new email designer user list in the admin section. And when you’re added, you will be able to do with the new email designer, what you’re also able to do with the existing email designer.

Now, those brand themes, I think those are a really, really strong feature that provide the answer to most of the concerns that I had with the first version of the email designer that were launched.

Brand themes are actually a central place and they go hand in hand with email templates, but they’re a separate entity. So you can define a brand theme and connect it to more than one email template. And in that brand theme, you centrally define all of your styling. So your color schemes, your fonts at all sorts of different levels, margins, paddings, buttons at every single level that you can ever dream of. And you can create more than one brand theme. So you can have 20 templates and four different brand themes and if you say in a template that you want brand themes to be applied, you can use that template and switch from one brand theme to the next. So if you have five different product lines or five different divisions inside your instance each have their own branding, you can create one template and every division can use that same template, but change the brand theme so that it has the full look and feel of their actual brand kit.

Now you can do a whole lot in brand themes, but there’s some little things that can be a little bit tricky, but in the email template, you also have an option to add custom CSS. So that’s an extra layer of timing possibilities that you can add on top of that.

One thing to be aware of, and that’s something that I’ll address in one or two slides.

If you don’t want your end users to edit the custom CSS in your email template, you have to enable content locking and then the custom CSS that you put in there cannot be edited.

One thing to be aware of when you create an email template, the very first choice you need to make is, do I want this email template to be based on the brand theme or not? That is a choice you cannot go back on. So make the right choice at the beginning and you can have a template that is really creative to use.

Because one thing that on top of what I saw in the brand themes in general, that really made me excited is the concept of color variants.

And that is where you can give your end users pretty endless flexibility while still being compliant. What you see here in the screenshots is a brand theme that has six different brand colors and with those brand colors, it is possible to create a yellow button.

It’s also possible to create a white background. With the old or existing email templates, the background and the button could have variables to restrict them to a number of different colors that you could use, but they could still combine those freely. And in here, yes, you can use that yellow button, but only on the blue background. If you choose the white background, you get a red button.

So you can define, I think, up to six different color variants within that one brand theme. And those color variants can be applied to the different structures. So in the email, you can also see that the event details module is based on the dark blue background color variant, but the speaker section underneath is the gray background variant. And choosing a variant defines which options are available for colors everywhere within that color variant. So I think that’s really a cool feature to have.

Now, an email template, you could also add locking to, as I mentioned.

And the first thing you would do is for the entire email template, so at the body level, you enable whether content locking is on or off. And when you enable content locking, the first choice still at the body level that you make is, is the end user that’s gonna create an email based on this template gonna be able to add structures and content? You already had a screenshot very early on where you could only see content. So you can say an end user cannot add a completely new structure to the email that’s based on this template, but within an existing structure, they can add, for instance, a button to an image and text structure. So that removes the need to create all sorts of different variations of the same structure because one is with a button and the other is without, et cetera. You can allow that level of freedom.

And then for each content element that’s in your email template, you can decide whether it’s editable or not.

So that offers a whole lot of granularity. So my top tip is experiment with this. Create your template, put some lock-in in place, and build an email based on it. See where you run into issues. See what the balance is that you want to create between the freedom for the end user to create what they need to create versus still protecting your brand.

Another way of doing that is customizable fragments. And that’s where the language issue becomes really confusing because at first glance, a fragment is the new snippet. But by making the fragment customizable, it almost becomes a module.

Because if you use what you know as a snippet, and then add the option to say, I want this specific text element to be editable by the end user. That’s where you have a very clearly defined structure. So the restrictions that a module would also have, but still the option to add text to change things, to change the image.

And you can add that fragment into your email like any other content element, like a text block or like an image.

The one thing to be aware of is if you make a text section editable, it is not rich text editing that the end user can do. They can only type in text. So if you want to control that and make sure that the end user has the flexibility to do what they need to do, I would suggest to add multiple text blocks underneath each other and decide which ones can be edited, which ones cannot be edited, and which ones need to be bold, which ones don’t need to be bold. And that will improve the experience there.

So that’s what I can say about governance. And all of those combinations are possible. So again, go and play with it, test with it, build a template, have somebody else create an email off of that template and get the hands-on experience to see where your ideal combination is.

Now, when it comes to migration, if you’re really excited about that AI assistant and the brand themes and the whole user experience, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to start tomorrow.

So build out that template, play with it, get the first template live and sort of keep expanding from there.

If you’ve got an existing template that you’re really happy with, be aware that there is an option to import an existing template from the existing email editor to the new email editor. There’s a good chance, depending on how that template was built, that you will need to do some tweaking and optimizing, but you can use that existing template, import it and then save it in the new email.

I’m not 100% sure whether you can still add brand theme to that one. I’ve given that as feedback.

But like I said earlier, when you create a template, you need to choose to make it a brand theme based template at the start. So originally that wasn’t possible.

And one thing to be aware of when you use the import option is that the new email designer doesn’t support variables. With the brand themes, you’ve got pretty much all of the alternative options to give you even more flexibility.

But in the import option, you will need to convert your variables to fixed choices.

Now, if you don’t want that, I still would say start experimenting today. If you’re happy with your existing template, keep using your existing template, but actually start working with that new email designer, familiarize yourself with it and figure out what it is that you need in order to be able to make that migration at any stage.

The top tip, whether you’re migrating now or later, always use email on asset or litmus or another validation tool to make sure that your new email template renders correctly in all email clients. That is something that’s always going to be relevant. And of course, what I said all the way at the beginning, if you have a litmus subscription, you can actually connect that into your market though, so that you can do that validation seamlessly.

Now, some best practices.

Again, test, test and test again, use litmus, use email on asset, use whatever tool you got available for that, but make sure that you know that what’s going out will actually be supported by different email clients.

If you have more than one brand theme, be aware that fragments that you put inside an email, the template and the fragment both need to use the same brand theme. So if you have more than one brand theme, make sure that your fragments are available in the different brand themes that they need to be used in. And that also makes it really important to have a consistent naming convention to understand both for your templates and for your fragments, what the theme is that is being used.

Similarly, if you have more than one color variant within a single brand theme, the color variant choice is made inside the fragment. When you put that fragment into an email, you can’t change the color variant of that fragment anymore. So again, if you need the same fragment available in more than one color variant, create a copy.

And you can actually create an email template through that drag and drop interface that I showed you. When it comes to margins and paddings inside the brand themes, it is actually useful to be aware of what the best practices are in terms of HTML coding for when to use margins, when to use paddings, how to apply them.

So when you set up a brand theme, that is something to actually educate yourself a little bit on.

Just for inspiration, a couple of examples that we created earlier, showing the different options that are there.

I actually like the Add to Calendar option in the right hand email because I use the social icons module to actually put links in for the different calendar options. A nice creative way to use the social icons content block.

So I know this has been a bit of a roller coaster, but the key takeaways for me are the new email designer has a user experience that is very much improved compared to the old modular email templates. You can create your own templates without much of developer skills. You can protect your brand with brand themes and multiple locking options. So you can give that flexibility to the users while still having the protection in place. And you can accelerate content creation and do variant testing with the AI assistant. But whatever you do, make sure that what you build is suitable for different email clients. So test it in litmus or email on asset.

So take this next step today, activate those permissions for the core users in the admin section, let them experiment with fragments, exchange experience, content blocking, play around with it. And then when you’re familiar with the features with the new names, create your first template, send an email based on it. And from that experience, consider what is needed. Some organizations have a large user base, others have a small user base with a lot of experience, not a lot of experience. So look at what your users need to understand this new email editor and be able to use it every day, but also have a look at which emails, which program templates need updating in order for the new email designer to be able to use. So start playing around with it and start planning for it.

You’ve already seen them on the right hand side as well, but the links are in the slide deck too.

There’s quite a lot of resources that you can use to find more information on a lot of the features that we just discussed.

And after this little rollercoaster, I would be interested to see which the features are you are most excited about right now.

Okay, Katja. So we have a question coming in from Michael. When should we use a container element and why? You could also insert texts and images without a container.

Yeah, true.

In all fairness, I haven’t seen the burning use case for containers or grids just yet, to be honest.

I reckon when you want to do something with a background, that could be a use case, but I would say that is not the biggest feature that I would be looking at deploying tomorrow.

Thank you for your insight, Katja. We have more questions on features. So coming from Akshat, can we safely paste custom HTML code created from other HTML editors without it breaking or getting rewritten? Very good question. If you want to add custom CSS, that is something where you would need to test how that actually works together with your brand theme. That’s actually exactly what we’re gonna be doing internally at JTF as well.

We’re now also excited to start creating our own proper templates.

So in the next couple of weeks, we’re gonna be doing exactly that sort of testing how it all comes together in the detail.

And then I’m curious about tokens, Katja. This is coming from Danny. We utilize program templates that include emails with most, if not all content populated with my tokens. How well does this new designer work with that use case? Actually pretty good, because you can insert a token in the same way, more or less as you did in the old one, but it gives you a pop-up menu that will provide all of the different tokens available. So it would be the my tokens, but also system tokens, database tokens, et cetera. So you’ve got a lot more transparency on all the different tokens that are available and the my tokens are included there as well. And that does also include velocity.

Yeah, thank you so much for sharing.

More questions coming in. Adam is asking, I see I can import a template and email asset components, but what about the full email itself? If you want to import the template, then we build them all in the new designer.

Yeah, you can import a template, but you can’t import the emails off the back of the old template that you have in place. So yeah, you would need to convert the template first and then recreate the emails.

So that’s for your always on emails, as well as any program templates for new emails that will be built up.

Yeah, thank you so much for sharing. It looks like there are many people in the chats and then ask the presenters experiencing Outlook issues with the rendering. Do you have any suggestions on fixing these problems with Outlook? Well, I would say provide feedback on that to the Adobe team.

I know that from the champions, we’ve done that as well.

And I know the team are relentlessly working and making sure that that always works, that those issues are fixed. But then again, Outlook is a notorious platform that I would say also the old or the existing modular email templates can sometimes struggle.

Will it be able to fix all issues? It also depends on which versions of Outlook, of course.

Yeah, and I echo that Katja, please, everyone, share your feedback to the product team. Feel free to echo that feedback in the attendee chat. We do take this very seriously.

Question coming in from Stefan. Is there an easy way to add a gradient background? Oh, I haven’t tried that one yet.

Inspiration to try that one after this. Exactly.

Lots of questions.

How can we control padding within the structure? For example, I want less space between a one column structure and a three column structure.

So the margins of padding that I’ve played with give the option to provide different paddings on a column.

So if you want more granularity than that, I would say that you would need to resort to custom CSS to control that further.

And then when it comes to rolling out, I recall you had a number of paths to roll out. Katja, James is curious, what would be your approach to moving to the new email builder? In terms of planning and rollout, start with some one-off sends, nurturers, maybe autoresponders interested in hearing your thoughts.

That depends in my opinion, a lot on how different the look and feel is of the template that you create in the new email designer compared to the emails that you already have. If the look and feel is really quite different, I would migrate as much as possible as soon as possible because you want that consistent experience across the different email communications. If the look and feel is very similar, then indeed start with some low volume autoresponders and get a gradual experience with that before you do sort of big full blast email the entire database volumes.

Yeah, thank you so much for sharing that on the rollout plan. We have about a minute left, so let’s try to tackle one to two more questions, but keep your questions coming. For those we can’t answer live, we’ll answer offline. So Laura’s asking, what would you use a fragment for? Anything that would have a very standard layout with limited need for editing. So for instance, a speaker bio that you would want to include in a webinar invitation, you will know always that that’s gonna be an image, a title or like a name, a job title and a brief description. You can create that format, lock it down so that you can only swap the photo out and change the name, the title and the text for the description. And then if you take that fragment, you can drag that into all your webinar invite emails and you don’t need to recreate it over and over again.

You can use it wherever you use snippets today, but also in sort of modules that you would want to reuse in different places.

Yeah, thank you for breaking that down. We’ll do one last question. Fragments seem like a hot topic. So follow up question on fragments. When building fragments, how do you account for the padding you use when creating the fragment? Then the brand theme applies to the email you’re pulling the fragment into.

Yeah, so again, that’s defined by the brand theme that is applied to the email, the email templates that it’s based on and the fragment in the same way.

Yeah, thank you so much for sharing it. Now it looks like we’re having a number of questions on brand themes, but we are at a time so please keep those questions coming and we’ll have a follow up on marketing nation community where we’ll answer these questions and we’ll also have more follow up AMAs office hours because it seems like this is such a burning topic and everyone has so many questions on the new email designer which makes us very excited that everyone’s excited to get this up and running.

So thank you Katja for your time today. Thank you everyone for your excitement and interest. I have so many learnings and takeaways. If you submitted a question during the session that we didn’t get to answer, don’t worry, we will be following up. So please be on the lookout for your email for that link to the post webinar marketing nation community thread. Please fill out the survey on the top right corner. That really helps us improve our future webinars and thank you so much everyone. Have a great rest of your morning, evening, afternoon, wherever you’re tuning in from. Thank you for joining us. Happy new year and have a great rest of your day.

Thank you so much everyone.