If you haven’t read part 1 of my MEUE blog series, please read that now for context! This blog is a continuation of that blog, not a repeat.
For many organisations Marketo Engage Unified Experience (MEUE) is already here. For some organisations it is still a while away.
For those of you who have not yet moved, you have some time to ensure you’re ready for the change. For those who have moved, there’s some notes below on what behaviour you should expect and how to communicate about the changes within your business.
The move to MEUE is compulsory. In some extreme cases your Marketo Customer Success Manager can help you delay having it switched on, but that will be temporary at best. Everyone will be moved across in the coming months.
Below I’ve tried to answer some of the most frequently asked questions I’ve received about the rollout.
When do I get MEUE?
Essentially, if you’re an SMB or Enterprise middle of the road user, regardless of data centre or geographic location, you should see MEUE switch over in October or November 2020.
This generally means you won’t move for a while if you are using some advanced features, but it’s primarily being driven by whether or not you use workspaces and partitions in Marketo. If you are using workspaces, you will likely get phase zero of MEUE in the latter part of the rollout, most likely in early 2021.
What will the communication from Adobe look like?
First, you will have already received a pop-up within Marketo. Then you will receive an automated message to all your Admin users. Then your Customer Success Manager will reach out to your admins in order to let you know the change is coming and on what date, usually a few weeks in advance.
There have been some instances where people have seen the change pop up and weren’t aware they were on the schedule to move. Hopefully these instances of lapsed communication are few and far between.
What happens if I have a Marketo sandbox?
If you have a production and a sandbox instance, they will change at the same time.
What should I do to prepare?
Change is never easy for anyone, especially in the tool you spend your day to day. There are some specific things you should be prepared to do before the change occurs if you still have that chance.
Before the switchover
Alert all your internal users that a change is coming. Be positive, open, and upfront about the impacts the change will have. Use Adobe’s own documentation and words to describe it to your users. Empathise with their situation, and ensure it’s easy for them to come to you for answers to their questions.
Stay on top of all the notifications and information around the change so you know what’s coming and can explain it to others. Be sure to emphasise that this is largely a cosmetic change in this phase, and that functionality generally has not changed too much.
Consider sharing some of the documentation Adobe has sent you to your users to help them acclimatise.
There are some official Adobe resources you can use to share information about the MEUE rollout with your team:
Clean up NOW!
If you have been considering a mass cleanup of your Marketo instance, do not put this off any longer. Do this work before MEUE hits your instance. Some of the decisions Adobe have made around drag and drop functionality (explained below) will make cleaning up a messy instance more time consuming, so tackle this job today.
With the types of changes coming in the new interface, it has never been more important for you to build a program naming and foldering strategy and enforce it. If you need help with this, give us a call.
After the switchover
If you have documentation or training materials internally, you’ll need to explain to people that while the interface has changed (some screenshots will now be out of date) functionally the content and processes are the same. Some handholding may be required.
Consider whether you want to hold off doing massive updates to your documentation until the full MEUE experience has been rolled out as we will continue to see big changes rolled out throughout 2021. If you can do cosmetic changes in documentation for the new tree without too much effort this would be a good idea now.
If you have users that you support, consider pulling together an internal FAQ that documents the changes and publish this to your users, keeping it updated as you learn more.
What’s in it for me with MEUE?
This is the first of many changes that are going to make Marketo more powerful and improve usability. There are some really positive signs for Marketo in this change.
The biggest benefits are (from Adobe’s own official documentation):
- Streamlined program and asset creation with the ability to create a local asset within a folder
- Consistent design for easier navigation across Adobe Experience Cloud applications
- Updated and sleek iconography
- A faster, more performant tree
- Ability to easily collapse all folders in the left-side tree menu
- Ability to apply multiple filters at once to narrow down your search
- Find any campaign, asset, etc. across Marketo Engage with Global Search
- More intuitive global navigation to move around Marketo Engage quickly
The big wins I’ve found are all in the advanced tree filtering that’s been carried over from Marketo Sky. It’s now easier to find what you’re looking for in a complex tree, and the ability to use multiple filter criteria to narrow your search is powerful once you get the hang of it.
Haven’t you missed something?
Read Part 1 and Part 3 or Veronica’s Marketo Engage Unified Experience blog series.
