MOPS Rundown: Marketo enhances Predictive Audiences and UX in Q4 release

Adobe released several notable enhancements to its Marketo marketing automation platform earlier this month, along with tighter Marketo/Bizible integrations. Marketo acquired Bizible in 2018.

Predictive audiences

Predictive Audiences were first offered as an add-on in 2020 including filters like Lookalike of Program Members, Likelihood to Register, Likelihood to Attend, and Likelihood to Unsubscribe. According to Adobe Experience League, “Predictive Audiences (PA) utilizes AI and machine learning to enable you to target audiences more effectively and take proactive steps to reach your marketing goals.” The latest release offers enhancements to this feature.

To enable, navigate to the Predictive Audiences page in the Admin area of Marketo Classic. There, you can enable the feature and start testing after 24 hours. This feature is only available to those of you with Prime or Ultimate pricing bundles.

The feature enhancement provides more visibility into the behaviors driving results or what is leading to unsubscribes. 

“Learning what is influencing AI predictions is another layer of insights marketers can use to adjust their approach,” said John Francis, Demand Generation Director at Perkuto.

Additionally, the latest enhancement allows for creating lookalike audiences in all program types.

Why we care. “AI should be made available to everyone and should be easy to use and to adopt,” said Alexandra Quick at Marketo. With only 18% of B2B marketers reporting adoption of AI-driven personalization according to “The State of Artificial Intelligence in B2B Marketing” (Demand Metric, 2019), Marketo’s initiative is welcomed. 

With that said, it’s unknown how many Marketo users are currently experimenting with Predictive Audiences. At Perkuto, we haven’t documented any use cases since its inception and there is very little documented in the broader Marketo community.

During the original Beta testing, we were impressed by the results achieved by Kimberly Galitz, a Marketo Champion who runs marketing automation at Bandwidth. She was able to reduce her audience size for email sends by 73% and still meet about 80% of her audience registration goals. In this video, she shares the details of her test.

Perhaps with this latest enhancement, we will see more discussion within the community and specifically answer some of the following questions, for example:

• Does the use of Likelihood to Register, Likelihood to Attend, and Lookalike of Program Members filters increase performance? and
• Does the use of the “likelihood to unsubscribe” filter reduce the unsubscribe rate?

Next-generation experience

A few updates will be released including the ability to toggle between your preferred experiences, search more efficiently, and monitor tasks. According to Adobe, users will be able to “monitor the status of tasks running in the background of the new experience via the new task notification tray in the global navigation bar.”

Why we care. Toggling between the old and new experience can be a love-hate relationship with any platform. It goes without saying that many of us have been toggling between Salesforce Classic and Lightning for some time now. In Marketo, it’s nice to see that users can toggle between form details or landing page list view without losing context, asset changes, or preferences. 

For searching more efficiently, you had us at “more visible applied filters.” 

Experience automation

Let’s dive into a few enhancements related to experience automation. 

First, remember Program Member Custom Fields? Adobe has upgraded the Submit Form API endpoint to support Program Member Custom Fields. 

“Adobe is likely expanding the endpoint to increase the utility of the Program Member Custom Fields and the Submit Form endpoint,” said Paul Ferrer, Perkuto’s Senior Technical Consultant. “While we have yet to see Program Member Custom Fields widely used, it’ll be nice to have increased options around them.” 

For Adobe Experience Platform users, Adobe also announced new connectors with AEP. These will be released over the coming months: 

1. A native Adobe Experience Platform connector for sharing audiences to Marketo will help enable multi-channel campaign orchestration for segments created in Adobe Experience Platform. According to Adobe, static lists will be automatically populated; and 
2. A Marketo data source connector for keeping data consistent between AEP and Marketo. 

Sales Insight

Sales Insight is receiving some love with enhancements to Best Bets and reporting dashboards.

In Microsoft Dynamics 365, Best Bets will allow sales users to take actions including review a person’s score, send an email, or add prospects to designated Marketo campaigns directly from the Best Bets page. 

In Salesforce, sales users will have the ability to review Best Bets for all contacts on the account or opportunity they own — even for contacts they do not own. This means sales users will have a more holistic view of the account or opportunity. 

The new reporting dashboards include email and web activity (including anonymous). Sales users will have access to the most recent email and web activities for their leads and contacts and can use the new filtering capabilities to drill down as needed. 

Why we care. The latest updates will increase efficiency, speed up response times, provide more visibility, and better inform sales users about lead behaviors across all of the touchpoints. The expected result is to enable sellers to personalize engagement and convert leads faster. 

Bizible Integrations with Adobe Privacy Service

Bizible is now integrated with the Adobe Privacy Service. According to Adobe, “the Adobe Privacy Service centralizes compliance with critical data privacy regulations, such as GDPR (General Data Privacy Regulation) or CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) across Adobe Experience Cloud applications.”

Why we care. This enhancement allows users to manage all privacy requests centrally and changes can be reflected across applications. 

View the complete set of October 2021 release notes from Adobe. 

MOPs Rundown is presented through a partnership between MarTech and Perkuto, a marketing operations consultancy.