Hello,
I was wondering how we can export everything we have in Marketo to have as a backup, should we decide to discontinue the license?
I've searched around but haven't found much answers yet. My concern is do we simply lose everything we built in Marketo the moment we don't renew the license each year (other than the few things we manually export)? Things like campaigns and scoring take a long time to build (we had to hire a 3rd party agency for this). That doesn't seem very user-friendly, why aren't our data kept at least for a few years should we start using Marketo again in the future?
LPs, LPTs, Emails, and ETs (and Forms, which aren't on your list) can be grabbed using the Asset API. But your goal as a whole can't be accomplished, since details like Smart List triggers/filters and Flow steps aren't exportable.
Marketo -- like most complex SaaS applications, I must say -- doesn't provide you with one-click reproducibility of your entire instance setup. Some things remain UI-only.
That doesn't seem very user-friendly, why aren't our data kept at least for a few years should we start using Marketo again in the future?
User-friendliness isn't so important for ex-users.
Seriously and personally (as someone who has worked on several SaaS platforms) the appeal of giving customers an offboarding method that they can use to rebuild entirely on a competing platforms is... limited? Though we understand that people might use the backup so they can get back in action on our platform, the cost of building a thorough export format for everything is way more than just keeping a copy of their setup around for a year or so (but in our proprietary format, not as a dumpfile or anything). But it's not a guaranteed thing, more like "I think these guys are legitimately coming back" vs. "These guys are off and running with a competitor, fuggedaboutit" case-by-case.
If you want your Marketo setup to be kept "on the side" of another product, you could in theory wipe the entire lead database and downgrade your subscription to a more affordable level?
Thanks for the explanation.
Can you provide more detail on the "asset API" you mentioned? I looked at the documentation but I'm not seeing info on how to export stuff, only tasks like create/edit/delete/approve etc. So far we have our leads and email templates exported only, the other things I haven't found an efficient way to export yet.
Here's the documentation for using the API to export assets: http://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/
I agree this would be a good feature. Even for just Smart Lists where you can export all the filtration, flows, and scheduling. To me, this would make editing robust and complicated smartlist's much easier if we could export them to excel, much like you can with a Smart campaign.
A few companies are offering a similar service to back up activity data due to the upcoming marketo retention policy changing. This will not include campaigns and creative assets, for these I recommend the other recommended suggestions.