4 things your Marketing Automation Platforms should be doing (but probably aren’t)
Mina Saleeb, Global Director of Marketing Automation The majority of businesses now use marketing automation – 76%, according to recent research – but it can...
Moving beyond the basics
Adobe Marketo Engage has been a staple in the marketing automation world for over a decade and in that time, it’s become a core part of marketing operations in thousands of organizations. But for many teams, their use of Marketo still centres on the basics: sending emails, scoring leads and reporting on opens and clicks.
That might have been enough in 2015. But in 2025, marketers and their audiences expect more.
Let’s explore how modern teams are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with Marketo and marketing automation as a whole. We’ll look at real use cases and strategic shifts that show how Marketo can (and should) evolve as your marketing maturity grows.
Is Marketo still delivering value in 2025?
Absolutely, but only if you’re evolving with it.
Marketo’s original strengths were around scalable email campaigns, lead management, and CRM alignment. These are still foundational, but there are many platforms that do this now, at a fraction of the cost. Today’s organizations are facing bigger challenges:
- How to personalize at scale across channels
- How to automate more than just emails
- How to measure meaningful engagement beyond an open or click
- How to unify fragmented data across systems
Marketo has the flexibility and architecture to support all of these, but only if you push it beyond its traditional use.
While many organizations are experimenting with generative AI, those that combine it with campaign automation frameworks will scale faster and get to market faster to deliver more personalized, relevant content without burning out teams.
What’s next with Marketo?
Automating the Content Supply Chain
Creating and deploying content is still a manual process for many teams. But Marketo can play a critical role in automating the Content Supply Chain. As teams, budgets and time diminish, more creative ways of generating content to save time and resources are available:
- Integrating with Workfront, AEM Assets and Fusion: Automate workflows from content creation to approval to activation directly into Marketo, without even being in Marketo.
- Content Assembly and Tokenising: Use tokens, programmatic structures and scripts to dynamically assemble emails or landing pages based on audience segments.
- Versioning and Localization: Use smart campaigns or tokens to manage variations in versions, languages, products, or regions.
Advanced personalization with velocity scripting
Velocity scripting isn’t new, but most marketers only scratch the surface. Advanced use cases include:
- Injecting dynamic recommendations based on custom fields or behaviors, perfect for e-commerce and scalable personalization.
- Calculating values on the fly, like pricing models or discounts
- Translating content dynamically based on language preferences using localised token libraries or lookup scripts
This allows for a truly 1:1 experience at scale, no third-party tools required. With the new Email Builder, we are eagerly awaiting the revamped version of velocity scripting dubbed “handlebars”.
Custom engagement tracking (time on page, scroll depth, video views)
Clicks and form fills don’t tell the full story, especially with the rise of bots.
By embedding custom JavaScript into your website, or using the Munchkin API you can track back to Marketo:
• Scroll percent and depth
• Time on page / dwell time
• Video interaction or engagement hotspots
• Persistent UTM and session tracking
• Custom CTA interaction outside forms or emails
This data can be pushed back to lead fields, custom objects or activities and used to trigger follow-up actions, enhance reporting, create behavioral segments, or adjust scoring models to give your business a higher level of engagement analysis.
Self-Service flow steps and operational efficiency
A major shift in mature Marketo organizations is the move toward self-service automation; empowering marketers to trigger operational tasks without needing dev and technical support for every campaign.
This has led to the rise of Self-Service flow steps and to an older extent webhooks. These requestable flow steps on smart campaigns handle tasks like calculations, alerts, enrichment, limit restrictions and AI summaries in a centralized, controlled way. These flow steps are prebuilt and exposed onto smart campaigns to run these more detailed and technical actions that out of the box Marketo, simply cannot handle.
Examples of this include:
- AI sales summaries of engagement for the last 30 days
- Prompts to Slack or Teams channels
- Calculations and formulas
- Data enrichment or standardization of a lead before routing
- Merging of duplicatesWith this approach marketeers have more options at their fingertips, without requiring technical support.
Combating deliverability issues with ISP-specific settings
Email deliverability has never been more complex. Google, Microsoft, Comcast and company inboxes all have their own evolving rules on what they do or don’t let in. Marketo natively doesn’t always comply with these rules, which can leave large databases prone to hard and soft bounce issues.
For example, through testing we noticed Comcast would only accept 30 emails every 2 minutes and exceeding that limit resulted in soft bounces for every record afterwards.
Businesses are now starting to:
- Using dedicated IPs with custom ISP strategies
- Customizing SPF/DKIM/DMARC beyond the defaults
- Setting up custom throttling rules per ISP
- Creating audience-specific sender reputations
- Using seed testing + feedback loops with inbox providers
This improves inbox placement and protects your sender reputation long-term.
Fighting bot traffic and false signals
Fake clicks and bot traffic are muddying lead scoring models everywhere. With the rise of spam checking bots, half the time we can’t even be sure that a person has opened or clicked an email. Try as they might, Adobe’s default bot defence cannot combat this alone.
Smart Marketo users are now looking for their own solutions like:
- Filtering out bot activity using custom click filters and regex matching
- Using reCAPTCHA and honeypot fields in forms to spot spam submissions
- Combining Marketo and server-side analytics (like GA4) to validate engagement
This helps separate real engagement from noise, and keeps your scoring and reporting clean.
Connecting with BI tools for custom dashboards
Out-of-the-box analytics in Marketo can’t answer the bigger or more technical questions. That’s why many teams are:
• Exporting Marketo data to a data warehouse
• Building dashboards in Power BI, Tableau, or Domo
• Combining Marketo, CRM, web, social, offline and product usage data together for full-funnel analysis
If you’re not doing this yet, you’re probably missing out on making the best data driven decisions for your business or incapable of proving your worth through ROI. On top of this, the next evolution of BI analytics is to add AI prompts or replace dashboards all together.
Why not have AI review all the data and tell you or your C-Suite which campaign is generating the most ROI or how your company is performing is key areas, rather than sifting through dashboards. No longer are you restricted to what you can format into a dashboard!
The rise of AI
Scaling content creation with Adobe GenStudio and AI
We have already discussed how we can automate the Content Supply Chain, but it still relies on human input to write, design and create content and emails. This can still take businesses and marketeers time and effort they don’t have. Is this not what AI was designed to help alleviate? Enter Adobe GenStudio.
GenStudio helps teams generate, manage, and adapt content using AI, with a direct line into Adobe’s creative and automation tools, like Marketo (or AJO) for:
- AI-Generated Emails: GenStudio can create branded, editable templates optimized for engagement, reducing creative cycles and giving marketers faster access to launch-ready assets.
- On-Demand Copywriting: From subject lines to CTAs, generative AI can assist in creating tailored variations based on audience, segment, or channel goals.
- Smart Personalization: Pair GenStudio with Marketo to dynamically insert timely and relevant content for different personas.
- Streamlining Approvals and Compliance: Creative teams can collaborate in GenStudio’s shared workspace, using built-in version control and automated compliance checks to ensure content is approved and personalized before being seamlessly pushed into Marketo.
While many organizations are experimenting with generative AI, those that combine it with campaign automation frameworks will scale faster and get to market faster to deliver more personalized, relevant content without burning out teams.
Our newly Adobe Accredited Partner Solution for Compliant Content Orchestration with Adobe GenStudio for Performance Marketing is built for creative and content teams, this helps enterprise marketing teams and those in regulated industries to move faster, work smarter, and stay on brand – at scale.
Explore how we’re enabling enterprise marketing with Adobe GenStudio across the Content Supply Chain.
The challenges ahead
The rise of Adobe’s Experience Stack and the challenges ahead
Adobe is clearly moving toward a more unified Experience ecosystem, with AEP (CDP), Adobe Journey Optimizer (AJO) and Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) all designed to work seamlessly together.
But the reality right now is it’s still complicated:
- AEP is powerful and offers to take business and their data alignment across all channels to the next level. But, it’s also complex and requires a significant data foundation.
- AJO is disrupting the channel-led mindset to create a customer-centric approach, for a more consistent and engaging experience. It’s promising to offer a holistic customer engagement with orchestrated campaigns and real-time customer journeys. From what I see they’re on the right track, but may still require some time to get to where they promise.
- CJA brings multi-touch, cross-channel visibility by combining AJO (or potentially Marketo) data with behavioural, CRM, and web analytics, giving marketers a unified view of the entire customer journey, from anonymous to known to converted. However, it requires a strong data layer and integration with Adobe Experience Platform (AEP), making it less accessible for teams without a mature data infrastructure or significant implementation resources.
Though this ecosystem looks and sounds like the solution to all your company’s problems, the reality is platform cost and implementation overhead is significant and many organizations outside of large enterprises simply won’t be able to justify adopting the full suite. Watch this space though!
What’s next?
For now, Marketo remains the workhorse for engagement. But forward-thinking teams are maximizing the potential of the platform, while keeping one eye on the future, ready to adopt AEP, or pivot to a more advance ecosystem all together once the options become more mature and integrated.
Conclusion: Marketo’s not done, you just need to push it further
Marketo isn’t a legacy tool. It’s a powerful platform, but only when you unlock its full potential.
Whether you’re looking to improve personalization, scale your content production, empower your marketing teams, or connect to a future-ready data stack, the tools are there. But it takes a mindset shift, technical creativity, and cross-team collaboration to make it happen.
Marketo is still delivering value, especially if you’re ready to go beyond the basics.
Many organizations are paying for advanced capabilities they never use. Bluprintx’s Martech Assessment identifies the gaps between your current implementation and what’s possible. Schedule your assessment to receive actionable recommendations for evolving your marketing technology beyond the basics.
If this resonates with your current Martech Journey and you want to take the next step why not take our Martech Assessment.