Waiting on the edge of your seat for Marketo’s May release notes? Well, now that they’re finally out, I am excited to break down the highlights. May brings some great additions for maintaining campaign quality, plus a very welcome level-up to their Real-Time Personalization platform. Without further ado, here are the highlights from the May release:

How will this help me work better?

• Abort Email Programs.
  First, we had the abort campaign button for Smart Campaigns, and now, that same emergency brake is being rolled out to Marketo email programs. With the new abort email program button, you can cancel scheduled email sends that are not ready to go out. Avoid major email goofs like these, and deliver top-notch communications to your audience.
• Maximize Email Deliverability.
  Ensure that you have maximized email deliverability by checking your Marketo notifications when you log in. Marketo will now tell you if there are any errors in your SPF or DKIM records so that you can stay on top of your system’s health.
• Create Fully Responsive Landing Pages.
  Sometimes too much freedom can be a bad thing — like when it makes landing pages a little wonky on re-sized windows. Now, the Landing Page Editor will guide you as to where content should go to optimize the user experience. Of course, this also means you may need to review your landing page templates to ensure they are playing nicely with the updated template syntax.

How will this help me go further?

• Customize Content Recommendations on RTP.
  Previously, Real-Time Personalization’s machine learning was limited to the Content Recommendation. Bar that, when activated, displayed a link at the top of the page. Now, you can combine the power of predictive intelligence with images and text descriptions of your choice and recommend multiple assets at the same time. How cool is that?

The Final Word: The two updates I am most excited about are the deliverability notifications and the enhanced content recommendations on RTP. Deliverability is essential to the work that marketers do on Marketo; the last thing anyone wants is to find out that they are unable to communicate to their core audience because of a technical misunderstanding. (For more info on how SPF and DKIM work, you can visit here and here.)

As for the enhancements to the RTP Content Recommendation Engine, I’m excited to see the engine giving more creative power back to the marketers. The best user experiences leverage the science to enhance the art.

Full May Release Notes can be found here. How do the new enhancements affect your campaign efforts? Let me know in the comments below, or get in touch.