Poll: Your experience level with HTML/CSS

[Anonymous]

This question is for folks who use Marketo not in a consultant capacity, but rather as the sole user for your company.  I want to know how your team organizes job responsibilities around Marketo:

1.)  What is your job title at your organization?
2.)  How involved are you with the HTML/CSS coding of your email marketing campaigns?  Does your graphic design team handle all of it, or does more of it fall to you?

My organization is trying to figure out how to utilize existing resources and also plan for the future in this capacity.  I have some experience with HTML and in previous jobs, was actually doing the updates in Dreamweaver and troubleshooting code (though was no expert).  However, this was a few years ago and there have been many chances since then, including responsive email design.  I'm trying to figure out if I personally need more training, or if our graphic design team needs more training.

Thanks for your thoughts!

[Elliott_Lowe1]

Runjini, I'm the head of our Marketing Operations department.  In addition to myself, we have three different people creating programs, emails, landing pages and reports.  One of those has some HTML experience (self-taught), but is not an expert.  We rely on the graphics experts on our web team for assistance with significant redesigns of our email templates.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hi Runjini, I'm the Marketing Automation Specialist, primarily responsible for our Marketo in our organization, although there are a couple of other people who have a more basic understanding of the system and can get emails out. As far as the creation of emails, I have some HTML knowledge (read: monkey see, monkey do) and no experience with responsive creation as you've mentioned. We use our graphic design team for some things, but also outsource some of our template development. 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the responses, everyone!  Helpful.

[Ashleigh_Davis]

Thought I'd pop in and share some of my insights, too. I echo much of what's mentioned above by Dory and Elliott. I'm managing the Marketing Automation Operations for our US region.

I do have HTML experience and can get in and do custom coding - I can code responsive design, but I'm slower than most because I don't do it day-in and day-out like full-time developers do.

If you have the budget to rely on dedicated design resources, I think that's definitely the way to go. It's easy to get stuck in the day-to-day and lose sight of the bigger picture, so I believe the power users in an organization should really be there to help optimize, recommend best-in-class processes, integrate new tools (where applicable) to automate, data strategy, and run the operational/more complex programs. I think this is really where the value of a marketing automation/operations role comes in.

Certainly there will be trouble shooting and day-to-day things like basic HTML revision, etc. that you'll still need to manage. That said, if you're trying to learn responsive from scratch, you could use designers to do it faster and more efficiently while you focus on more strategic items.

Of course, you can still learn responsive for fun....I just wouldn't rely on it 100% of the time. Too much other work to do, hah! 🙂

[Anonymous]

Thanks Ashleigh!