Moving off Marketo Designer

Hi Paul,

If you have rendering issues or insufficient flexibility, the designer is not the culprit. The issue is in your templates.

So, an alternative to moving away from Marketo designer would be to invest into a a set of custom templates developed for your needs by a serious developer

Creating emails with the designer has the interest of flexibility and user autonomy.

Now, there are some email development tools that can inject the html code directly into Marketo using the API, removing the need for copy-paste operations. So if you really want to go in this direction, you should consider a solution that proposes this capability.

-Greg

Like Greg said, if you can find the right agency (or even a service that provides a way to build templates self-serve, like Knak), you can really create an environment that makes creating emails and landing pages quite easy (and on-brand) - even for novices.  We recently worked with an agency (Grazitti Interactive) on an "all-in-one" template that will be used for any type of email communication: newsletters, campaign content, event invitations, blog subscriptions, etc.  Here's a sampling of the variety of modules at our disposal to enable us to create the layout that works best for the type of communication/promotion:

It was a bit painful to get here - primarily all of the testing required (especially to get modules to render properly in Outlook) and going back and forth with the agency to make the necessary code changes.  But now that we've deployed this in our instance, the field marketers love the ability - and flexibility - to create just the look they want.  And since the hero banners are editable (text) and users can select from a wide variety of base images, they don't need to go to creative services every time they need a new email/landing page banner.  Not only is everything completely responsive, but they even created a framework for rendering alternate hero banner elements (the ones with the wave/gradient) when viewing on a mobile phone.

Hi @Dan Stevens thanks for sharing the wonderful words, it's always an amazing experience working with you.

Hi Paul Jackson as suggested by Dan and Greg, we help Marketo users with custom email and landing pages development. Would be happy to connect and discuss in detail.

Thanks,

Shailendra