How email approval works in Marketo

Approval is a state on the asset

Marketo’s approval model is best understood as a switch. Every asset has a draft version and may have an approved version and only approved versions can be used by smart campaigns and programs. Flipping the switch is a permission. Deciding who should flip it for a given asset, telling them it is waiting and recording why they did are left to the team.

Oracle Eloqua took a different route with a multi-stage campaign approvals workflow with named reviewers and notifications. Each approach covers different ground.

Approving emails

Adobe’s approve an email page is short. “Emails start in draft state. They are generally unavailable in the system until you approve them.” There are three ways to approve: Approve from the Email Actions menu with the email selected, Approve from the right-click menu in the tree, or Approve and Close from the Email Actions menu inside the editor. Then “your email’s ready for use.”

What happens after that is where teams get caught. Editing an approved email doesn’t change the live version. It creates a draft alongside it and the email shows as Approved with Draft. Marketo keeps sending the approved version until the draft is approved too. Marketo users describe the three states as Draft, Approved and Approved with Draft and the practical consequence as “Marketo would keep using the approved version unless you don’t approve the draft.” The same thread notes that an email can’t be unapproved while anything references it so the usual way to change a live email is to edit, check and approve the draft rather than unapprove first. A draft that shouldn’t have happened can be discarded which is also how an email picks up changes from an updated template.

The mistake this allows is a specific one. A marketer fixes a date, previews the email, sees the fix and schedules the send. The fix is in the draft. The send goes out with the old date. Scheduling an entirely unapproved email is blocked but a draft on an approved email gets a warning at most and users have asked Adobe for a stronger alert.

Landing pages, forms and templates

The same model applies to the rest of the Design Studio. Landing pages are in draft until approved and Adobe’s page covers approving, unapproving and deleting them. Forms are approved from the form editor with Approve and Close. Email and landing page templates are approved the same way and approving a changed template or form can push drafts into every asset that uses it, each of which then needs approving in turn. Snippets have an Approve Snippet permission of their own.

Email programs

An Email Program adds a program-level step. On the Approval tile you click Approve Program and Marketo flags anything that would stop the send, such as an unapproved email, for you to fix before approving again. After approval the tile shows the program’s status from waiting to run through finished. A program can be unapproved before it runs if you change your mind.

With Head Start turned on the program begins processing about twelve hours before the scheduled send and is locked once processing starts, with Abort Program as the way out. If you unapprove within twelve hours of the run time and re-approve, the new time has to be at least twelve hours out. Head Start can’t be combined with A/B testing.

Who can approve

Approval is governed by role permissions. Under Access Email there are separate Edit Email and Approve Email permissions and the same split exists for Email Template, Landing Page, Landing Page Template, Form, Snippet and, under Access Marketing Activities, Approve Email Program. The roles guide covers how roles are built and assigned.

That split is the review mechanism Marketo offers and it is worth using. Give marketers a role with Edit Email and without Approve Email and every email they build has to be made live by someone else. Two caveats. The roles have to be granted in the right workspace and a user holding two roles can lose the permission unexpectedly, since Adobe’s knowledge base warns that when roles conflict “Marketo may restrict the User from being able to approve the email asset.”

What approval leaves to you

For a central team approving its own work the model is fine. Self-service asks more of it, because the people building are marketers and the people approving are checking someone else’s work.

Reviewers aren’t notified

An email sitting in draft waits until someone looks. Notifying an approver that a draft needs them, escalating and tracking how long drafts have waited are left to the team, so the marketer usually finds out by asking.

Any approver can approve anything

Any user with Approve Email in the workspace can approve any email in it. A regional email can be approved by someone in another region, a product announcement by someone who has never seen the product brief and a marketer with both permissions can approve their own work. There is no way to say “this kind of email goes to the brand team, then legal.”

The reviewer sees the asset and never the request

Approval is set on the email. The reviewer sees the email and nothing about what was asked for, who asked, which list it is going to or when. A perfect email built to the wrong brief and pointed at the wrong smart list passes, because approval never looked at the brief or the list.

Programs and lists aren’t covered

Asset approval covers emails, pages, forms and templates. A smart campaign’s audience, its schedule and its flow steps have no approval state and neither does a list import which is where most of the lasting damage comes from. Approve Email Program covers the program as a whole but still says nothing about whether the right people are in it.

Every edit creates a draft

Because edits create drafts that don’t send, a marketer who fixes a typo after approval and doesn’t re-approve has sent the typo. The same mechanism that protects against sending unreviewed changes can send a stale version when a draft is left unapproved.

Approvals in Campaign Launchpad

Campaign Launchpad treats approval as part of each kind of campaign rather than a state on an asset. When Marketing Ops builds a campaign wizard it decides who has to sign off on campaigns made with it and in what order. A customer-facing announcement might need the brand team then legal. A regional newsletter might need the regional lead. A test send to an internal list might need nobody. Each wizard carries its own chain and a campaign can be checked twice or three times before it goes live when that is what the content warrants.

A few things follow from doing it that way.

• Approvers are chosen per wizard rather than per workspace and they are told when something is waiting. Every request carries a deadline and sits in the same queue Ops uses for everything else.
• Approvers review the whole request: the marketer’s answers in the wizard, the finished email and the audience, inside Launchpad and without a Marketo login.
• Approvals cover list imports as well as sends so a file is reviewed before a single record reaches Marketo, after Launchpad has already validated it against the rules Ops set.
• The decision, the comments and any back-and-forth with the marketer are kept on the campaign, next to the rest of its history.
• Launchpad builds the program and approves the assets inside your Marketo instance as part of the launch so there is no draft left behind to send the old version.

Approval also has less to catch. Because the wizard only lets the marketer change what Ops left open, the reviewer isn’t checking fonts, footers, sender addresses or whether the right template was used. Those were never editable. What is left to review is the content and the audience which is what a human reviewer is for.