Does Marketo support Interactive Email?

[David_Eldred]

So far with our Marketo implementation, we've used the Marketo templates to design our emails.

But I've begun reading more about the next generation of Interactive Emails, where recipients can engage with the content directly within the email.

Does Marketo support this?

The link below is from Litmus's Email solution. I'm not advocating for use of Litmus but would love to hear that adding Interactive Email content is on the roadmap for Marketo. Anyone know more about this?

LINK: Interactive Email’s Opportunities and Challenges – Litmus Software, Inc.

[Grace_Brebner3 · Accepted solution]

Hey David,

It's actually not really a question of whether Marketo supports this - if you have resource to develop the code for interactive functionality then yes, you can add it to Marketo emails - Marketo won't strip it out. Creating interactive elements within starter templates is not likely to be on Marketo's roadmap because the expectation is generally that you develop those more use-case specific components yourself - their primary responsibility would be to ensure that functionality is supported in the template + email editor. Which it is, at least for the use cases I've tested.

So the question is less whether Marketo supports it and whether email clients do - which is the complicated answer. Some do, some don't - and whether the ones that do have a high representation in your database is another point for consideration. Email Monks and Litmus both have more info on what is and isn't accepted across major clients.

I'm actually a major advocate for Litmus, love it, couldn't do my job effectively without it. If you don't have a subscription I would strongly recommend it - lots of people don't realise how complicated email development is until they see how many clients we have to test in and how much they vary. Personally, I wouldn't touch interactive without it.

Personally I would say that you might be jumping the gun to be looking at interactive functionality when you're still using Marketo starter templates. Marketo's starter templates aren't updated super frequently and are typically designed to suit the broadest, simplest use cases - they often have client display and/or responsiveness issues as a result. Most users move onto custom templates pretty quickly to cater to their more specific needs.

Because interactive functionality doesn't have a particularly high acceptance in email clients yet, it often requires some fairly advanced dev support and thorough testing to ensure that it works and falls back as intended. It can be even more difficult and frustrating to attempt this in a template that has existing client display issues - and I'd argue, often less impactful to your performance than just fixing those issues. I would recommend considering developing custom templates for your organisation before looking into interactive to deeply.

Hope that helps