Marketo’s New Starter Templates: What You Need to Know.

With Adobe Marketo Engage’s new email editor (which we love btw) they have also released some new email starter templates along with it. While there are some nice modern designs in these starter templates, we ran them through Litmus and there were some pretty concerning results.

These templates are not coded using the fluid hybrid method, which means they are not responsive in Outlook or Gmail. There are some pretty major rendering problems on Outlook and Gmail since they use media queries. For more on the importance on fluid hybrid email design, refresh yourself in our blog post: Your ‘responsive’ emails actually aren’t.

What does this mean for you? Well when you think you might be sending this:

Your recipients (in this case in Outlook 2010) would actually be seeing this:

It looks as though Marketo has downloaded these templates down from a vendor called ‘MailSalad’ for $15/each. You can see the original templates here: https://www.mailsalad.com/responsive-email-templates/

Here are the public Litmus Test Result links for the current Marketo Starter Templates in case you’d like to take a look yourself:

Starter Template: Iceberg

https://litmus.com/pub/fec6f9e

Starter Template: Urbanista

https://litmus.com/pub/3f2d30d

Starter Template: Breaking News

https://litmus.com/pub/49ae570

Starter Template: Good News

https://litmus.com/pub/a86b138

Starter Template: Sophia

https://litmus.com/pub/74a8a87

Starter Template: Limón

https://litmus.com/pub/996eb8b

Starter Template: Homegrown

https://litmus.com/pub/fec68b1

Starter Template: Flatiron

https://litmus.com/pub/ab51e91

Starter Template: Slam Dunk

https://litmus.com/pub/3a8281e

Starter Template: Basic

https://litmus.com/pub/7cc8a53

Starter Template: Short & Sweet

https://litmus.com/pub/3a8281e

Starter Template: Save My Spot

https://litmus.com/pub/2820414

Starter Template: Private Jet

https://litmus.com/pub/e0ed61b

The takeaway? We think there is a ton of potential with the new email editor, and keep in mind, these templates have nothing to do with the new editor. However, the starter templates that Marketo is offering fall short of being reliable for your audience given the number of users on Outlook and Gmail. Hopefully, they will get these templates sorted out and release some proper fluid hybrid Marketo templates that work with the new editor.