This series of blog posts is going to review functionality that you can use to be safer when you're building programs directly in production. I'm not suggesting you use all of these every time; there's a level of common sense that you need to deploy here, but it is good to know what options are available.
First, let's focus on functionality available across the entire instance.
User Permissions
Marketo has very granular user permissions that allow you to set up varying roles for users who have less training and/or experience within Marketo. In the Admin section, you can modify user roles so that newer users do not have the ability to take certain actions that have a permanent impact on the database. For example, the following permissions may be restricted:
- Access, Edit, Approve, or Delete Email Template: Would prevent the user from modifying email templates that may be in use by other groups besides their own
- Access, Edit, Approve, or Delete Landing Page Template: Would prevent the user from modifying landing page templates that may be in use by other groups besides their own
- Access, Edit, Approve, or Delete Email, Form, Image, Landing Page, Snippet, Social App: Would prevent the user from modifying the designated asset that may be in use by other groups besides their own
- Access, Edit, Approve, or Delete Segmentation: Would prevent the user from modifying database segmentations that may be in use by many other groups besides their own
- Import/Advanced List Import: Would prevent the user from using simple and/or complex list import options that could potentially overwrite data
- Delete Lead/Person: Would prevent the user from deleting people’s records in the system
- Edit Person: Would prevent the user from modifying people’s records in the system
- Run Single Flow Actions: Would prevent the user from running flow actions on an individual, such as changing a field value or adding the person to a list
- Activate Trigger Campaign: Would prevent the user from turning on any campaigns that run in real time based on the individual’s behavior
- Approve Email Program: Would prevent the user from launching an email through the email program, which is the program type with the built-in A/B testing functionality that is only used for one-time batch campaigns
- Delete Marketing Assets: Would prevent the user from deleting local assets within a program
- Import Program: Would prevent the user from importing programs from sandbox or other instances
- Schedule Batch Campaign: Would prevent the user from scheduling any campaigns that run on demand or on a schedule based on a predefined list or query
Smart Campaign Limits
In the Admin section, you can modify Smart Campaign settings so that when a new smart campaign is created, a limit is added to the campaign to abort it automatically when more leads exist in the campaign than the limit.
When a smart campaign is created, you can go to the schedule tab to manually override this for a specific campaign.
Using the Smart Campaign limits provides safety in two ways:
- The limit provides a built-in warning that can prevent people from accidentally emailing a much larger than normal group (e.g. the entire database)
- The limit adds in a built-in delay, in that individuals who aren’t aware of how to override this functionality would need to go to a more experienced Marketo user for support with this