Updating Marketo Email Template

Crystal_Pacheco
Level 4

Updating Marketo Email Template

Is there any danger in updating an email template that's associated with many emails? 1000+ emails or 5000+ emails?

I once updated an email template associated with about 600 emails and it took almost an hour for Marketo to approve the updated email template.

My concern is that it will begin the updating process and maybe crash and cause the template to be corrupted and unusable, is that possible?

6 REPLIES 6
Jay_Jiang
Level 10

Re: Updating Marketo Email Template

Can't say for sure, but, you can always update it when marketo usage is lowest, e.g. at midnight

Dave_Roberts
Level 10

Re: Updating Marketo Email Template

We normally build one-to-many templates and have a few clients running assets in the 1k+ range. In my experience, you can "trigger" the mass approval and it'll take a long time but I haven't seen it fail b/c of the wait or being interrupted. I've come to not trust the dialog box that warns you it'll take 40+ mins or whatever - seems like it's rarely that long and when it does/has acted up or frozen that a refresh will bring it back on track (either cancel the action or load the completed update). This makes me think it's more like "sending a command" to the system and that will try to process live in the browser over time but that once the command is sent it'll work in the background regardless of the duration of your browser session (like if you were to close the window and come back later). 
To be fair, some instances have way too many processes running at any given time so it might be a good idea to look for some down time to push a big update like this - if you've got 1k+ assets, chances are pretty good there's a bunch of processes running in the background as well. 

If this is something you're running into that seems like it just wont update, you could think about cloning your template and batching it with some kind of asset limit like 500 EM only and then cloning the template to start the next 500 assets. Makes a bit more work for some pieces but might help to work around a mass-approval issue.

To your point about it getting corrupt: I don't think this is something that'd corrupt your template code, but you could always copy the code and save it as an .html file for backup-sake. The big push here is in updating the assets, not the template, but I haven't ever seen any assets get corrupt as a result of an update to a template.

Crystal_Pacheco
Level 4

Re: Updating Marketo Email Template

Thank you for your response. I always have a saved backup offline of the html used for templates. 
I have seen emails become corrupt from updating a template, where the modules look broken and can no longer drag and drop. It could've been a fluke but I'm still traumatized by it.

I will consider doing the update at a more quiet time and see if it helps.

I will update this post when i do the update of the email template thats associated with 5000+ emails.

Wish me luck!

SanfordWhiteman
Level 10 - Community Moderator

Re: Updating Marketo Email Template

And next thing you know, someone will be asking you if you've ever done 10,000.

Crystal_Pacheco
Level 4

Re: Updating Marketo Email Template

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Albert_Alvarez
Level 3

Re: Updating Marketo Email Template

We have this issue.  We're trying to update our master template that has over 6K emails based off of it and it's failing approval every time.  Very frusterating and defeats the purpose of a master template structure IMO.

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