Marketo’s December release delivers a stream of new features just in time for the holidays. Some, like the enhancements to the Real-Time Personalization platform, are too specialized to affect most Marketo customers. Others, however, like improvements to Marketo’s workspaces, will have an immediate impact on Marketo's user experience.

Here are the highlights from the release — and what these new enhancements mean for you. 

How Will This Help Me Work Better?

• Clone Programs Easily Across Workspaces.
  
  Before, if you wanted to clone a program into another workspace, you had to first create a folder, clone your program into the new folder, and then move that folder into the desired workspace. Now, you can save yourself a few extra clicks. At the moment, this is only limited to programs, but Marketo hints that this may be rolled out to other marketing assets.
• Use Smart Lists Across Workspaces.
  
  Now, shared Smart Lists shared can be used to build campaigns and other Smart Lists even if the host folder is in a different workspace. This is a huge value-add; marketers no longer have to deal with the hassle of re-creating Smart Lists.

How Will This Help Me Go Further?

• Track Sales Email Activity.
  
  See which Sales Reps use Sales Insight the most and which templates drive the highest response rates. The new Sales Insight Marketo Report merges data from Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Outlook (via the plug-in) and Gmail (via the plug-in). For those Marketo customers on Sales Insight, this report could prove to be invaluable for driving better collaboration between marketing and sales.
• Track Links in Email Scripts.
  
  One of the biggest limitations previously in using email scripts was the inability to track click-throughs. Now marketers can take advantage of custom scripting without having to sacrifice valuable performance data.
• Create Facebook Custom Audiences from Marketo.
  
  If you have Facebook installed through Launchpoint, you can create, update or replace a Facebook Custom Audience using Marketo Smart or Static Lists. The catch: you will need the personal email addresses of your target audience. This feature will benefit B2C Marketo customers the most.

Additional Noteworthy Enhancements

• More Accurate Website Tracking.
  
  The Munchkin Javascript used to track website activity has been known to conflict with other Javascript on the page, skewing results in Marketo. Roll-out of enhancements is expected to take several months, with the first deployment scheduled for mid-December.
• More Secure Personalization.
  
  Lead and company tokens used in emails and landing pages will now be automatically encoded in HTML. The org-wide update is set for March 2015; in the interim, administrators can test this functionality by activating it in Field Management in the Admin section.
• Import Files in More Languages.
  
  In addition files encoded in UTF-8, leads and contacts can now be imported using files encoded in UTF-16, Shift-JIS, EUC-JP or EUC-CN. This is a major enhancement for companies with large databases in Asia and will improve Marketo’s ability to facilitate global demand generation initiatives.

The December Release Notes show that Marketo is ramping up to accommodate the needs of larger businesses with global reach. From enhancements to workspaces used by marketing teams, to greater language compatibility, rest assured if you are an enterprise client that Marketo will continue to improve the features that will allow you to scale your marketing operations.

Have an opinion about these new features? Contact us or tweet @Deandrathtan.

To learn more about effective marketing strategies, download our guide created in partnership with Marketo, The 3 Pillars of Modern, Digital Marketing.