Marketo Tips for Holiday Campaigns

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.