Marketo Hidden Tricks and Tips

With the ever increasing array of marketing tools available through Marketo, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite tips and tricks. These are simple ways to work with Marketo that solve some small, but real situations for marketers.

Marketo Tip 1: Favicon on Marketo Landing Pages

The favicon is a cute and somewhat useless icon that have been around since the early web to differentiate bookmarks. Now they are used as the cute icon in your browser’s tab so you can visually see which site you might be on. The code to embed this icon on any web page is:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

You can do this in Marketo easily as well. (See Landing Page Tips and Tricks). Note that the ico file likes to be at the root of your web directory, although this is not necessary for Marketo. Simply direct your Landing Page Template to your usual favicon or upload it to Marketo – but use the entire URL.

The .ico file itself can be generated at a 16px square from Photoshop or at several sites. I like Favicon.cc if you don’t have a designer. From what I’ve read in the Community, it may take 1-2 days for the favicon to show up for everyone

Marketo Tip 2: Use a Blank Email Template

Before you spend a ton of time creating dozens of Email Templates, consider not doing this at all.

If each email you send is going to be wildly different and designed by a professional graphic artist and html designer, then it makes sense to use a Blank Template for all emails. This blank template has nothing in it at all, but allows you to create a new email, then to Replace HTML.

 

Step 1: Upload Images

Before you attempt this, be sure to upload your email’s images to a folder in Design Studio > Images & Files with appropriate names. An “appropriate name” is one without spaces or funny characters:

my-good-file.jpg

Step 2: Copy Image URLs back into your HTML Code

Failure to do this will result in one ugly email.

Step 3: Create an Email based on your blank template

Step 4: Replace HTML

You can ignore the warning about disconnecting the Templates. That’s what we’re here to do.

Notice my HTML replaced whatever was in there.

Step 5: Review Your Work

You may need to make some tweaks after using the Send Sample or Deliverability tools to review the rendering across email clients.

Why do this? Doesn’t this prevent you from taking advantage of Marketo’s template features? Yes…and no…The reality is that Templates are there to help non designers generate quality, on brand Emails fast. If your company has a team of designers, a retained agency, or rely on your graphic originality, then Templates will constrain your creativity.

Marketo Tip 3: Use a Blank Landing Page Template

As you probably know by now, there is no way to “Replace HTML” in a Landing Page Template. So if you want to be super creative with your landing pages, you have two choices:

• Create a blank landing page template.

What you do is create a New LP Template. Then remove the code in the BODY section so that the default gray bars disappear. You may also want to strip out the CSS, but be careful with this as it could affect Marketo Forms.

Now save the Template.

When you create a Landing Page based on this Template, you will use Custom HTML to drop in your design. This may not work super well if you have a fancy design, so try it out.

• Create custom pages on your site with an embedded Form.

This is the more tried and true method. You create appropriate pages on your main site and then embed a Form or use the API to create a customized form.

Marketo Tip 4: Time Zone Email Sends

The ability to time emails by the recipient’s time zone is a big request from Marketo users. Mailchimp has this already, but that doesn’t help in Marketo. In the meantime, you can do a few things to drop emails by time zones:

First, be aware of how Marketo uses Time Zone. In the Admin > System Settings, you set the System Time Zone. This is the real time all activities and sends happen.

Your personal time zone is set in Admin > Your Account (or go to your name at the upper right). All this time zone does is display dates and times in your time zone. Most of the time, you will see the activity in relation to your time zone. Occasionally, Marketo displays the System Time.

Ok, now let’s talk about two options for sending by time zone.

• Smart List or Segmentation by Region or Country. Then use Wait Steps or Batch Time to send out the email at the optimal time by region. Usually I do this by Americas, EMEA, APAC. The system says,

If Member of Smart List IN "EMEA", then Send Email 1

Wait 5 hours

If Member of Smart List IN "Americas", then Send Email 1

Wait 12 hours

If Member of Smart List IN "Asia", then Send Email 1

• Streams – it is possible to setup your Streams such that each Stream represents a Time Zone or Region. The Stream’s first send date and Cadence would be set to each region based on the System Time Zone. So if you are in US East Coast, then you will need to send, according to your system time:

UK: 3am

US EDT: 8am

US PDT: 11am

Singapore: 8pm

Marketo Tip 5: Blank User Role to Block Old Users

A quick tip here – if someone has left the organization, you normally delete his user account. That’s secure.

But if you do this, all of his modification history disappears from the system. Thus, I often recommend removing all Roles from that user. If he tries to login, he will be able to do nothing and see nothing in the system. As a bit of a security nut, I would only do this for about 30 days though, then delete his account.

Marketo Tip 6: Scratch Pads

Lately, I have been using a “scratch pad” Smart List to generate quick counts. This way I know this is a Smart List I can modify without affecting other parts of the system. All I do is create a Smart List “scratch pad” in my personal folder or in a Program. This name also warns people not to take this list seriously.

You can use this tool for lists and campaigns.

Marketo Tip 7: Comment History System

Many clients want to timestamp a comment and then keep a history of it. This is surprisingly easy to do in Marketo. You need two fields to do this.

Comments (or you can use Person Notes/Description) This field can be in Marketo only if you want.

Lead Comments History – this field should be created in your CRM first.

Step 1: Create a Smart Campaign

Step 2: Smart List Triggers

Trigger: Lead is Created

Trigger: Data Value Changes IS "Comments" New Value IS NOT EMPTY

Filter: Comments IS NOT EMPTY

Step 3: Workflow to Concatenate the Old and New Comments

The first step time stamps the lead if the history is empty and places Comments in the history.

Change Data Value: Choice 1: IF Lead Comments History IS EMPTY, then Lead Comments History = {{system.dateTime}} {{lead.Comments}}

The second step says if History is already being used, then just append the Comments. This works every time.

Otherwise: Lead Comments History = {{system.dateTime}} {{lead.Comments}} {{lead.Lead Comments History}}

Change Data Value: Comments IS NULL

<–this is important so you can reuse this field again and again on a Form. Otherwise it shows prefill data to the user.

Naturally this campaign is set to run every time. You can do something similar with just about any Text or String field.

Marketo Tip 8: Treasure Chest

The Treasure Chest is a place where Marketo let’s you test beta features out. If you are a Marketo Admin, I recommend checking it out once a month and activating some helpful features such as Landing Page Editor Comments and Undo. They may not be fully supported, but they are super helpful.

Learn more about marketing automation strategy at my first big webinar with RingLead on July 17 at 2pm EDT/11am PDT. Register now.