New Email Editor -- not ready for widespread use?

[mmcvey]

Anyone else having not only a bear of a time using the new Email Editor, but getting any actual answers from Support about it?

• Upon its initial release, we were unable to clone newly created emails in any type of Marketo program other than email programs, which we use the least at this time. Because of this, with our newly redesigned emails that we hoped to import from Emailify/Figma, we had to plug the HTML directly into the email code in the default program built in Marketing Activities, making it much more manual of a build/maintenance process.

• We've had ongoing issues with Email Editor properly reading the HTML that we are plugging in. Mainly, we are trying to create fragments that we can then add editable fields to in order to create a "library" of reusable fragments. As we are importing the HTML into Email Editor, it seems to read only one or two components of the overall fragment we are creating as "editable", when we need to be able to have the ability to make each component customizable. 

• To the above point, we currently have a library of modules that we are able to drag and drop in the emails we are building and customize them to fit the needs of the campaign. It is our hope (and need) that we are able to do the same with customizable fragments. 

If anyone has been able to make the aforementioned (or anything resembling it) work, please reach out! Thanks, all. 

[uditmathur]

Hi @mmcvey ,

New Email Designer is a very new feature launched by Marketo & is still not full flagged launched.

Having said that many of the functionalities of new editor are now Live & available to use.

New email Designer is now available across all program types except Interactive webinar.

Fragments are also fully available. You can clearly define parts within fragments to make them editable & be changed during the email design.

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/marketo/using/product-docs/email-marketing/email-designer...

You should go through the updated document on above link.

Hope this Helps 🙂

[mmcvey]

Thanks, Udit. I've gone through the documentation you included many times and have referenced it in tickets to Marketo Support. Unfortunately, it's not much help when you actually go in to the tool itself. 

[Dave_Roberts · Accepted solution]

I do think it's still really too early to be taking the new email tool seriously as an option for real-world production. There's still a bunch of features that are lacking in the tool that limit the functionality compared to the existing email editor (v2.0). Even once the "bugs" are worked out and all the road-mapped features are added, I'm still skeptical that it'll be something you can trust. The real issue with WYSIWYG editors and automatic code migration (for templates, etc) is that someone somewhere has to make decisions about how to interpret the HTML and force that into some sort of standard format programmatically -- that's difficult for even seasoned email developers on a case-by-case basis let alone as a single program/format/logic-path and I haven't (in my 10 years of Marketo Email development) ever run into a migration project where there weren't questions or concerns around how to handle taking "some other code" and translating that into Marketo's Email syntax. At the end of the day, it's just not a one-size-fits-all world.

Moreover, this kind of tool needs constant baby sitting -- as things change in the email code landscape (which they often do) things that worked yesterday no longer work today or things that were once best practice are now old-hat. From what I've seen so far from a technical perspective of the code base, I don't trust the tool or the framework to produce consistent enough results to compete with what we're currently doing in email 2.0 -- that's to say it's technically a step backwards. Since the code base is locked away and not something that is open to developers like the email 2.0 model is, you're kind of stuck with what they give you and are forced to align your business requirements around the tool instead of the tool around your business requirements.

When Email 2.0 was announced, it took a few years for it to actually gain traction and even longer before the "old version" was sunset. To this day, you can still make FreeForm Landing Pages in Marketo and that's an ancient feature that hasn't ever gotten sunset, so I wouldn't buy the hype about needing to be ready for the current email system to go away -- think about how many folks out there are using it and how disruptive it would be to hit the kill switch on something like that... it sounds like an easy recipe to lose a lot of business if you ask me.

For my own stuff as well as in a consultative manner, I'm thinking late 2026 or 2027 might be a more realistic timeframe to take something like this seriously and even then I'll need to look behind the scenes at the underlying code base before I'm ready to trust a WYSIWYG email tool b/c email is notoriously fickle and not something that's easy or consistent enough to nail down in an automated tool like this without having a lot of "yeah but it doesn't work here and here and here" disclaimers. 

Remember - you can get 2 of 3: Fast, Cheap and Good --- this is promising Fast and Cheap email design, so I guess we'll have to wait and see how that all works itself out.

[mmcvey]

Dave, thank you so much for your thoughtful reply. It's much appreciated and honestly very helpful when I speak to my team leaders later this week!

[deepthiamir]

Hi @mmcvey 

Some of these features are being addressed as we speak.

Regarding importing Marketo V2 version email as HTML, there might still be some work required for some components in the new visual editor. Kindly DM me any screenshot or components that are not getting converted as expected, we can check how reuse of content from v2 to the new editor can be addressed.

We also encourage you to create new Fragments in the new visual editor for net new email creatives, so they work seamlessly & unlock many new features.