Marketo's email editor is obviously terrible

We are using 2.0.

I'll check out Litmus and Email on Acid. Seems odd that Marketo's email builder is so limiting and cumbersom to use compared to many others out there.

Brian,

See my response below for one example.

We're developing a drip sequence. We wrote text and we're porting this into some of the templates marketo give you. Formatting text was hard. Moving text up or down within a block, especially when there's a background image, seems impossible to do via the editor. Removing some elements seems impossible. When you upload an image, it has to be the perfect pixel ratio. Then, if you change the size of the text on top of the image and length of the text, the image gets distorted.

I imagine if you kept to the exact same parameters - same string lengths. Same size photos, they'd work fine. It's deviating even 25% from these that seems to make things fall of the rails.

My colleague and I both ran into issues - and we are by no means new to email marketing, wysiwyg editors, or the like. Image resizing, trying to remove text from templates, after a few hours, we were considering hiring a full time designer because we'd pretty much not gotten anywhere...

Thanks,

DF

I have to agree with the sentiment. It's like you have to code in order to do simple things. Example, there are 3 pieces of text and a call to action button on top of an image in a std template. It's rather difficult to remove 1 or 2 of these text blocks. Also, there's no easy image resize option. So, just creating the header image and call to action in the Marketo platform is dramatically more time consuming than other editors in software like Hubspot. Even a simple system like Square Space has an editor that makes this easy. Honestly, the Marketo editor feels like it's 3-5 years behind the times.

Bee free is the way to go... by far the best tool I've used. Pretty sure Knack uses the Bee editor but built a smooth Marketo integration to make life even better for us Marketo users.

I totally understand the frustrations, but I think it's misleading and arguably defeatist to consider these as the only two options - there's more options, and the first two you've presented aren't (in my opinion) inherently awful choices. You can:

1. Use Marketo's basic starter templates (which are designed to be a starting point)
2. Expand your skill set by learning to code for email (a highly attractive skill in this industry) and how to use Marketo's simple and easy to use syntax within your HTML (i.e., include a few additional details to with ids and classes at appropriate sections to enable additional user-friendly functionality).
3. Develop a strong business case to hire a developer with email specific knowledge (which is an awesome resource to have).
4. Partner with other areas of your business who would benefit from developer resource to create a joint business case to hire one - noting that any decent email developer would be able to learn Marketo's syntax quickly, and many people with email development skills are multi-skilled in enormously beneficial areas such as web development, email/web design, UX, etc.
5. Partner with one of the many knowledgeable and affordable third parties who can develop email templates that are specifically designed to suit both your brand and your in-editor requirements.
6. Utilise one of the many third party plug ins mentioned in this thread to scale your email creation in a drag-and-drop style.

I'm sure there's more choices beyond that, too.

Equally, I think the expectation that Marketo should provide fully realised and comprehensive advanced email templates free-of-use is unrealistic and impractical. It doesn't really (in my opinion) make sense for Marketo to devote resources to developing advanced versions of their starter email templates, when:

• Most Marketo customers (particularly users above level 1 maturity) are likely to be using custom templates and wouldn't benefit from updates to the starter templates.
• A larger number of customers would benefit from investment in developing additional platform functionality instead.
• No two businesses needs are going to be the same for an email template - the starter templates are therefore designed to be as best fit for as many people based on the type of users who utilise them, and it would be incredibly difficult to develop advanced templates that would have high adoption for this same reason.
• Further to that, email clients are constantly evolving on what they do and don't accept, display, respond to, etc, so the more complicated an email template is, the more ongoing maintenance it's likely to require to ensure consistent responsivity across clients over time.
• And each database may have a completely different skew of dominant email clients that an email must be responsive across, so Marketo wouldn't have the benefit of being able to disregard or prioritise responsiveness across specific clients based on how that client is represented in your database, like can be done when you develop a custom one.

I'm not arguing that these difficulties you're experiencing aren't real or frustrating, actually the opposite - the fact that I've experienced those same frustrations is how I've learned a lot about the complexities of email development, client testing, and eventually come to develop my own templates and use the full power of Marketo's email editor in a way that's effective for both me and my users.

Sorry for the long rant, but I guess TLDR; this is a complex and nuanced subject with no single, perfect OOB solution for everyone, but there's resources out there to make it easier for a range of different needs.

Well, the rules are there so threads don't become flooded with ads... no matter whether someone's product or service is fit-for-purpose.