Hey Vikram, here's my two cents...
Also trying to understand- what if a HTML formatter is provided in the editor, would it suffice?
I think the biggest help here would be to take the EM 2.0 framework and apply it to landing pages. It's nice to be able to format the html but those tool would probably need to be more open-ended so they could be dialed into more specific brand requirements. The Rich Text Editor is really either A) slowing down anyone who knows html -or- B) confusing a lot of folks that don't know html (things like copy/pasting from word, the way the editor handles styling w/ spans, divs, etc).
An example of something more like the EM 2.0 framework w/ LPs might be as simple as adding in similar variables - list, number, image - to allow a user to choose a color from a dropdown instead of using the RTE to add add'l html to color the text. There's an idea in the community here: that's along these lines.
Overall, I think the biggest challenge with designing in Marketo is two-fold -- 1) getting it right the first time (a solid foundation) and 2) being able to make changes that are more "error proof".
Editing emails was always a pretty thorny subject until EM 2.0 came along and now with the combination of modules and more variables, it's easier to make design-type (color, font-size, etc) changes without impacting the overall code-base. Something like this might be a huge win for Landing Pages as well and address the same problem with a proven solution.
Or having a set of predefined templates helps?
Templates age.... quickly. I think providing a collection of templates is something that either needs to be more crowd-sourced or maybe something internal that a team would stay up on and support (but this is more expensive for sure). Once upon a time, shortly after the release of EM 2.0, Marketo ran an email template contest that I thought was a pretty good example of how to get the community involved and provide more current template code to "update" the library. Perhaps there could be some kind of "badge" in the community or something that'd help folks who do make templates get recognized and maybe earn some new business in the process. Check out https://themeforest.net/ for inspiration - they're a template marketplace (so maybe some big-picture ideas here) and if you check out any of the templates, you'll notice some badges for the authors that help to "certify" their work over time (eg. "street cred").
Regardless of the approach here, it might also be worth it to think about this issue in terms of "modules" rather than templates -- they're more granular so updates can be singular or en-mass which makes them more manageable and it might also allow users to create their own templates which might be the biggest win overall here.
In the simplest terms, a "module" would be the same thing as it is for Email 2.0, just for Landing Pages. Maybe in a more "futuristic" application, you could drag-n-drop modules onto a template and those modules would be preset with all the variables, CSS and HTML you'd need for that specific piece. In this way, modules could be used to build templates once the blocks were setup and/or they could be used to add/edit the actual Landing Pages similar to the EM 2.0 experience now.
.png)