Marketo's email editor is obviously terrible | Community
Skip to main content
David_Friedman
David_Friedman
New Participant
April 3, 2019
Question

Marketo's email editor is obviously terrible

  • April 3, 2019
  • 13 replies
  • 12429 views

All,

Since Marketo's email editor is obviously terrible...

What other email editors do people use to get anything done?

Thanks,
Dave

    This post is no longer active and is closed to new replies. Need help? Start a new post to ask your question.

    13 replies

    Show previous replies
    Grace_Brebner3
    Grace_Brebner3
    New Participant
    April 3, 2019

    Hey David,

    You might want to be more specific about what you're looking to achieve with the email editor that you're finding you're unable to achieve. You're obviously experiencing issues that are causing a lot of frustration, but if you can share those specific frustrations with us we might be able to help you resolve them to use the editor more effectively.

    There's quite a few factors to consider when it comes to a great email editing experience in Marketo - its ability to mould itself to your template is incredibly powerful but can be jarring for those with experience in other platforms where the structure is quite different, and problematic if the template isn't built to suit Marketo's syntax. There's lots of discussion on the community around this topic (see this thread: Re: Do we seriously need to know how to code to create a landing page template?).

    Hope that helps.

      David_Friedman
      David_FriedmanAuthor
      New Participant
      April 3, 2019

      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.

        Grace_Brebner3
        Grace_Brebner3
        New Participant
        April 3, 2019

        My comment in that thread I linked to probably provides much the same response I'd have here.

        Totally appreciate how frustrating this is for you, the structure of the systems are quite different - personally I would choose Marketo any day for the level of control it gives me that Hubspot doesn't. I've never been able to create emails in Hubspot that were as beautiful or as responsive as the ones I've created in Marketo (but disclaimer; I can code, I know Marketo's syntax fluently, and design my templates to maximise this, and I care ​a lot​ about ensuring my emails display consistently across clients).

        I would strongly recommend that you invest in a custom email template that meets your brand and user requirements; there are a number of affordable third parties with pretty comprehensive knowledge of the Marketo syntax who can do this for you if you don't have the internal expertise/resource.

          Bryan_Epstein
          Bryan_Epstein
          New Participant
          April 3, 2019

          What exactly are you trying to accomplish with Email Editor that you are having issues with? Are you trying to add new modules or are you just trying to make basic edits to the emails?

          David_Friedman
          David_FriedmanAuthor
          New Participant
          April 3, 2019

          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

            Grace_Brebner3
            Grace_Brebner3
            New Participant
            April 3, 2019

            Hey David - totally appreciate how frustrating all those issues must be. Examples are helpful.

            What you're encountering are issues that are not the result of Marketo's email editor being a bad editor, however, but the email template that you're using not being built to enable the kind of changes you'd like to make, or the degree of control you'd like to have.

            Sounds to me like you'd benefit from a more advanced and customised email template - all of the problems you list are problems that I don't have in my template because my template is designed to enable these functionalities/ways of working.

              Nicholas_Hajdin
              Nicholas_Hajdin
              New Participant
              April 3, 2019

              Do you have experience building emails? Many people have had success with Email Editor 2.0 Make sure you've reviewed Email Editor 2.0 - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation

              Have you looked into Litmus or Email on Acid? Both offer email builders along with the ability to test your emails across devices and email clients.

                David_Friedman
                David_FriedmanAuthor
                New Participant
                April 3, 2019

                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.

                  Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement

                  Loading footer...