Marketo unveils new email designer as part of January updates

The January release for Adobe Marketo Engage unveiled a new email designer with the promise to “improve productivity and efficiency.” 

Let’s take a look at the feature updates and deprecations for Markeo from January 2025.

New email designer

The new, powerful and enhanced email designer is stealing the show since its release and it’s making no-code email competitors cringe. There is much to talk about here, but here, in a nutshell, is what you need to know:

Old vs. new

• The old and the new design editors will coexist in your instance; there is no plan to deprecate the old email editor at this time. 
• Previously built email templates and emails stay untouched, and you are now able to choose between the old email editor and the new designer when creating a new email asset. 
• There is no migration possible between old and new email templates at this time. It may be best to move into the new editor as your team creates new content.

Here’s a comparison between Marketo’s classic email editor and the new email designer:

Why it’s a win: The user-friendly, WYSIWYG email designer is what Marketo users were waiting for, allowing users to build email templates without technical assistance. The integration of the AI Assistant Content Accelerate feature unlocks the power of AI for content creation (copy, design) further enhancing the email creation process. While the email designer has some limitations, it is expected to be upgraded with additional features throughout 2025, marking a new era for Marketo users.

Now, on to other Marketo updates from the January release.

Unregister registrants from an event in interactive webinars

Remove a registrant from your webinar. The workflow removes the registrant from both the Marketo Event Program as well as Adobe Connect.

Why it matters: Stop unwanted registrants from attending your interactive webinar.

Disable campaigns on archive

This is a long-awaited upgrade: Previously, smart campaigns would continue running even after their associated program was archived, unless they were manually deactivated. Many users would forget to deactivate their smart campaigns, resulting in slower system performance due to possibly hundreds of these campaigns running in the background.

Why it’s a win: Less manual work thanks to the automatic deactivation of programs and campaigns upon archiving . Once this feature is available in your instance, it will be disabled by default. Head to your Admin section > Treasure Chest to enable it.

Social features deprecation

Social features (polls, social button, referral offer, video share, sweepstakes) were deprecated in summer 2024. Social assets ceased to function as of Feb. 1, 2025. As a result, social assets are no longer operational.  

Why it matters: It is crucial to audit your existing instance and assets to remove all uses of these social features.

Get Program Members API update

The Get Program Members API supports the ability to retrieve program members’ identifiers. This will help keep track of program members via their unique ID.. 

Why it matters: This will be helpful to anyone who has implemented a custom program/campaign sync or is tracking program membership in an external platform.

Rest API ‘access_token’ parameter deprecation

The Marketo REST API will no longer support authentication using the access_token query parameter after June 30, 2025.

Why it matters: People using the API should ensure that they’re passing the access token through the ‘Authorization’ header rather than a url parameter.

SOAP API deprecation

Support for the Marketo SOAP API will end on October 31, 2025. Any custom integrations need to be migrated to the REST API by this date. 

Why it matters: This change can be a big lift. If you haven’t already started this effort make sure to include all relevant stakeholders such as IT in addition to the MOps team.