Until Email Insights was released in June, (and you may still not have it), Marketo provided scanty device and email client data on your leads. This data can be helpful when making decisions on how much tweaking to put into email or landing page code. Ideally, our stunning visuals work across all devices, OSs, and browsers. Of course, we know this isn’t true (ahem Outlook). So if you knew your audience breakdown by these metrics, you might put a lot less work into Outlook 120dpi or that Blackberry no one is using.

Marketo on its own does not produce a report displaying the types of browsers, email viewers, devices, or operating systems used by Leads. Marketo does collect this information, and it is possible to extract it in a directional way for deciding on layouts or even offers. Even ESPs won’t be 100% accurate on these reports.

The good news is that there are two ways to obtain this data.

• Email Insights
• Smart Lists

Marketo collects the following data:

• Device – available in smart lists and Email Insights.
• Browser – available in smart lists.
• OS – available in smart lists and Email Insights.

What you still won’t get is a perfect view of your audience’s device preferences. You also won’t be able to test email or page designs against each possibility out there. For that, use Litmus or EmailOnAcid. If you really need Browser data, Google Analytics or other tools will be much more accurate. What they won’t do, though, is tie that data back to the Lead.

Using Email Insights

This is your first, best option, if you have it on your instance. The challenge, however, is that it may not have much data for you. Device data is there for the data that is loaded and can be calculated across dimensions. Here’s a quick peek at the menu selection:

When I’ve tested this feature in real life, I found that I had much better control and data using the smart lists. Also, this feature doesn’t really tell us the percentage of the total database that uses the platform. So if you did a 30 day window on this report and were fairly confident you emailed most of the database, then you could make a reliable extrapolation.

Using Smart Lists

The email data you seek is also available if you are willing to spend a couple of hours building out the smart lists.

Filters and Constraints you will use:

• Clicked Link in Email
• Opened Email

Group by Device, OS, Desktop vs. Mobile, Viewer.

There a myriad of devices, operating systems, and form factors. The best thing to do here is group them into large categories that can be analyzed more efficiently with a smart list. Here is a list I built that should save you time [XLSX]. This list could be different for your audience, or as new devices and systems come out, so you may need to update this list periodically.

Once you have these lists created, you will build a Program with a set of smart lists like this:

When you create your smart lists, consider the implications of the smart list logic.

• Method 1: Clicked Link in Email in Past X Days
  • Only looks at the most active leads.
  • Most reliable data.
  • More than 7 days of data could take a really long time.
  • You will need to run this once for Platform, Device, and OS.
• Method 2: Opened OR Clicked
  • This is a wider range of data and would likely help you understand mobile engagement (many won’t click).
  • Will depend on people downloading images.
  • Should be viewed as Directional.

It is best to use a Date constraint like IN PAST 7 days, otherwise you can end up waiting forever for the system to count the Lead. You can try 14 or 30 days as well if your database is smaller. Besides, we want recent history, not what happened a year ago with viewers that no longer matter.

There is a caveat with this method. This smart list will pull leads that may have hit your email or page from multiple browsers or clients. Each Open or Click or View will be recorded separately and may cause overlap between smart lists. Keep this in mind because this method will not give you a 100% unique list. This is directional.

The reason to do this at all is to better understand how to serve your audience. It is easy to make assumptions about the audience with general stats on the use of Internet Explorer, Chrome, Apple Mail, etc. If you are selling to other marketers, there’s a good chance iPhone rates are higher than average, while IT buyers often use a combination of Android, iOS, and Outlook 20XX on Windows. Get some benchmarks here:

• Email Monday Stats
• Litmus Stats

There’s no sense in wasting five days getting an email or page to look perfect on every device and viewer; it’s just not possible. But if you can get it perfect on the top five devices and viewers that cover 90% of your audience, then this smart list technique will help you stay focused on what matters for your leads.

Note – in the image above, I show a set of batch campaigns that could use these smart lists to Add to List various leads every X days. You will then need to clear those lists every X days to keep the data clean. This system may be a giant waste of processing time, however, it may run faster than the smart lists.

Interpreting the Statistics

Please be careful in interpreting the data. For example:

In this report, can can say that most people are using Windows desktops. About 30% appear to be opening and clicking the emails from an Apple Mobile device (iPhone or iPad). Very few people in our audience use Blackberry. (these numbers are totally made up).

If instead we used Opened only or Clicked only, we might find completely different data. We might find nearly everyone clicks from a desktop, but opens or reads email on a mobile. If your firm is local dependent or you like to send email at 6am, this data will make sense. People will commute to work and read the email on the train, but wait to click at work.

Again, this only tells us about the actively engaged email addresses, not the entire database. You can infer this, however, I would not totally bet on it. The good news is that if you use Litmus and are trying to get Lotus Notes 10 to work, you can safely ignore that group of people.

Web Client and Browsing Data by Lead

Marketo does collect a fair amount of browser and URL data, but this data is scattered through the system. I would recommend using Google Analytics or another package to better understand your audience by Device. However, Marketo’s stats are tied directly to real email addresses, including Prospects and Customers. If what you are selling relies a lot on type of  site visitors by device, browser, etc…then definitely break out your database in this way.

Filters and Constraints to Use:

• Clicked Link on Web Page
• Visited Web Page
• Filled Out Form > Querystring
• Original Search Engine
• Original Search Phrase

Other Resources

• Litmus
• EmailOnAcid
• Marketo Deliverability Pack (250ok)
• Marketo Email Insights docs

 

Marketo has been hard at work at several key enhancements for marketers of all types. As many are about to be released on September 23, I thought I would discuss these and how they can be helpful to marketers and marketing technologists. The enhancements are a combination of technical back-end upgrades; ideas we’ve been waiting for; and larger visionary projects.

Summer 2016 – September Release

Account Based Marketing Module – released September 13

This is Marketo’s long awaited entry into ABM. In the past month, I’ve seen two demos that include great tools such as

• Lead to Account Matching – but this isn’t going to auto convert SFDC Leads to Contacts. It’s more about associating the leads based on various fields so that you can communicate to them using Marketo. A big step.
• Reporting – this includes engagement data and Interesting Moments.
• RTP Integration – better target people by Account, Stage, and other criteria. Marketo is also releasing the ability to Schedule RTP campaigns….although this also appears in the December release…

While I’ll keep the rest under wraps for the big release, do keep in mind this is a paid add-on based on the number of Accounts you decide to track.

[Update: Sept 17, 2016] Now that the big release has occurred, you can check out more on Marketo’s site. Marketo handles all the key areas of ABM. You need really good data in your system because you will create a big smart list of Account names, domains, etc for Marketo to track. Tracking and targeting will include this list and then allow you to reference it using a special set of Filters and Triggers. This should bring together matching Leads and Contacts. The ABM tool will also try to rank Accounts based on total Contact/Lead Score along with other activity, like Interesting Moments. From the demos I have seen, parts of this do not happen automatically. Marketo documentation hints at many new features such as Named Account Filters, Triggers, and RCE Dimensions. Note that Engagio’s “play” concept is not a part of the new ABM tool. You can easily build out personalized nurtures and call tasks in Marketo based on Named Accounts. I do recommend this at least through MQL or SAL.

Moving to ABM represents a big change to how Marketo’s system thinks and I expect it will be an iterative process over the next year.

Audit Trail

Wow, as an administrator and architect of these systems for a long time, the Audit trail is probably the most exciting change. Now we can finally see full details of who changed an Asset, Flow, etc and why. How many times have you, your team, or consultants changed something accidentally (or intentionally), but the basic log info told you nothing about who or what. In the past, I had to call Support to ask for a specific log for a specific Asset. Now I can resolve these questions fast myself. I see this as not just a move toward a more robust system, but as a tool for better training.

Email 2.0 Updates and API access

I’ll let Pierce Ujainwalla of Knak and Gregoire Michel discuss the details, it’s great to see Marketo is incrementally adding capabilities and fixing bugs the Nation asked for. With API access, Email 2.0 becomes much more flexible for a variety of external plug-ins that create highly complex emails.

Miscellaneous and Helpful Updates

• Multiple Branding Domains – for all of the B2C or multi-brand businesses, this can be a big help to choose specific domains so spam filters don’t see you as a threat.
• Program Tokens!  The long awaited ability to select a Program ID, Name, or Description for placement into assets and flows is happening! This change will help add richness to Interesting Moments and flexibility to flows.
• Enterprise Key for MS Outlook MSI Plugin – now IT can use one key to install the Outlook plugin instead of calling you everytime.
• New SMS Integration – While this is a Vibes Launchpoint release, it represents a new addition to the SMS integrations that have been fairly limited so far. Now there are 17 providers in the ecosystem with varying degrees of capability.

Fall 2016 – December Release

Miscellaneous changes

• Is Anonymous finally going away – this is the next step in the long running changes to Munchkin. At this point, it shouldn’t affect anyone, but you should double check that you’ve prepared properly for removing Is Anonymous TRUE or FALSE properly.
• MS Support – Edge and Outlook 2016 now supported. For all of us Mac lovers, Outlook can finally be useful again.
• Program Creation and Cloning with the REST API – this could be a big deal for some large scale operations.  Think of externally built app that walks inexperienced Marketo users through a process and it just creates the right things in Marketo. I know of some custom work out there and I’m sure this will make it better.
• MS Dynamics errors now appear in Notifications – helpful for all of the MS Dynamics people out there.
• Custom Objects continues to become a more robust database option. Database pros will no doubt love this.

Email Headstart

Looks like this is coming out of Beta to ensure large email sends actually get released at the time intended. As we all know, large sends will actually begin at the scheduled time, however, emails could take hours to reach the entire list. Looks like only Email Send programs can use this right now. Will Engagements be next?

Thoughts on the Roadmap

With a large community and a desire to stay visionary, Marketo’s product managers have a lot to contend with and limited resources, just like at your company. Many of the Summer and Winter updates are incremental changes that help a small portion of the Marketo Nation, while a few like ABM and Audit Trail can benefit many of us. However, many features marketers want continue to have fallen behind under Ideas. Features that would mean a reduction in the complex logic workarounds we find in the Forums as well as UI enhancements. I would really love to see Marketo spend at least one Release Cycle a year working through these continuing requests. Be sure to go to Ideas and vote up your favorites today.

 

A continuing challenge for marketers is deploying landing page and emails that are on-brand, look good across platforms and devices, and are easy to use for non-coders.

Good luck!

Actually, marketers have very good luck these days between all of the marketing automation platforms and new solutions that have cropped up recently. The problem is less with the features and more about how they are used. Let’s face it, many of us are not HTML/CSS gurus (or not anymore), and we lack the creative slush fund of consumer product companies.

Yet, we are still tasked with ensuring our landing pages are deployed fast and look amazing, like our website. Same for emails. I receive requests all the time for “special” pages and emails because someone had a bright idea about next week’s event. How often does that happen to you? Does your firm really need an entirely special page every time? What if I could help you develop a system that allows flexibility in design, works across devices, and is easy to deploy for non-coders?

What if I told you that you already had it?

Template System Considerations

In Marketo, and I suspect other systems, there are a lot of personalization options that are also ways to ensure rapid deployment and updating of pages and emails. The catch is – you have to design it that way.

Cadence of Branding and Updates

While many firms do not make major brand updates frequently, there is pressure to keep websites “fresh” about every 12-18 months. In the startup world, this brand change could happen more frequently, creating a fire drill of page and email changes that are time consuming, taking away from message crafting and distribution.

Digital marketing teams also tend to have a separate project timeline from demand gen and marketing operations, and only inform the marketing ops team about a week before the new site goes live… “Oh by the way, your page templates need to match the main site and we can’t help you because we’re too busy.” Huh.

You can save yourself! Marketing automation is intended to empower the marketer and avoid this frustration. But you have to plan in advance. 

Communication Between Teams

First, agree with Brand, Communications, Design, and Web that there will be

• No more than one major change per year and that change is planned six months in advance. (you can stop laughing!).
• Build 5 to 10 situational templates Marketing can use without further approvals.
• Marketing (and others) agree to use only those templates. Special page or email designs must be thoughtfully considered. (Remember, you can always swap out images!).
• If there is a Creative team, or retained agency, decide if you really want them to be paid for every single email you need.

Use Cases and Scenario Planning

Once you decide that you will limit template designs, you should come up with the standard use cases and “scenarios” for each Template.

Asset	Email		Landing Page
Situation/Type	1 column	2 column	1 column	2 column
Invitation – Webinar
Invitation – Roadshow
Promotion – Generic
Confirmation – Webinar
Confirmation – Event
Confirmation – Generic

You may also want to be more specific, such as “Webinar Invitations need to allow me to display 1, 2, or 3 presenter images.” Be specific up front so you do not have to re-code later.

Using Tokens and My Tokens Across the System

Speaking of coding, Marketo (and others) offer tokenization abilities that go well beyond the “mail merge.”

In fact, My Tokens in Marketo can be used to turn on and off Page features such as Guided Template sections or even javascript options. Here are a few specific tips to consider after you whiteboard the layouts from the table above. The more you can create these variables and code them into your Templates, the more easily you can make universal changes in a flash.

• CSS/HTML Snippets
• Javascript and Tag Switches
• Form behavior and look and feel
• Logos
• Branding code
• Header and Footers
• Meta Tags like Title, Description, and other HEADs
• Preheader Email Text
• Snippets
• Standard Image Areas – swap in an image and it’s a whole new email!

Essentially, you will end up with a set of wireframes indicating which components of the Email or Page should be coded as Editable Areas, Replaceable Areas, and Tokenized.

Which layouts should you use? It’s up to you. Many firms have established layouts, but most are not tested against other layouts. Most of us have used WhichTestWon.com, MarketingSherpa, and a host of examples from other firms in the past 15 years. Those layouts are battle hardened and good places to start. But if you plan to optimize your conversion rates, build in a testing plan on Templates. 

Designing for Devices and Viewers: Mobile and Responsive

You can imagine how important mobile responsiveness is, given that according to some surveys, 61.9% of email opens occurred on a mobile device. We are in a world where you must design for mobile-first, but how do you determine which systems and devices you are optimizing for?

If you are able to check your Google Analytics device stats for the web and use a service like Litmus, you can decide which coding methods will perform best for Email and Landing Pages. For example, corporate IT departments are often on MS Outlook for Windows, so that should take precedence over Android Mobile. But those targeting marketers may find Apple products higher on the list.

That being said, you do need pages and email that work well on all current devices and operating systems. Build in device and viewer flexibility from the start.

If you are only using Marketo, you can get directional data on Device-Viewer Opens and Clicks using a set of Smart Lists.

Remember, if you are targeting mobile users, consider:

• What do I expect someone to do on a small device? (read!)
• What do people really do on the device?
• When do people use the mobile device? (commutes, weekends, travel, boredom).

Guided Landing Pages and Emails

Over the years, many marketers have come up to me and said, “I’d like to remove this section of the asset this time.” For whatever reason, that block of text isn’t necessary for every single campaign. That’s ok!

But the standard editable sections in emails cannot be removed. Landing Pages (Free Form) were only partially dynamic. In both cases, one-off templates or changes were needed. So I generally discouraged “special” requests.

And frankly, the template layouts you chose above are good enough for 99% of situations. Remember, you aren’t an ad agency, you are in demand generation.

With the advent of Guided Landing Pages and Marketo’s Email Templates 2.0, it is possible to build flexible Templates with removable sections.

Guided Pages and Emails can also be used as a way to build in Layout Testing without having to re-code new Templates every time. Plan out the editable sections in a way that can be tested head-to-head.

The same rules apply here: design the variable sections in advance, before coding.

Testing Across Platforms

Earlier, I spoke about using Litmus and Google Analytics to understand the proportion of your audience on the Device-Viewer matrix. Don’t bother coding crazy things for under 5% of your audience. An image that’s 1px off doesn’t matter to anyone!

Of course, you still have to test your Templates properly across these tools. Litmus, EmailonAcid, and other tools are available to conduct such testing easily before you ever load the code into a marketing automation platform.

Once the code is well-tested, then load it into your Sandbox, non-visible pages, or a Staging site to conduct further tests.

A Word About Your Brand Guide

If you have a brand guide that explains all of the precise colors, sizes, logos, and fonts to use across communications, it is important to take that into consideration as you build. But, there are limitations on what you can enforce when people are not directly on your website. And, if you treat your audience the way you would want to be treated, you would design pages and emails to play nicely on low bandwidth to retain a good experience.

Your lead is not there to enjoy that fancy font; they are there to solve their problem.

• Eschew fancy fonts on email. (It’s possible for some viewers).
• Load fonts on landing pages, but ensure the font API is fast on mobile.
• Images on pages and emails should have small file sizes.
• Use ALT tags on all images, especially email.
• Emails should never be a single image, nor should they be dozens of images in tables.
• Keep HTML and CSS simple and mobile friendly.

The final part of testing is to load it into a live system and train marketers to use any special features as well as provide clear instructions on how to edit the child asset.

Marketing Automation Template Options

Building templates can be as simple as adjusting pre-built templates, or complex with hired agencies and designers. Keep your team focused on

• Goal of the page or email.
• Audience use – what are they there to do fast?
• Audience devices and viewers.

Ways to Get Templates Created

Internal Creative Team

Lucky firms have an internal design team or web designers. Work with them to build wireframes and provide them with the instructions to code for your MAP.

External Creative Agency or Freelancer

There are now dozens of agencies and freelancers with Marketo and other MAP building experience.  Pricing ranges from $500 to $2000 per template.

Marketing Technology Consultancy

There are now dozens of agencies and freelancers with Marketo and other MAP building experience.  Pricing for basic email templates can be as low as $500, however, that involves very limited work. Most custom templates start at $1500.

Automated Generator Services

We’ll discuss some below. If you need a constant stream of template options, the fees are very reasonable. These services take your inputs and generate code you can drop into your system with minimal changes. While ideal for those with limited budgets and skills, an automated customizer saves a ton of time and reduces the need for complex “branding” choices you often don’t need to make.

Vendors for Email and Page Templates

Knak.io

Knak is a service from fellow Marketo Champ and Consultant, Pierce Ujjainwalla. The setup process is the same for landing pages and emails, allowing customization of logos, colors, and the other little pieces that make a template yours. Knak is completely self-service and integrates directly with Marketo. (I received a free trial for the purposes of this article).

• Type = Self Serve, Automated
• Fees: $125/mo x 12 = $1500.
• Best for: anyone.

Let me walk you through Knak, although you hardly need my help! 

Other Template Options and Examples

There are plenty of other agencies and consultants out there. Here are a few options, free and paid, for you to try out. Remember, most of free templates will need someone to customize logos, graphics, and other options. These examples can be a good starting point for a web designer learning the quirks of Marketo Templates.

• Etumos [free]
• ShowMeLeads [how to]
• Marketo Free Library [free]
• Grazitti Interactive [custom]
• MapleIQ[custom]
• Perkuto [custom]
• LeadMD [custom]
• MarvelMarketers [custom]
• RevenuePulse [custom, makers of Knak]

For those looking at more interactive options like Surveys and fun tools, take a look at SurveyMonkey, SnapApp, and IonInteractive.

Ultimately, the layouts and templates you choose should be rooted in what your audience wants, not what your designer or VP wants.

Yesterday, Marketo began rolling out the new Email Editor and Template system. Quite a few others have already written in detail about it. Marketo’s docs are fairly clear as well. 

Template provider Knak.io sent a notice regarding the Email 2.0 rollout process that everyone should pay attention to:

“When you switch to the new editor, all of your existing (v1.0) templates go into draft mode. If those templates are reapproved, Marketo converts them to v2.0 and it is impossible to revert them back to v1.0. This means that if for some reason you are not happy with the new editor, or it is not able to produce code that is conducive to fully responsive templates, you would not be able to revert the templates back to their original state.” – Pierce Ujjainwalla

To handle this rollout for your team, I recommend testing and training in your Sandbox first. If you do not have a Marketo Sandbox available, please consider carefully training your Designers and Marketers before switching on Email Editor 2.0 in Admin > Email > Email Editor. The biggest impact here is on Templates that were created before you turned on Email 2.0. Be very careful about editing Templates or re-approving Templates with a 2.0 Draft.

Email 2.0 addresses many of the shortcomings of last year’s Email Editor update as well as new features we’ve been clamoring for. Here’s what I’m excited about as I prepare a giant Template Update this year:

• Built in Pre-Header Text – no more asking for special code. This enables Gmail and other viewers to display a short text to entice leads to open your emails.
• Improved Editor and Section Designer – Modules! This is essentially Guided Templates for Email – add and remove sections you want, or don’t. This feature also enables human friendly section names and enhanced handling of image, video, and rich text components. The options include “snippitization” where you can designate a section for a Snippet. And now that Snippets no longer throw all your assets into “Approved w/ Draft” mode, you can easily scale up Footers globally much faster.
• Template Picker – this includes templates from Marketo’s Library and your Library in a nice previewer that takes the guess work out of the picture.

Marketo is also recommending turning on Rich Text Editor when using Email 2.0. My bet is you already turned this on last year, but in case you did not, do so when switching to the upgraded Email system.

Stay tuned for more on Email and Landing Page Template planning and design.

Image Credit: Marketo.

As Marketing Automation Platforms mature, so do their customers become more skilled in the use of the platforms. And that means some customers push the limits of what the system is designed to do. Whether it is running dozens of data correction flows, scoring, and lead lifecycle or accumulating workflow detritus, an older system is often a slower system.

To keep your leads flowing fast, there are some tricks and best practices for running a system efficiently and effectively. These tips are helpful for new system builds (do it right the first time) as well as rebuilds or cleanups. These tips are considerations and each situation may require different designs.

Why do systems like Marketo slow down?

Like any computer program, MAPs are limited by hardware as well as software. Marketo is designed to handle marketing focused activities like scores, syncs, and email sends. Marketing tech people like me have taken advantage of other functions like data normalization, personalization, and lead lifecycles to perform tasks that the system can do, but maybe wasn’t expecting to be used heavily.

There are three key components that can slow down a system:

• Number of trigger campaigns
• Volume of Leads
• Complexity of smart lists

There is not a hard and fast rule for the number of campaigns or leads that a MAP can handle well. Based on my experience, slow downs can occur with as few as 150 triggers and 100,000 leads. With regular cleaning and good systems design, it is fairly easy to keep your system running fast.

Increasing speed, reducing load

Trigger campaigns are always on, always listening. That means for every lead that changes, the system must check if it meets those conditions. If you import a lot of leads, or change a lot at once, the system will have to check all of those at once. According to Marketo, each lead is set serially into the flow, further slowing down the system.

Reduce the number of Triggers!

• Convert triggers to batches.

Does every score have to happen immediately? Probably not. Behavior based triggers are prone to frequent hits and complexity, so move these to a nightly batch. Data normalization can also help. Batches also run all the flow steps for every lead at once, instead of serially, which reduces total processing time.

[Update: May 5, 2016]: I recently learned something I can now share, it’s a special, insider secret: The real reason triggers cause problems is there are two queues. Whenever a change to a lead happens, it hits every potential Trigger in the backend – the Trigger Evaluation Queue. You cannot see this and Marketo Support won’t show most of you what is going on there. The key thing to know is that you should multiply the Change x # of Leads.

100,000 Leads Imported x 20 Lead is Created Triggers = 2,000,000 evaluations

Yes. It gets big, fast. The fewer triggers you hit, the faster Marketo can send the lead to the correct Trigger that’s visible in the Campaign Queue. Some big offenders could be your SalesOps team or Product team making batch changes on their end, only to let 1,000,000 records sync to Marketo to hit that Evaluation Queue. This Queue will slow down your processing and routing inside Marketo because it takes longer for the lead to hit the correct set of Triggers and then be processed as you expect.

• Reduce the Qualifications Rules from Every Time to something else.
• Reduce Triggers like Change Data Value and Lead is Created to single points of entry or batches.
• Reduce the number of leads that can flow through with filters
• Leverage the auto-deactivation after 6 months.
• Clean up quarterly by using the Campaign Inspector.
• Compress flows by adding flow steps to one campaign based on the same trigger. Eg: Interesting Moments and Scoring can often be on the same flow.

Smart Lists Should be Less Complex on Triggers

Depending on the situation, you may want to reduce the complexity on batches and triggers. Instead of Marketo looking for the list and running it, just put the filters in the trigger itself. Or reduce the number of nested smart lists called in a smart list. The more complex, the harder it is for the system to figure it out, which increases backend processing (which you do not see on the Campaign Queue) and even creates campaign failures from timeouts.

Change the Time of Day of Batches

While this may vary with your business and location, batch data flows should occur at night, or the time of day where leads aren’t on your site frequently. This helps give priority to email sends that may start around dawn or through the day, as well as triggers that route leads to sales on weekdays.

Use Wait Steps in Processing

There is a much longer discussion on this regarding Lead Lifecycles and Ed Unthank’s lead processing articles. Many times, some campaigns are subject to a race condition between themselves or the CRM. To mitigate this, where the lead should have been updated, but wasn’t in time for the next campaign to process properly, you can do three things:

• Add Wait Steps at the start of the flow to let the other flows catch up. Sometimes 5 to 30 minutes are needed.
• Add Wait Step after a Sync to CRM step to let the CRM assign a Lead Owner. May require 10 – 30 minutes if the system is complex.
• Request Campaigns to control the order of operations

Marketo Campaign Queue and Priority of Campaign Type

Here’s Marketo’s secret campaign priority queue order.

According to presentations shared by Scott Nash, Marketo’s VP of Product Platform, you will also see any batch or trigger fall in the priority order if the Wait Step is activated and the Wait Step is 5 minutes or more. There’s a new one for 2018 if you’ll be at the Summit.

• MUG Slides with information (2016)
• Campaign Sync Queue Information
• More Marketo Docs (2016)
• Campaign Queue Icons 
• Order of Operations Advice (Justin Norris)

Is a Slowdown the Vendor’s Fault?

Yes, and no. The vendor often designs their infrastructure for a shared load, with instances running on servers, pods, or unique servers at data centers globally. Depending on your contract, the software is often designed for SMB variances. Since each organization has different needs and different growth rates, some firms may outgrow the expected load bands.

Some customers also may underestimate their needs and buy a system that underperforms because it wasn’t the right match. Thus, it is incumbent upon you, as the customer, to work with your vendor to determine what they can do for you, and what you can do to improve efficiency. And be honest–your needs may outgrow a vendor that only is ready for SMB, not enterprise scale systems. Honesty also works the other way — you may be asking more of the vendor or doing inappropriate things with the tool.

There are a few other tricks I’ve learned over the years as well. And maybe I’ll share those soon. With the tips in this article, you should be able to keep your marketing automation platform running smoothly.

[Updated: March 23, 2018 with new links and details]