“But it’s still good!” – Grandpa

As we work with different clients, we encounter users with newer instances and users with older instances. In each case, both compile a legacy of active triggers, scheduled batches, and old assets. These collected items make it harder to see what is currently important and what is safe to remove. Now that a new year is upon us, a Marketo cleanup is in order.

You may have pages with old offers still visible online to people. Pages and emails may have old branding or addresses listed. Your new intern may have found that great offer from 2018 to resend to 10,000 people—except that Forrester report is from 2015 and no one cares.

Don’t let that happen to you. Establish a regular procedure for archiving and unapproving old or expired assets.

Archiving Assets and More in Marketo

In Marketo, you can “archive” an asset, program, campaign, folder, etc. Archiving tells Marketo to no longer display or prioritize an asset.

You can Archive old assets of any type using the Archive feature of folders. Once a folder, program, asset, or campaign is inside an Archive, it is no longer visible to Search and it looks all filed away. Do keep in mind, Archived campaigns are not deactivated. The logic will still work, so if you plan to archive an active campaign, you should consider deactivating it first.

Here’s how to do that:

What Changes	What Does Not Change
Asset is no longer visible in search. Results will return the collapsed Archive folder.	Global search still searches Archived folders.
Assets no longer appear in auto suggest.	Active trigger campaigns are still active.
Templates are no longer available across the system for new assets.	Data is available in reports.
Pages cannot be added to new Landing Page Tests.	Filters in Analytics will still see the archived asset.
Subfolders are also archived (and vice-versa).
Archived sub-folders cannot be un-archived unless parent folder is un-archived.

Archived Programs are still available to Revenue Cycle Analytics as long as it has at least one period cost.

In terms of organization, I recommend that you create Archive folders by date or as “zArchive 2018” so the folder isn’t in the way of your main folders. You should also create an Archive in Marketing Activities and Design Studio (for all asset types and templates).

Archiving Assets in Engagement Programs

Engagement Programs offer a more refined way to handle archiving of assets.

• Pause an asset so it isn’t sent out – ok to do, but can be reactivated easily.
• Remove/Delete an asset – watch out, this deletes related data.
• Archive a stream asset – do this to retain all the data.

Unapproving Assets in Marketo

Assets such as emails and landing pages must be approved to be visible to leads and to be sent out. Old emails, pages, and lists can clutter up things and eventually confuse people. Once a year (or twice), hold a clean-up day with pizza and just get it done. Here’s what we recommend as a regular clean-up procedure:

When	What	Procedure
Every 2 Months	Emails	Remove unused or test emails.
Every 2 Months	Pages	Remove unused or test landing pages
Every 6 months	Pages	Review pages and offers; turn off ones that are stale.
Every 12 months	Templates	Review templates for updates to your site and styles. Unapprove templates no longer used or Archive them.
Every 12 Months	Forms	Archive or delete stale forms. Unused Forms can be deleted.
Every 6 Months	Smart Lists	Clean up the Smart List folders. Look at the Used by tab to help remove unused lists or move them to a more logical location.
Every 6 Months	Static Lists	Carefully review lists and delete ones that are no longer useful for reporting or flows. Deleting a list does not do anything to the Leads in the list.

I wrote a few other tips on the blog, where I recommend to always default to Not Publish to Sales Insight. This will save your Sales Team from being confused by hundreds of emails.

Archiving and Reporting in Marketo

Archiving assets and campaigns retains all the data associated with those assets. In certain reports, such as Landing Page or Email, you can choose to include Archived items in the report, but this is not done automatically. If you set up your folder structure and naming scheme, you will easily find the folders and Programs to include in a report.

Chaos Too Big for Your Team?

Etumos can help. Start with a complimentary Health Audit and we can provide suggestions focused on old programs and assets, as well as other areas to make your Marketo instance run smoothly!

It’s that time of year again!

Not Turkey and presents, but the dreaded holiday campaign season. Whether you are in B2B or B2C, you always have a holiday campaign from the Customer Email Card to the “special offers” to induce last minute budget spending.

Here are some quick tips you can use in Marketo to run those campaigns faster.

The Holiday Card to All Customers

Ideally you can identify all customers because your database is always up to date and the flag says “Customer=TRUE”.

LOL.

Anyway, assuming you know where your customers are, you can do a few quick tricks to ensure the Holiday Email goes out well.

1. Customer Only Engagement

In this situation, all you need to do is drop the email at the TOP of the Stream and it will go out at the next Cast.

2. Master Customer Emailable Smart List 

Pretty simple – always have a master Customer Emailable list to use for random batch campaigns like this.

No, your Seasons Greetings card is not operational. It’s a promotional communication.

Avoiding Holiday Casts

Remember how we all asked Marketo to enable a Calendar where we could set “Holiday-Do Not Send” and Marketo would just “know” what to do?

Yeah.

Option 1: Engagement System Shut Down and Restart

You can do that anyway though with two simple tips. First, just don’t schedule your batch on a holiday. Second, if you are running mostly Engagements, it’s easy to do a few things if your next Cast date is on a holiday.

First, go to your Program > Setup

Second, turn OFF the Engagement

Third, a day or two after the holiday, turn the Engagement back ON.

Fourth, go to the Stream > Cadence and change First Cast date to the date you want (any date in the future) and verify the Cadence is still the same.

The only caveat here is if you are using Time Zone Sends, you should turn this back on at least 36 hours before the next Cast.

Option 2: Pause or Suspend

An alternative is to Pause people in the Engagements, Wait Until the holiday is over, and then set their Cadences to Normal. And for good measure, switch on/off Marketing Suspend. In some ways, it may work better to simply set Marketing Suspended=TRUE for that time period, especially if your Marketo isn’t Engagement heavy. If you have a global instance, remember to only target the people that would celebrate that holiday.

Here’s a quick flow to review.

AB Testing End of Year Offers

Some of you may need to do a final push to fill pipe and revenue goals for the year. It’s hard to know which offer will do well, so you have a few options.

AB Test Day of Week – send some offers on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and a Regular Day. You can also run some offers on December 22, 23, and 31. [see random sample]

AB Test the Offer – see if Holiday messaging is helpful, or not. Be direct and ask for unspent budget before December 31. This works better with consumer products and ecommerce, however, low price point SAAS services should also test it.

Before you send that copy off to Creative for a design, be sure you have a reason to communicate with your customers. What is the goal of the holiday email or communication? Is it gratitude? Is it a gift? Is it an offer or discount? Make it meaningful, make your customers be thankful they work with you.

As you become more confident in using Marketo, you will eventually be asked to create a method for a Lead to select multiple webinars (or assets) at once. This is a variation of the Recurring Webinar series and is an important method to learn because it can be applied to at least three use cases that will help you scale your Marketo programs quickly.

This post will focus on the workflow component only. There may be some additional work to do on Guided Landing Pages to make this fully functional.

Use Cases

• Multiple Webinars, One Choice (Recurring Webinar)
• Multiple Assets, Multiple Choices
• Lead Assignment Rules

What You Need

The Concept is your central Operational Flow will handle the initial Form Fill. That Form Processor will call a local Smart Campaign at the individual Webinar level to initiate the next steps, such as Confirmation Email.

Form Setup

• Usual Stuff
• Request Campaign Code – string field, hidden as shown below.
• Script to concatenate values.

The Code should populate your hidden field based on the values from a script, a URL parameter, or other method. If you have Multiple Webinars with different dates, but the Lead may only select One Date, use the Recurring Webinar method. You won’t need a hidden field for that one.

Guided Landing Page (not shown)

• Tiles or Multi select box that tie a specific asset or webinar to the Form hidden field “Request Campaign Code”. This field is a String type and expect it to be overwritten each time.
• Script to concatenate values if multiple assets selected. (Sorry, try GitHub or the Nation for ideas).

Multiple Assets, Single Choice

Use this if you have several times for a Webinar and the Lead chooses only one time. Also a good variation for a recurring webinar. Remember, you may not need a Hidden Field in this situation. Depends.

Trigger: Fills Out Form on Web Page X

Flow:

1. Request Campaign Field [Code]
   • If Request Campaign Code=X1, then Request Campaign X1
2. Change Data Value: Request Campaign Code=NULL

In the standard Recurring Webinar setup, you can set someone’s Program Status to trigger the Confirmation Email and data transfer. In this version, you can use this for any type of asset registration because it is only pointing at the Registration Flow inside each Program.

You may not really need Step 2 because it will be overwritten anyway. It’s a good habit to clean up fields if there could be confusion later. There is also a small risk that someone could fill out several forms within a few minutes and you would erase their value before another campaign finished processing.

Multiple Choices, Multiple Selections

Use this method when you actually have one or more webinars someone could register for at the same time. This could be for live webinars or on-demand webinars, allowing a lead to binge content easily.

Trigger: Fills Out Form on Page Y

Request Campaign Field has concatenated values in the Form. In that case, you must use CONTAINS instead of IS. Your Page may also need Javascript to ensure the values are properly added to the hidden field.

Flow:

1. Request Campaign Field [Code]
   • If Request Campaign Code=X1, then Request Campaign X1
2. Request Campaign Field [Code]
   • If Request Campaign Code CONTAINS X2, then Request Campaign X2
3. Request Campaign Field [Code]
   • If Request Campaign Code=X3, then Request Campaign X3
4. Request Campaign Field [Code]
   • If Request Campaign Code=X4, then Request Campaign X4
5. Etc…
6. FINAL STEP
   • Change Data Value: Request Campaign Code=NULL

 

Things to know:

• The more asset codes to process, the longer it will take.
• Small risk that someone would fill out the Form twice or go to another page that uses the same Field and overwrite their values before it processed.
• Maintenance is important! As you add or remove assets, be sure to update the Smart Campaign with the latest information, especially to remove unused Webinars so it runs faster.

Uploaded Lead Assignment Rules in Marketo

As many of you know, I am not a big fan of using Marketo to manage Lead Assignment and Ownership in Marketo on a large scale.

Sometimes, though, you just need to do it. In a similar way to the above methods, you can create a string field called “Salesperson Email Address”.

When you load your List, you can add a column with the Salesperson Email Address as it is in your CRM.

Then, you can run a campaign like:

• Member of List IN “Salesperson Reassignment”
• Salesperson Email Address IS NOT EMPTY

Flow:

• If Salesperson Email Address=”none@marketingrockstarguides.com, then
  • Change Owner to Josh Hill
• If Salesperson Email Address=someone@anotherfirm.com, then
  • Change Owner to Someone
• Etc

Of course, adding more than 10 Choice Steps will slow down the UI and the processing, but you can certainly add up to 99. Another way is to add up to 50 reps per Step, then to add a new Flow Step to do the same thing for the next 50 reps.

This isn’t the most scalable method, however, it does work and it can save you time. A better method is to purchase a tool like LeanData or RingLead to manage these rules and run the processing faster with SFDC.

On April 30, I’ll be at the Marketo Summit 2018 to share more of my secrets to automating nurturing with Marketo Engagement Programs. The concepts I will share can go well beyond just Marketo, if you practice the techniques.

To prepare for the Session, here are a few of my previous tips and slides.

Nurture Your Audience the Way they Want to Be Nurtured

In my last talk at the Marketo Summit, I shared the key framework and discussed how you might approach the overall multiple nurture system. I recommend reading these again before you come to my session as it is good background.

• The Nurture Waterfall Framework
• Storytelling Framework

How to Use Marketo Engagement Programs

When Marketo first launched this feature, I wrote two key articles to help people get started. Since Engagements are mostly unchanged, read these to get a baseline. My talk this time around assumes you’ve at least read these articles and are ready for the deeper understanding.

• How to Use Engagements
• How to Test Engagements

Why Attend Another Session on Marketo’s Engagement System?

This year I will share more of the Journey Session framework along with the latest thinking on how to run nurturing programs in Marketo to scale up your storytelling. These concepts are not in any documentation and will make the difference from being a successful lead nurturer to leaving behind a wasteland of unfinished programs. Here’s my talk abstract:

The Engagement Nurture Program is one of the most useful and least understood features of Marketo. When used effectively, an engagement nurture can power everything from sales prospecting and ABM to customer lifecycle programs. Join Marketo expert Josh Hill in this special deep dive session, going beyond the product docs to learn the secret framework that helps you build scalable systems that automate your email communications. Learn how to take campaign requirements, translate them into Marketo, and build effective engagement nurtures. Josh will show you how to design a system which can manage 20 major campaigns in a week requiring only two hours of your time (versus managing four programs per week with 30+ hours of your time).