If you weren’t able to make our Coffee MUG webinar Tips & Tricks to Creating Amazing Emails in Marketo, you missed out on a pretty enlightening discussion. Led by Perkuto Senior Consultant and email aficionado Anna Leary, the webinar offered comprehensive instructions for using Marketo Email Editor 2.0, from enabling it for the first time to ensuring that emails show up the way you intend them to in your recipients’ inboxes. And at the end of the webinar, Anna fielded a number of questions on everything from tokens and snippets to design best practices, with lots of insights in between.
Here are some of the trickier “gotchas” Anna pointed out as elements within Marketo Email Editor 2.0 that can often be easily overlooked and cause issues down the road.
Your first, most important task
After enabling Marketo Email Editor 2.0, your first priority should be to clone or create a copy of all your 1.0 templates and then archive that folder for safekeeping. This will ensure that you’ll have a clean version of all of your original templates should you ever need them.
Always check your text version
While the default setting within Marketo is for your HTML copy to automatically populate your text version, some elements (like your call-to-action buttons, URLs and other variables) will not automatically carry over; that information must be added manually. You must check your text version against your HTML version for every email to ensure that all of the info you intend to send is included.
Preview is no substitute for sending a test email
Don’t rely on the preview tab within Marketo to ensure that your email will look the way it needs to for your recipients. To get a more accurate picture of how an email will look within an email client, use the “send test email” functionality to view the email within a specific email program, or go another step by using a program like Email on Acid to ensure your email renders properly in all of the top email clients.
Use modules instead of editing code
Anytime you edit the email code directly—whether it be to add additional spaces between paragraphs or tweak the settings of an image—you increase the chances of creating errors within your email and your template. By using the modules available within the template to ultimately create the design you want, you’ll be streamlining the process, reducing the need for designers and IT to step in.
Hold “shift” to suppress formatting
Pasting text that includes funky formatting can drive you crazy! To paste your text as plain text into Marketo Email Editor 2.0, simply press SHIFT + CMD + V (or SHIFT + CTRL + V if you’re on a PC) and any text you’ve copied will be pasted without any weird formatting issues.
Professional templates make life easier
Forgive the shameless plug, but using professionally designed, responsive templates (like those created by Perkuto) can and do make marketers’ lives exponentially better! You can take a single master template and create an entire library of subtemplates from it—and the templates work in all clients, even Outlook. The best templates are backed by an organization (like Perkuto) that offers professional services that will customize the template(s) to meet your specific needs.
Keep emailing and keep learning
It’s obvious that there’s a lot of interest in making the most of Marketo’s new email editor. And if you missed the webinar, don’t fret; our on-demand presentation is available, including 15 minutes of questions from marketers just like you, will give you an overview of how to get the most out of Marketo’s latest version. And don’t forget to download the ebook Making the Most of Marketo Email Editor 2.0 for easy-to-follow instructions complete with screenshots.
