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:
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Is in a particular program
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Is published to sales insight
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Is operational
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Is in a particular folder
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"starts with" / "contains"
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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editor: We use sales insight published emails quite a bit, and right now the most efficient way of pulling down old/outdated emails is simply unapproving the email.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.
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