Troubleshooting in Marketo can be more of an art, than a science. The data you need is often scattered around several screens and what you need to figure out may take time to track down. Is it a workflow error? Sync error? Manual error? Troubleshooting is not just for testing: you can also use it to learn why a lead’s data changed or why they received a certain email.

The most common scenarios you will encounter as a new Marketo user are:

• Lead received two of the same email.
• Lead went to the wrong Salesperson.

It is worth searching the Marketo Nation Forums for solutions, but you will learn much more if you use the techniques below to attempt a solution first. And I do strongly recommend attempting to understand what happened before asking the Nation or Support. Both will appreciate the detailed account that can help them help you.

Here are the places where you can find information for troubleshooting.

Campaign Member List

You can find this by clicking on the count of Members on the Campaign Summary tab, or you can click Schedule > Campaign Members or Results > Campaign Members.

• Which leads actually qualified?
• Count of Leads that became qualified and are Members
• Use the View tab to look at more data.

Campaign Run History (Batch)

If you click on the Campaign and then look at either the Run History Tab or click on the list of Runs at the bottom, you can see how many qualified each time the batch ran. This is a vital troubleshooting tool when you have recurring batches that manage data flows. I’ve often come across troubled systems and been able to uncover when something happened to then uncover why there was a change in volume.

If you know how many qualified on a certain date, you should be able to track back what occurred, or even select leads during that time period and Member of Campaign.

Campaign Results Tab

This is the log of executed flow steps per Lead. You can filter this by Type of Activity in the same way you do for the Lead View>Activity Log. This is a great way to see if a flow step failed or if certain leads went through at a certain time. Remember that some activities such as Data Value Was Changed, Visited Web Page will be archived after 90 days and not visible here.

 

Members by Week: Campaign Summary Tab

See chart of qualified leads by week – are more or less people entering over time?

This is particularly helpful when troubleshooting certain data change flows or lead routing flows when something may have inadvertently pushed too few/many leads.

Member Trend Tab

This is less used, but you can get an idea of the differences over the past three months. Like Members by Week, this will show you abnormalities.

Program Summary Tab

This is where you can view the key tactical metrics for each program or offer. I come here often to check on Program Membership counts, Channel Type, and if the Program is synced to an SFDC Campaign.

• Total Members
• Total leads Acquired By
• Total leads Acquired by Social
• Total Successes
• Leads by [Status]

Remember that you can also adjust the view depending on the Channel Type. Most Default Programs show a Member chart, Calendar View, and Used by. Special Programs like Engagement and Email Send will also show the Program Dashboard.

Program Member Tab

This area shows you

• Count of Members
• Count of Members by Each Status
• Potentially other data if you change the View.

Program Dashboard (Engagements)

These Channels have special Dashboards. For Engagements, we can see the overall

• Engagement Score
• Unsubscribe Rate for the Program
• Days to Next Cast
• Chart of count of leads and Cast Count until Exhausted
• Engagement Scores for each email.

Program Dashboard (Email Send)

The Email Send Program also has a Dashboard that works a bit differently.

• Delivered
• Opens
• Open Rate
• Click Rate
• Unsubscribe Rate
• Engagement Score

Program Summary (Email Send)

This Program uses the Tile setup method, which is really just a different view into a smart campaign. Check here for stats like:

• Lead Qualification Count
• Leads Blocked
• Schedule

Lead Detail View

There are several ways to reach a Lead’s data:

• Lead Database > Search
• Smart List > Click on Lead ID
• Static List > Click on Lead ID
• Campaign Results > Click on Lead ID
• Campaign Members/Qualified Members > Lead ID
• Program > Program Member > Lead ID

Once you open up the Lead’s view, you have access to modify most fields directly. Sometimes this is a useful method for testing. More importantly, you can view key data like:

• Lead Activity Log (more on that soon)
• Custom Tab – just a special view.
• SFDC Data and Custom Fields
• Marketo Data Fields and timestamps.
• Lists of Segmentation Membership

Lead Detail > Lead Activity Log

This is arguably the most important tool for testing and troubleshooting. Marketo added filters to let you narrow down the types of behaviors or changes to work with this faster.

Key use cases include:

• Why did that campaign trigger?
• Why did that campaign not trigger yet?
• Why is the score X?
• Why did that data change?

Notifications Log

Most of you should be able to see the Notifications button at the top of the screen. If you click on it, you will see a list of alerts and errors Marketo encountered. Administrators should monitor this weekly or even daily (if a large system) for major issues.

Marketo tells you what is wrong, but you often have to hit the campaign or lead detail to find out more. Key issues include:

• Exhaustion of Nurturing content
• Broken campaigns
• Failed campaigns
• Failed syncs to SFDC – if you click, you can get a smart list, but this is the only way to see this kind of data.

Troubleshooting with Smart Lists

Another tool you have is to use Smart Lists to pull groups of leads and then use Custom Views to look at certain fields.

The best use case is when you want to see Email Deliverability fields (and I always have a View with these fields). This View exposes the Email Bounced Reason in a clear way. You can sort it or even build a new smart list to narrow down these issues.

Campaign Queue

The Campaign Queue helps you see which campaigns are running or slated to run soon. Some types of campaigns take precedence over others. In addition, you can try to spot race conditions or blockages like a large batch run that will slow down execution of other campaigns. There may not be a resolution, but at least you will know what is going on.

Campaign Inspector

If you are not certain where a flow step is occurring, then you can search all campaigns for filters and flow steps, among others. This can help narrow down problems or help you understand how the system is setup. If you do not have access to this, you may need to go to Admin > Treasure Chest to turn it on.

Note that you must be at the Top Level of the Workspace you wish to view for Inspector and Queue.

Let’s Talk About Things You Can Break

I do not want you to break things. Here is a checklist of things you can break or miss easily if you are moving too quickly in Marketo. Typos in Marketo (or Marketo Language) can bring things to a halt or worse.

Operators (Any, All, etc.)

Choosing the wrong operator is easy to do because you went too fast. I often come across mistakes (and have made them), where IN vs. NOT IN did not stick because the mouse moved too quickly…or someone forgot.

Logic Steps

I see people ruin smart lists and Lifecycles because they didn’t consider the right parentheses or groupings of filters. See logic for marketers.

Flow Steps

Are they in the right order? Is that wait step correct? For example, the SFDC Sync may push lead data to SFDC instantly, however, SFDC may take as long as 20 minutes to process the lead on its end, which means your next logic steps should wait.

Choice Steps

Only the first qualifying step works! You may want certain steps to always take precedence if more than one condition applies.

Filters (Smart Lists)

Using the right filters is, of course, crucial to most parts of the system. There is a big difference between Was Sent Email and Not Was Sent Email. Understand when to use each.

Triggers

Remember, triggers are OR between them, then the logic on green filters. 

Schedule and Qualification Rules

Sometimes you need to set it to Once, Once Every X, or Every Time. This is a common problem that is easily fixed, especially if you are testing a flow.

Race Conditions

The Race Condition deserves an entire post because it is a critical problem and there are very few ways to handle it. Solving the race condition is hard, but you’ll know you have one when your Activity Log doesn’t seem to update as quickly as you’d expect.

Let’s say you have 10 sync flows. One syncs the lead to SFDC, but the others all change data values, then sync. They are all triggered on Lead is Created, but you only want the last nine to work after the initial sync. This is not going to happen that way. All 10 campaigns will trigger “at once,” but not all at the exact same moment, and not all the data values will change when you want them to.

Look at the Log for affected leads and you’ll see that some executed around the same time, while others waited. You will need to use wait steps to control the execution of the flow. For a good set of examples and solution for Marketo, see Ed Unthank’s Marketo Summit presentation.

Batch vs. Trigger       

Sometimes your choice of Filters vs. Triggers does make a difference, especially if you set up similar flows – trigger to capture now, and a batch to capture misfires. If you aren’t careful, you might include people in the Batch who already went through the Trigger, so exclude with Member of Campaign NOT IN.

There are many use cases for each of the techniques above and I recommend using one or more for each situation.

Troubleshooting in Marketo is fairly easy, if you know where to look. And once you rule out the obvious, you can then call Support to help root out back-end issues.

Special Note – if you are a marketing expert, marketing operations expert, or otherwise amazing Marketo User, you are welcome to submit guest posts. Email me at hello [at] marketingrockstarguides.com.

This is a guest post from Steven Moody at Beachhead.io, a marketing technology consultancy. Steven’s weekly newsletter is a great read for marketing, technology, and deep thinking.

We recently worked with a high-growth technology startup to reengineer their lead routing program in Marketo.  They wanted to quickly route leads but also lay the foundation to scale.  This was important to them because they receive a high number of inbound leads that are not ready to buy, and they plan to grow from 3 to 30 sales reps quickly, so they need something that works now and also in a year.  

We worked with them to understand their present and future requirements, discussed some of the tradeoffs they would need to make for scaling, and implemented a lead routing program that matched their needs.  

Ultimately, this saved about 20 hours per week (960 man-hours/year) for their sales manager, who had spent much of his time just manually sorting through leads.

Below are the technical details that we hope can help other companies considering a lead routing program in Marketo.

The client wanted a program that would be easy to adjust and scale as they plan to grow from three to 30 sales reps within 2 years.  

The Client Request

Initially, the client asked for a lead routing program that split up US States with Annual Revenue and buying intent as criteria.

In a discovery workshop, we determined this routing was too complicated for their needs, and suggested a simpler program. First, they did not want to collect the data for location, beyond State and Country. Second, they did not see a large difference in buying behavior or average contract value between large companies and smaller companies. This discovery led to a much simpler routing system.

Questions you should ask when defining your territories:

1. Do you have the data you need to make this lead routing program effective?
2. If your primary sales are by phone, does location matter more than industry and company size?
3. Are you prematurely optimizing territories through micro-splits of the territories?
4. How will your lead distribution change, and will this make the territories unfair?

After reviewing the above questions, we settled on a revised lead routing that looked like the following:

Territory Rules:

• ACME’s objective is to successfully route leads according to two different criteria: Location, Interaction.
• ACME has 6 different sales reps covering the US, they divided the country into 3 different territories, Western, Central, Eastern.
• ACME has 2 sales reps per territory, a Business Development Rep (BDR) and an Account Executive (AE).
• The BDR will receive all new leads.
• The AE will only receive leads who made a Sales Contact Request (SCR).
• The 6 sales reps are West_BDR, West_AE, Central_BDR, Central_AE, East_BDR, East_AE.

Planning the Lead Routing System in Marketo

This routing program is decentralized (can start from multiple entry points). When a program is designed in this way, careful attention must be paid to ensure the entry points don’t overlap, or leads will be subject to a race condition. Here, the distinction is set between SCR and !SCR (Not SCR). The blue is the area we selected.

Here is the process chart for a new lead given the above conditions. We can end up in 6 outcomes depending on how the Lead acts.

Implementing the Lead Routing System in Marketo

Create a Program “Lead Routing”, then create three smart campaigns as shown.

• Route New Leads – this listens for any new lead and then calls either Not SCR or SCR depending.
• Route Leads Not SCR – if the Lead did not fill out an SCR form, then it will be routed to the BDR based on the territory.
• Route Leads SCR – if the Lead did fill out the SCR form, it is fast tracked to the Account Executive based on the territory.

Routing New Leads Campaign

Route Leads Who Did Fill Out a Contact Form (SCR)

Let’s handle the leads who fill out a SCR form. This may happen to a lead who already exists in the database, so we also need to use Fills Out Form as a trigger.

The lead is selected if he fill out the form “Contact Us” or is added to the list “Lead Routing…” AND his Lead Owner is not (already) one of the Account Executives.

These filters create the distinction between the SCR and Not SCR requirement for the routing system.

Then assign the lead to an Account Executive according to the value in the field “State”.

This time we set up a limit for the lead to run this Smart Campaign. Once a lead is assigned to an Account Executive by the routing campaign, he should only be assigned to a different person manually so the AE concerned is aware of the change and can pass on useful informations. This is why we set up the limit to “once” in the Schedule, so the lead will be assigned to an AE the first time one of the trigger is activated and will not run through the campaign if he matches the trigger criteria one more time.

Route Leads Who Did Not Fill Out a Contact Form (Not SCR)

Then, we want to take care of the leads who do not fill a SCR form.

The Lead may only continue if it is true that the lead never filled a “Contact Us” form, even when the Campaign is Requested.

It is possible to use different triggers such as Lead is Created to route the Lead immediately when it is created.

In this case, the lead will be assigned to a User in SFDC depending on their State value. We can also include choices based on the location detection by Marketo (Inferred State) in the same way that we did with State.

Within the flow steps, it’s important to note the first choice applies. To avoid a race condition here, careful consideration must be paid to the order of the choices. For example, there will be leads who declare their State as California, but have an inferred State of Texas due to a VPN. Should they be routed to the territory for California or Texas? The same applies to the Country and Inferred Country fields.

The Schedule defines how many times the lead will run through this Smart Campaign. In this case it will only happen one time since the lead can only be created one time (the system will alert that the email address already exists).

Testing the Routing System

Before launching your lead routing program, you should test it thoroughly to make sure leads go where you expect. Marketo typically doesn’t provide a sandbox environment like Salesforce, so these steps will enable you to test all scenarios before activating the new program. A fairly simple routing system will require a few key tests. For our more complex system, it is worth following the testing scenarios.

Step 1: Create a spreadsheet of example leads with every scenario that matters.

We built 2 lists of 52 leads each. One group of leads are for Lead Routing Not SCR and the other for Lead Routing SCR.

The columns for your CSV will look a lot like this.

• An ID Number for each lead. This is just for your needs, do not upload this column!
• A name describing the example, here State_Territory_Status. Which gives us Lead_CA_w_NotSCR for a lead from California who did not fill an Sales Contact Request.
• Same procedure with the email address: team+7_CA_w_NotSCR@beachhead.io so with only the email address you’re able to judge the accuracy of the results. Note that you can use “+” sign to create a new virtual email that goes to the same box.
• Country does not influence our routing, but is a part of the location and may be important in global routing.
• State is the key element to route leads by territory. You can see the first to leads as example of edge cases we want to monitor to make sure our routing is flawless.
• And finally your expected Lead Assignment. In your CSV, add a column to define who you expect your Lead to route to. This will make it easier to review later.

Step 2: Notify Sales that they may see these test leads.

Remember to make their names and Titles as clear as possible, but avoiding triggering any other “Test Suppression Lists” that might cause a sync to be missed because Title=Test. The reason is you want the flow to work fully so you can see the results in the CRM too.

Step 3: Add a Brake to the Campaign Flows to ensure only your leads go through right now.

Later you will remove this brake to fully activate the system.

Step 4: Verify the results next to each Lead, row by row.

Step 5: Fix any Errors

Step 6: Confirm with Sales if needed.

Step 7: Confirm with Sales when the routing will go live.

Step 8: Delete the Leads from the system.

Migrating to the New System

Once you’ve validated your new lead routing works as expected, here are the general steps to replace an old routing program with your new routing program:

1. Plan the change for the weekend, if possible. Even with testing, things can go wrong, and you’ll be better able to handle updates if the volume of new leads is lower
2. Set aside 1-2 hours of uninterrupted time to make the changes, just in case.
3. Create reports for potential bugs.  For example, if you have five sales reps and ten total salesforce users, your smartlist might be all new leads assigned to someone who isn’t a sales rep.  If you require a 2-digit state value for leads to route, then create a report of new leads this week by state.  These reports will make it easier to spot issues as the routing goes live.
4. Deactivate the current routing campaigns (5 minutes)
5. Activate the new routing campaigns (5 minutes)
6. Notify the stakeholders of the updates and share instructions to submit bugs.
7. Monitor the reports for issues.  We recommend checking at least once the first two hours, then the first two business days, then once per week for the first two weeks.

Create a report to get people who are assigned to someone who’s not a sales rep:

Here’s a report to see leads who don’t have a State information matching one of the 50 US states.

We can Setup to view daily, weekly, monthly etc. You can start daily for the first week and if everything is working well, then move on to weekly.

Triage Lead Routing Bugs

When bugs happen, we’ve found most clients want to share a Salesforce link to the lead record. You will also need the lead’s email address and expected Lead Owner. Be sure that you also have Lead Owner history turned on in the Lead/Contact record history, otherwise it will be hard to see how things unfolded.

Most routing errors are due to Sales not informing Marketing Ops of territory and people changes. Occasionally an error may be cause on Marketo’s end because a smart list used CONTAINS instead of IS, or OR instead of AND. So be careful during setup!

Beachhead.io invites you to download the complete guide.

Marketo and HubSpot and other marketing automation vendors have written a lot about the idea of “sales-marketing alignment” the last few years. So many people are discussing this that Google has 1.65 million results. HubSpot also call this approach “smarketing,” and while I don’t hear that term much, it has a comparable page count.

Much has been made of how important this alignment is for increasing pipeline and revenue, often up to 40%, according to Aberdeen. This Marketo chart emphasizes that Marketing is now responsible for a longer portion of the funnel, taking over the “farming” some salespeople used to do.

For those of us tasked with implementing such alignment using tools like Marketo, what is the best way to go about that? What can a marketing automation administrator do about sales-marketing alignment?

Marketing automation rockstars must facilitate sales and marketing alignment. It is very important to have alignment and that alignment has to be facilitated by someone, ideally you because you are going to implement the actual workflows. Even if your manager is tasked with helping to align the teams, you should offer your services and be clear about how you and your systems can help.

Of course, achieving this alignment is a team effort with your team, your manager, and sales leaders.

First, understand what Sales needs from Marketing. Ask them how you can make their lives better. Perhaps it is more and better data tools to append qualification fields. Perhaps Sales needs a ranking system that reflects their thinking and experiences. Or maybe the timing for notifications needs to change.

Second, help Sales understand how Marketing operates. Which systems do you have? What happens when a salesperson selects a certain option in the workflow? Why is that field so important? You may discover Sales is very happy to help if you can streamline that data collection.

Early wins are often at the lead hand-off process. For instance, rejecting a Lead could involve these steps:

1. Set Lead Status = Recycled
2. Set Recycled Reason = X
3. Change Owner to Recycling Queue
4. Set Lifecycle Stage = Recycled
5. Set Task = Recycled

That is a lot of clicking a salesperson doesn’t like. Is it possible to automate or streamline this data collection? Yes it is! Marketo and Salesforce would work hand-in-hand to do this work for you and for Sales:

Action in Marketo	Action in SFDC	Person
		Lead Status= Recycled
	Dependent Field: Recycled Reason	Choose Recycled Reason
On Lead Status=Recycled   Set Lifecycle Stage=Recycled   Change Owner to Recycled Queue	(Optional: Lead Owner changes in SFDC, not Marketo – this might be better for the Sales users’ experience).

This example is a simple one to automate and a good example of how you can ask Sales to help you uncover ways to reduce their workload while still achieving your goals. Other process areas to explore include:

• When and how to create Opportunities.
• How to manage Accounts and Contacts.
• How to process renewals.
• How to process cancellations.
• How to process new sales faster (salespeople love this one).

Thus, you can use your systems process chart as your guide to optimization of both the systems as well as the people.

Providing the Right Leads at the Right Time

This will not be a lesson on lead scoring, I promise. There is a process to understanding how your particular sales team thinks about bad leads, good leads, and great leads. It is your job to operationalize that knowledge. Ranking leads can take a few different approaches, which I discussed in how to build a lead scoring system.

• Survey the sales team on which behaviors and titles matter to them.
• Have a focus group to discuss (this is the most common).
• Track behaviors against Closed Won opportunities and work backwards. (Most scientific).

When Sales participates in this process, they are more likely to use it and be friendly about changes. Remember to setup a quarterly meeting with Sales to discuss the hand-off process and lead scoring.

Full Business Operational Alignment

Just doing sales and marketing alignment is not enough. Sales-marketing alignment is just one part of the puzzle. You should also seek discussions with other departments to make their projects become stellar with marketing automation. You have to go beyond the basics because the Web team, the Tech team, Communications, Finance, Customer Enablement, and Product Marketing are all impacted by the capabilities of Marketo.

If your company doesn’t have all of those teams, that’s fine. If your company has different names for them, that’s fine. Regardless, you will find the people, the team leaders that matter and show them the positive and negative impacts, your solutions, and how their work lives will be amazing after marketing automation.

When you go to these teams you need to sell them on the value of participating. Even if the other departments do not want you to directly access their data, be sure they are aware of what you are doing so they can warn you if their work impacts yours.

You will also need to assess each team’s situation:

• Do they want to be involved?
• What big initiatives are they undertaking that might affect Marketo?
• What should we automate first?
• Where are humans still required?
• Which team or activity should be helped first?
• What does the team need to know about Marketo?
• What do I need to know about their systems and processes?
• Does the team need training on Marketo?

Help everybody understand why you’re doing this and how it’s going to help their team or everyday work. Everybody loves what’s in it for them.

Possible areas to explore and add to your Marketing Automation Implementation Roadmap (MAIR) include:

• In product triggers
• Trial triggers and nurture
• Renewal triggers
• Cancellation triggers

All of which may require new Salesforce pieces and redevelopment of related content that Sales used to type out themselves. Just be careful that anything customer facing is written with their needs in mind, not your company’s needs.

Managing Alignment is a Regular Process

Alignment between sales and marketing is not a one-time meeting. It is a process with regular feedback sessions on things like workflow, scoring, and quality of leads. To facilitate those discussions, you will use your marketing automation and CRM to generate reports on the agreed metrics. You might look at:

• Marketing contribution to pipeline
• Revenue cycle conversion rates
• Leads read by Sales.
• Opportunities created this month
• Net new leads this month.

A lot of relationships are quickly ruined with an automatic “no.” When changes to a nurturing campaign or process are requested, it is always good to first find out why the request is being made. Always work toward a solution with the requestor to ensure alignment. Make sure that, as guardian of the system, you ask people to think through the consequences of the change.

Aligning Marketing Automation to Business Process and Strategy Takes Time

This alignment will not happen all at once. It will happen as you add new teams to the mix and as you move along the Marketing Automation Maturity Model. Since the customer is the core of your business, it is absolutely vital that you consider the impact on the customer. Automation is fantastic for saving the company time and money, but is it designed to help the client in some way? Will automation of certain outbound emails be the best thing for the customer?

For example, if you have a nurturing campaign triggered by a subscription cancellation you should think about how the customer will react to this. If they were angry and cancelled in a pique, then sending out survey questions five minutes later is not going to be a good idea. Your nurturing flows must think like a salesperson who is “farming” the lead. Not too much and not too little communication is best for obtaining that meeting.

In some way, you could think of your marketing automation tool as an “automated sales farmer,” improving yields much the way combines did for actual farmers. Farmers are also known for their patience and this is what you must exercise when working with multiple teams to achieve your goals.

What else are you doing to achieve alignment with your marketing automation platform?

Image Credit: Flickr-alex012; Perkuto

Since my original posts on email preference centers and subscription management, many firms have gone well beyond the basics, building dynamic pages that literally speak the lead’s language.

Here are updated instructions on building the ultimate subscription management center (or email preference center) in Marketo. The process involves four phases to achieve pages in dynamic languages.

Every customer receives the standard Unsubscribe page when they first turn on Marketo. This page helps you conform to the minimum legal standard in most countries. If you are smart, you will want to build out a subscription center fast to reduce total unsubscribes and encourage people to subscribe to different kinds of communications.

For example, you may want to provide options like:

• Newsletter
• Event Invitations
• Webinar Invitations
• Solution A Content
• Blog Posts
• Unsubscribe All

Remember, these are examples. You may want to add more like Fax, SMS, and other channels. When I create these fields, I usually use a picklist in Salesforce first, with Yes, No, “null” as values. This way, the system is easy to understand whether you are an engineer, salesperson, marketer, or machine.

Email Preference Center Phase 1: New Channels 

Ingredients:

• Program – Operational
• Email Preference Center Page
• Confirmation Page to display results
• Email Preference Form
• 01 – Unsubscribe All campaign flow
• Additional fields as desired

Step 1: Create a Program

This program should be Channel=Operational. In some situations, I have created a separate Channel called “Subscriptions” where the statuses are Opted In, Opted Out and the Type is Operational so reporting is not affected. This only helps you with the counts and is totally unneeded from a technical perspective. Up to you.

Step 2: Foldering and Naming

This is how I set up my folders, which is largely the same across all Program Channels. Note the leading number ensures the order is how I want it.

Step 3: Create a Confirmation Page

The reason we create this page first is to ensure the Form is completed more quickly. You will use this page several times, so might as well do it first.

Most of my clients request the Confirmation page to reflect the new values provided. This is pretty easy with some tokens.

As I mention in the sidebar above, it is possible to display a human value. This is why I almost always use a picklist for each field with Yes/No/Blank. Blanks mean that the lead hasn’t made a selection and we cannot send to them yet. The default token will say “Not Selected”.

Example URL SLUG: http://you.yourcompany.com/email-preference-confirmation.html

Remember to check Meta tags: set this to noindex, nofollow as this page should not be found. 

Step 4: Create a Form – Main

Here is an example form and how to set the fields. Your Form will look different.

• Add Email Address
• Add requisite fields.
• Modify the Values as needed. In this case, I want Unsubscribe All to encourage people to do what I want, but you can leave it as a simple checkbox.
• On this form, we will keep everything as Not Required and Prefilled to show the current settings. You may want to mention that on the page.
• Set the Confirmation page on the Form to ensure that it always goes to the right place. 

Step 5: Create an Email Preferences Page

This is the main page you will point everyone to.

 The URL slug should look like this:

http://you.yourcompany.com/email-preference-center.html

Meta Tags: the default is Index, nofollow. In general, it is safe to leave this because you do want this page to be found.

Step 6: Create the Unsubscribe All Campaign

This campaign is designed to unsubscribe people from all subscriptions if they choose Unsubscribe=TRUE. In theory, you can use on page javascript to set the subscriptions to “N” as well. The advantage of doing so is to reduce the system load as well as confirm visually to the user.

Step 7: Test

Remember to test everything once it is turned on. You may want to use an email address brake on the Unsubscribe All campaign until you are ready. 

Step 8: Update Admin > Email with the appropriate URL.

Please visit this page to understand this area. Gregoire Michel wrote a detailed How-To on the Unsubscribe Link.

Back it up the original text.

• Take URL and add to Admin section or Email Template as desired.
• Must replace with full URL

The entire URL we created above is fine, alternatively, you can append the URL slug to

%mkt_opt_out_prefix%email-preference-center.html

You should remove the next section:

mkt_unsubscribe=1&mkt_tok=##MKT_TOK##

as it is now unneeded and will cause problems.

Press Save!

Please send yourself a Live Test to confirm the new link works as intended.

Step 9: Redirect the original Unsubscribe Page(s)

Once you are finished with the tests, I recommend creating a redirect in Admin > Landing Pages > Rules to point the original Unsubscribe page to your new page.

http://you.yourcompany.com/unsubscribe.html > http://you.yourcompany.com/email-preference-center.html

This ensures that anyone who finds the original page or clicks on the old link finds themselves at the correct place.

**Remember to approve and re-approve Forms and Pages when you update them.

Also, there is a durable unsubscribe in Marketo and a lead can only be re-subscribed in a particular way.

Email Preference Center Phase 2: Not You?

A new trend started in the past year with firms adding a Not You link on the Preference Form. This is intended to avoid a few situations:

• Email was forwarded and another person messes up the lead’s data because of the token in the email identifying the original recipient.
• Allowing people who find the page to Add themselves to your database. (Yeah, rare, I know).

To make this happen is fairly easy. There are two methods: Easy with more assets; and Hard with coding. Let’s talk Easy.

URL Slug:

http://you.yourpages.com/email-preferences-new-person.html

Meta Robots: set this to noindex, nofollow as this page should not be found on its own.

Ingredients: add:

• Email Preference Form – No Prefill
• Preferences Page – Not You

Add link to Not You under the original Email Preference Form as shown.

If you really want to go the Hard way, you can do one of two things:

1. Have the Not You link reset the page without the munchkin identifiers.
2. Go to the second page without any munchkin.

I like Easy and it takes advantage of Marketo’s existing features. 

Email Preference Center Phase 3: Dynamic Snippets by Region/Language

If you are operating programs internationally, especially at a fairly large firm, you will eventually need to implement a regional or language friendly system. The process is fairly simple, however, I would urge you to test it carefully.

Option 1: one subscription page per Region.

The overhead increases because you have to manage the links in your email template footers.

Option 2: one subscription page per Region with Dynamic Snippets

This option takes partial advantage of dynamic content.

Option 3: one subscription page to rule them all.

This is much better, however, I urge you to test it a lot before going live. We’ll talk about this one in Phase 4.

With Option 2, you get to try your hand at Dynamic Snippets. This is a fairly underused feature of Marketo, which can be very powerful if thought out.

Ingredients:

• Segmentation by Region or Language
• Email Footer Snippet
• Add to Emails

Step 1: create a Snippet

Go to Design Studio > Snippets

Step 2: create the dynamic content for the snippet.

I recommended using one Segmentation per asset to avoid confusion.

Once this Snippet is ready, test it on an Email that uses a Template with a Footer as editable. The results should flow through automatically in preview or a Live Test.

Email Preference Center Phase 4: Dynamic Languages on One Page

Of course, the holy grail is Option 4: just using one page for everything. In this situation, we will add new ingredients and modify the original Email Preference Page to be dynamic.

I will go through most of the steps, but be sure to read the docs on setting up Dynamic Content and Segmentations in order to follow along. Please remember that your Segmentation Segment order and smart list criteria will determine which Language is visible to the lead.

New Ingredients:

• One Form for each Language
• Modify the original Email Preference Page to use Dynamic on the Form and any other text.

**The Not You Page will still be the Default Form because new leads won’t have a Segment yet. Remember to set the Default to English or the major language of your audience.

Step 1: Create new Forms for Each Language

Here is an example in Japanese I made using Google Translate.

Step 3: Test the Forms in a Clone Page

If you already have a live Preference Center, I highly recommend that you clone the original Preference Page and Confirmation Page to test these Forms before going live.

Step 4: Set the Form in the Email Preference Page to Dynamic

Step 5: Set the other page content to Dynamic

Step 6: Make the Confirmation Page Text Dynamic

Look how cool this is! Is it all clicking now for you?

Step 7: Update the Unsubscribe All Campaign

You will have to add all the Forms to the Trigger. Feel free to test it.

Wow, after all that work, you now have a fully functioning, international web page. What more could you need? Some options to consider for the future:

• Double Opt In – this is required for GDPR. It’s a good best practice and  ensures email validity and engagement. All you need to do is add a flow or two to send out a confirmation email and link whenever someone subscribes. They click on the link and your second flow handles the final steps.
• Confirmation Email – please avoid this unless it is for Double Opt In. If I unsubscribe, I don’t want a final email. Use the Confirmation page for this.
• Leave me alone for a while. This option was first made famous by Marketo years ago. In this system, you ask people if they want to suspend emails for 30 days or more. The challenge is in setting up the workflows and lists to properly suspend someone for that period. Remember, the simpler methods work best.
• List Setup – of course, you will want a set of smart lists and even static lists to manage people who are Opted In vs. Out by Subscription. You will also want to update any suppression lists.

Here’s a video of how this works:

Interested in having your own custom email preference center? Contact Etumos.