General improvements to mass editing/approval of assets

General improvements to mass editing/approval of assets

I just finished up the annual project of updating the copyright year on all our email and landing page templates. It's a straightforward task made extremely time consuming with the inadequate mass approval/editing capabilities in Marketo.

Once a template has a change made to it, every asset that uses that template has a draft created, and must be re-approved in order to reflect the template changes. Yes, it's possible to view all the landing pages/emails en-mass and approve in bulk, but the interface for doing this is counterintuitive and limited. And god forbid you accidentally click an asset name and get taken out of the interface entirely. It also takes a lifetime to approve a ton of assets (but I'll let this slide for now). Here's what I propose:

1. Allow more options to filter the list of assets: Right now you can only filter whether an asset is archived or not. Yes, you can sort by a column, but this isn't enough, especially when you've been using Marketo for many years, and have thousands of assets. I'd like to see the additional filters available to be able to control what can be seen in the mass editor:
  • Is in a particular program
  • Is published to sales insight
  • Is operational
  • Is in a particular folder
  • "starts with" / "contains"
  • Is approved/approved with draft/not approved

3. Ability to control MSI/Operational/archived status from the mass editor: We use sales insight published emails quite a bit, and right now the most efficient way of pulling down old/outdated emails is simply unapproving the email. It's way too clunky to go into the email editor, find the settings (which are buried), and uncheck the box, and then reapprove. Let us change these settings on multiple emails at once, WITHOUT require a draft approval.

4. Change the behavior of Snippets so they're actually useful in mass editing: Snippets solve a lot of these sorts of problems on paper, but the problem is that they create drafts of the assets that use them, just like everything else, and must also be approved themselves. So in this situation, they create even more work for the user. I know this has been submitted as another idea in the past, but it's related, so I thought I'd mention it here.

5. Change the behavior when you click an asset in the list to open in a new tab: It is SO frustrating to wait 5 minutes for your asset list to load, only to accidentally click the asset name and be taken out of the mass editor entirely. At least open that asset in a new tab. 

Ultimately, if it's just not possible to make these sorts of enhancements to the mass-editor, I'd like to suggest the ability to set global tokens for things like copyright year,  physical address, logo, etc. Make it as simple as setting your unsubscribe footer text. Literally every Marketo customer wrestles with these changes at some point (and in the case of copyright, EVERY year), and unless you're relatively new to the system and don't have a ton of assets, it's so user-unfriendly and time consuming to change these things right now. 
11 Comments
Michelle_Tizian
Level 10
Thanks for posting Jeff! I'm having to change the copyright year on some key landing pages on our templates. I agree on your 1-5 items above especially 4 and 5. 
Anonymous
Not applicable
Thanks for your feedback Jeff.  We know this process could be made a lot easier, and we have a number of enhancements on the roadmap to do just that.  Personally, I would like to have a role-based privilege for making auto-accepted changes to assets without having to deal with drafts or approvals.  That would be nice.  Dangerous, but nice.  🙂

Anyways, we'll make sure this gets in front of the product team since this is something we are working on.

Best,
Mike
Anonymous
Not applicable
I'm running into the same issue this morning and was thinking the same thing. Then wala, you've entered the idea. There are plenty of activites like this that would help overall expediency in execution.
Anonymous
Not applicable
The good news is that we do have something on the roadmap to lessen the pain around bulk editing/mass approval.  When I have more information on timing, I will update the post.  One suggestion for "the global token" is to create this token at the highest folder level.  If it's on the folder, then it will inherit into every program that is created below it.  It somewhat mimicks "global" this way.
Anonymous
Not applicable
Hi Mike and Cheryl,

Thanks for chiming in here, I'm pleased to hear something to address this is in the works.

Mike, great point of role-based permissions--that would be the ideal scenario.

Cheryl, the global token concept at the folder level is an interesting idea and I started to go down that path, but the only challenge is for any assets in design studio. To my knowledge, I can't set tokens in that section of Marketo, so I'd still need to edit the template, which would, of course, makes all my Marketing Activities assets drafts too :(.  I've also discovered that tokens don't play nice with Marketo Sales Insight emails, a feature we use quite liberally. 

So while I'm using the term "global token" in my idea, it's really for lack of a better name, because this sort of funcitonality needs to transcend what ordinary program/folder tokens can & can't do. 

Thanks,

-Jeff
Dan_Stevens_
Level 10 - Champion Alumni
These issues that Jeff has outlined are exponentially painful when you have 23 workspaces in your Marketo instance (organized by country) and those templates (emails and landing pages) are shared across all workspaces (today, you can't even mass-approve assets that exist in other workspaces).  I can't even imagine how painful this will be once we're fully deployed across all countries.
Anonymous
Not applicable

Hello,

I am currently working on a feature to address some of these issues. There will be a new 'approval' permission for snippets that would bypass the auto-drafting of approved assets each time a snippet is updated. The snippet issue is the first I'm tackling, followed similarly by LP templates. Email templates and forms are slated to be looked at afterwards. My expectation is if we can prevent these unnecessary drafts from being created in the first place, the need for mass/bulk approval will decrease.

The current time frame for all of this is early next year. As I mentioned, this is an active project and my priority as a new product manager here at Marketo! I will follow up with updates as I have them.

Thanks,

Christina

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10

With regards to point 1 of the idea, filters to add :

  • only assets based on a given template
Marit_Rossing
Level 3

It would be great if we can filter Emails, Snippets and Landing Pages on unapproved, to approve them easily all at once.

Anonymous
Not applicable

Info on mass updates/approvals we did to prepare for a switch to ssl in Marketo: https://salytics.com/ssl/ .  We've also done mass approvals (without having to do one page at a time in Marketo), mass program tag and token updates, etc.