Scalability and Efficiency Using Tokens In Marketo Engage

Thank you so much. I’m Hillary Sachs. I am a business consultant at Marketo Engage and welcome to Experience Makers, the skill exchange. So we are focused today specifically on Marketo Engage functionality. So if you’re a little bit new to Marketo Engage or unfamiliar, Marketo Engage is an Adobe product that allows us to do marketing automation at scale. So whether that’s email marketing or tracking your journey for your customer across their buying lifecycle, there’s a ton of things that we can do inside of Marketo Engage that’s not just email automation. But today I’m going to be specifically talking to you guys about tokens and scalability inside of Marketo. I’ve got a brief agenda for us to go through today. I’m going to go through just a really high level overview of tokens themselves. I’m going to talk about how we can scale with tokens, and then I’m going to jump into use cases for each one of those. So it’s very, very high level. We’re all here to talk about Marketo Engage as an automation platform, as most of you are probably aware. But if you aren’t, Marketo Engage allows us to interact and engage with our customers and prospects from an automated perspective. So it’s much more than just sending emails out of an email platform. It’s really about engaging your audience from the very beginning of their journey to the very end. But with that said, we’re going to specifically talk about tokens and how you can really make sure that you’re personalizing your content inside of Marketo, but beyond that, using Marketo really efficiently. So let’s focus on what a token is in general. And you see these squiggly lines here. And if you’ve used Marketo, you probably know what they mean. But if you haven’t, or if you’re not really familiar with tokens, you’re like, why am I seeing these on the screen right now? But these squiggly brackets indicate that a token is being used inside of Marketo. And it’s kind of a good visual representation of what we’re going to discuss throughout the rest of the session today. So a token is just a variable piece of content or data that you can put into an asset inside of Marketo Engage. Now, what does that mean actually? So a really, really good example of this is first name personalization in an email. Whenever you send out an email to a prospect or even a customer, if you have data about them, like their first name, oftentimes we want to put that inside of an email asset so that the person feels like we’re actually talking to them as opposed to some generic message. Now, this is pretty standard across automation platforms and is something you’re probably familiar with if you’ve used an email service provider. So you might have heard tokens called things like dynamic merge tags or dynamic tags. That’s a similar concept that Marketo has. So I do want to show an example of what this type of token is. And I’m going to get into a lot of other examples throughout the session today. But as you can see on these screenshots, we’ve got our favorite little squiggly brackets here that indicate a token. And here I’ve got this in the body of my email message. So I’m saying, hey, happy Valentine’s Day first name token, which means I want to populate the first name of a person when they receive this email, which is pretty cool, which means that I don’t have to do any extra work. I don’t have to hard code anything into my email asset itself to actually display that information. So it’s just a quick way to add personalization. And you’re also going to see that I’ve got tokens here in the from area of my email. So the from name, the from address and the reply to can also be tokenized. I’m going to get into those token types and a little bit later during the presentation. I also wanted to say we are going to have a live Q&A after this session. So if you’ve got questions as I’m talking through some of these concepts, or something that’s a little more complex that we didn’t get to during the presentation, please put that into the chat and we’ll cover it during our live Q&A. Let’s talk a little bit about where tokens can actually be used inside of Marketo and then we’ll dive into the different types that we have. So the first place is emails. That’s probably what you’re all really familiar with and what you know, you can put a token in email. So it doesn’t have to be first name necessarily. Let’s say you want to put their company name or the amount of miles they’ve traveled over a year or perhaps loyalty points that they’ve accrued. If you’ve got that data point inside of your Marketo database, you can put that in an email as part of your personalization strategy, but it definitely doesn’t in there. So you can actually add tokens and a lot of different assets inside of Marketo. Landing pages are another place that you can add this. So if you want to personalize the page and have it display the person’s first name, like, Hey, Hillary, welcome back. We’re so glad you’re a part of Adobe. If you want more information about asset ABC, please fill out this form and we’ll send it directly to your inbox. It’s just little things that can give you that edge up to say, Hey, you know, we’ve taken a little bit of time and effort to make this personal to someone. So we’re actually speaking to them and not just out into the internet void. So it’s a really easy way to add personalization at scale to your instance, by doing it on landing pages. Now snippets are another place that you can add this type of token. So if there’s repeatable data that you have inside of Marketo that needs to be on like your footer or anything like that, you can add a token into that, perhaps the system unsubscribe link. If you’re using the standard unsubscribe, you can add that into a snippet itself. And it just allows you to not have to make so many updates over time. If you’ve got a lot of snippets or brand regulations and compliance, and I’ll get into more of those use cases and how that could be efficient for you in the future. The final two are a little bit special. So smart campaign flow steps can also use tokens. So if you remember a smart campaign is just a workflow inside of Marketo, where you’re taking a targeted list of people in a smart list and then executing an action against that list of people. So in the flow steps, we have the ability to use tokens there, which is pretty cool. And I’ll get into some of those use cases in a little bit. And then finally, web hooks are another place where you can use tokens. So web hooks are just a way to integrate Marketo with other applications where we can push data out and receive data back into the platform. A really common example of web hooks would be sending an SMS message to someone in your Marketo database. So perhaps you want to personalize that message itself. You can put a token in your web hook to have a personalized message go out, or really any anything that the web hook requires. Now web hooks are a little bit more complex. So if that’s something you’re interested in, talk to your Marketo admin. We’re also here at Adobe professional services, we’ve got a great technical team as well, who’s super well versed in web hooks if it’s something you’re interested in. So kind of taking a little bit of a step back here, I’ve talked about where tokens can be used. And now I want to move on to what types of tokens we have. So there’s a lot of places where we can take and put these tokens overall. But we have a ton of tokens at our availability. So one of the first types is what I’m calling data tokens. So these are these are just tokens built off of your Marketo database. So think first name, last name, company name, typical things that you would put inside of an email or perhaps a landing page to personalize it. But they’re not exclusive to Marketo standard fields, which is really cool. So if you have a CRM integration with Salesforce or dynamics, or perhaps a custom CRM integration, all of those fields can be available as tokens for you to use in your assets. Additionally, if you’ve got any other custom integration or just custom fields inside of Marketo only, then you can use those fields as well. Basically, any field that you have in your Marketo engaged database can be utilized as a token in your assets, which is pretty cool. So you can really dream big in this in this case, and I’ll show you some examples soon. Next are system tokens. So there’s just a handful of system tokens that we have. But they’re really handy for doing things like stamping the date or stamping the time of an activity. So Marketo will do this inside the flow step of a smart campaign. And we would just take that information and say, hey, I want to know when someone achieved marketing qualified lead or MQL status. And that would be at this time and date whenever the campaign executed. So it just gives you an easy way to stamp that information without having to build some sort of complex process or logic. On the same vein, we have trigger tokens, which are also used explicitly and trigger smart campaigns. So in smart campaigns, if you’ve got the little orange trigger in your smart list, that means you’ve got a trigger there. And trigger tokens are really specific for that. So let’s say you want to capture the last program name that someone interacted with or perhaps the last web page visit that someone went to when they filled out a form, you can use a trigger token to populate that dynamically in a flow step. And that really allows you to put a lot of information at your fingertips without having to go hunt and peck for that data in the Marketo activity log. There’s a ton of trigger tokens, and I encourage you to go check that out on Adobe experience league for the Marketo product docs. There’s a huge list of them and when they apply and I just don’t have time to get into every single one of those use cases today. But definitely check that out just to see that list of tokens. And then the final two here, program tokens and folder tokens exist in marketing activities. So if you remember inside of Marketo engage and you log in, you’ve got the tiles, marketing activities is the area where you’re executing your marketing initiative. So where you’re building programs inside of Marketo and you can actually put tokens inside of your individual program. So if you open up a program inside of Marketo, navigate to that my tokens tab that you’ll see on kind of that opening page, it’s next to the setup tab, then you’ll be able to add tokens there. And I’ll kind of get into what we can add in this next slide here. But folder tokens are really similar. So you can add tokens at a folder level inside of marketing activities that will then permeate down to every program underneath that token. So that gives you the ability to add a token in one place and then have it flow down to every program without you having to recreate it over and over and over again, because that can be a little bit annoying. But with program tokens and folder tokens, there are several different types that we can create. And they’re a little bit special when compared to some of just the basic data tokens that we have. So if you go to the my tokens tab in a program, if you’re in Marketo right now, you can navigate over there to any program and look at this and see as I talk through this, you can look and see the token types that you have available to you. So there’s a quite a list here. The most common kinds that we have are going to be score tokens and text tokens. So score tokens allow you to implement or increment a value. So plus, minus or equals a number, and that’s typically used for lead scoring. And then text tokens are just anything that you want to populate. So it’s a string field that you can put any type of characters into. And it could be anything from email address name to copyright year. There are a couple of other tokens on here that you’ll see. I do want to call out calendar file. If you’re running an event inside of Marketo, engage whether it’s a live event or it’s a webinar, then a calendar file token can be created so that when a person clicks on that link, it will allow them to open up an ICS calendar invite and add that to their work calendar. So there’s a little bit of configuration that you have to do inside that token, but it’s pretty straightforward and it walks you through everything step by step when you click on it. Another token I want to call out is an email script token. So email scripting is a special type of token that requires using velocity scripting, which is an Apache velocity scripting. And basically what this does, and it’s an advanced token that will allow you to either change data. Perhaps you have a number value in a field and it’s supposed to be a dollar amount, but it’s just a string of numbers. So it’s a little bit hard to digest. Using a velocity script token, you could manipulate that data. So it had a dollar sign and commas. So it looked better. Or if you have custom objects or CRM custom objects inside of your Marketo engage database, and this is also a place where you can utilize a velocity script token to then input that into your Marketo engage email. These are a really advanced piece of functionality and you would need someone well versed in velocity scripting to do that. Our technical team is really good at that. If that’s something you’re interested in or need help with. So I do want to talk about kind of the behavior of tokens within folders and programs. As we know, Marketo does have a folder hierarchy. So when you come into Marketo engage and you’ve got your overall folder structure, where you create the token itself is going to matter. So let’s talk about first local tokens. So local tokens are kind of like local assets to your programs. If you’ve got an email that’s only associated to a program itself, then that is actually going to be a local asset. Tokens function in the same way. If you create a token at the program level, that token is considered local to the program because it doesn’t technically exist anywhere else. However, if you create a token at a higher level folder, let’s say you’ve got a events 2022 folder and you put copyright year as a token in that folder, then that token itself is going to flow down into every program underneath that folder. And when you click on the tokens tab, you would see that the token itself is listed as inherited, which means that it came from somewhere else. It came from a folder higher up in hierarchy. But you might also see overwritten. And overwritten means that you at the program level change the value of the token to be something else. And that doesn’t mean it’s bad, but it just means the value has been changed from the original value that was at the higher folder level. So I’ve got an example of this here on the screen. So you can see the different options. I can see first, if I go to my tokens tab up here, I’ve got my local tokens, which are my from email address, my from name and my reply to, and then I’ve got an overridden token, which is just a logo token that I created. Again, this is all examples. And I’ve changed the value of what it used to be. So I can see that that is now overwritten because I updated the value here. And then finally I’ve got my inherited token, which is my copyright year, meaning that it came down from another folder level or another place. So when thinking about creating all these tokens and using this, that was a pretty small list of tokens in a program itself. However, as you start to think about scaling and start to think about using tokens a lot more, you might end up creating far more tokens than you ever realized you might create. And so I would recommend that you start to kind of think and evaluate about documenting your tokens, just like you do with anything else inside of Marketo engage, having a good governance strategy around it is really important so that people understand what they’re supposed to do with those values. And they’re not confused when they’re creating programs or what those things might be used for. So I definitely recommend that you create some sort of spreadsheet or tracking device to be able to track those tokens that you’re utilizing. This is just an example that I have, but it’s a, it’s a starting point for you to say, Hey, we might want to implement a token strategy, but we need to figure out a way to kind of get all of that information together. And so a couple of things you might want to include are the type of tokens. So is it a text token? Is it used in every program? Is it, it’s just used in emails? Where is the token being used? The type that it is. So that can be really helpful. And then you might also want a naming convention. So this can kind of mirror some of the things you have in your programs or how you name assets, if it’s going to be used in a specific asset, but any way that it’s going to make it easier for the marketers who are living and breathing inside of Marketo and who are executing programs on a daily basis, this is all about making their jobs easier. So any way that we’re able to do that, that’s certainly what we want to do before we move on to some of the use cases and really ramping up with scaling from tokens. I want to talk about gotchas. So there are some things to watch out for with tokens and some things that you might need to be aware of when you’re utilizing them so that you do it correctly and make sure that you don’t end up with any errors along the way. So I think this is obvious, but it might not be. So tokens and assets should always have a default value. If you notice several screens ago when I showed that screenshot of the tokens inside of an email, you might’ve noticed it said default value edit me. And that what Marketo was prompting you to do there is add a default value to the token. And what that does is just prevent a blank space from showing up in your content. So if you’re sending out an email and you want to personalize by first name and add their company name in there, that’s awesome. But what if you don’t have the first name in your Marketo database? Perhaps you only have their email address. Well, we don’t want to leave that as a blank place inside of Marketo and we want to make sure that there is some value populated. So give your tokens a default value so that something shows up when someone receives the content that you’re sending out to them. This is also really important to know with program tokens and folder tokens. So these can only be used for local assets to that program because they exist in that program. Only if you try to use those tokens with an email that you’re not sending out of that program, you’ll just end up with blanks. So if you’re using program tokens, that email asset or that landing page needs to be a part of the actual program itself so it knows which values to populate. Now you might be thinking, okay, tokens can be used in flow steps and that’s really helpful. I’m definitely going to do that. But can they be used in smart lists and in smart campaign smart lists? Unfortunately, the answer is no, you can’t put a token inside of a smart list. I’ve personally tried to do this. It doesn’t work, but you just can’t use them there. I would also say use caution when you’re deleting tokens. So kind of the same thing of not having a default value. If you take a token away inside of your program and the my tokens tab, then there is a risk that there might be a blank value somewhere else later on that you might not want to have that happen. So this is a really good reason why you want to make sure that your documentation is really good. That way people don’t accidentally delete something because they think it’s not being used. This is one of the areas that Marketo is not going to alert you and say, Hey, don’t do that. It’s being used somewhere. It will allow you to delete the tokens. You’ll just have to be careful and kind of assess what you’re doing. And now this is really specific. If you’re putting a URL into a program token, you’ll want to leave out the HTTP colon S part because that will cause the tracking to break and also can cause the token to break. So just put in the URL without the HTTPS. So the final thing about tokens that we want to keep in mind is that you cannot nest a token. So what that means is that you cannot reference a token and another token. So I can’t create a program token that’s called my from email address and then populate lead dot first name dot lead dot last name. That just won’t work. It’s not a possibility. Okay, let’s jump into scaling using tokens. So I’m going to start with some pretty generic use cases. We’ll go into some further examples in a little bit, but these are all going to build on each other just a bit. So let’s start with current year or copyright year. Let’s say you want to put the copyright year or the current year into all of your footers or somewhere in your email assets. This is a really good use case for a folder token. So if you go into marketing activities, go to your like really high level folder there, whether it’s like marketing initiatives for the year, maybe it’s whatever your global folder is, you can put copyright year as 2022 and have that just flow down to every single program. Now I realize you’re thinking, okay, maybe this is not the most exciting thing. It’s just like one piece of information. But if you’ve been using Marketo a long time, or if you have a lot of evergreen programs or perhaps nurtures or a welcome series that the content isn’t changing very much necessarily, but you need to make small tweaks. This is a good use case for that because I personally don’t want to go in and edit a ton of different emails because that just makes my job a lot harder and just takes a lot more time. So being able to make a change in one place and have that reflected in a lot of other places is really cool and really powerful. It just saves you so much time. So event date and time are really popular program tokens. And I’m going to show an example of this. And if you think about this, if you’re running an event, let’s say a webinar, the first thing you’re going to do is probably invite people to that webinar. And then you’re going to follow up with those people who didn’t open or follow up to remind people of the webinar. And then you’re going to send a thank you for attending or a sorry we missed you with all of that webinar or event information. You might even have a landing page as well that’s got the same content. And I found with events, whether it’s in person or whether it’s a virtual event, that they just require a lot of assets to build. And oftentimes that content is so repetitive. While you may be sending out a little bit different copy in the emails, the event date and time are probably not going to change overall. And so by creating program tokens for this, so event date event time, it allows you to enter that information once and then not again, because who wants to copy and paste January 22nd 2022 over and over and over again, it’s just not super fun. Same thing with the from address, every single email you have to sit you send out of Marketo Engage must have it from email address, but having to personally update this every time just leads to maybe more errors, maybe someone copy and paste the wrong one. By having this tokenized at the program level, you can give your marketers just a quick way to make an update to that or to not even have to worry about it overall. And this kind of comes really full circle to this concept of foundation programs or best practice programs. If you’ve ever worked on an implementation with someone at Marketo Engage with another consultant, they might have recommended this idea of a program that has everything set up that you might need, but you’ll have to tweak a little bit and clone to make adjustments to. And this is a pretty common practice. Most of the time we’re cloning things inside of Marketo because we don’t want to recreate the wheel. Like someone’s probably already done it, so we might as well clone it. But you can really set yourself up for success by using this concept of foundation programs, which means that you would have all your program tokens listed out. So from name, from email, you’ve got your copyright year, any boilerplate information that needs to go there. And then all of your assets also need to have that information reference. So you would build email assets that made sure and had the from name token in the appropriate place and the first name token or any other relevant information that you would need. Now, when you’re thinking about this, you might be like, Oh, that sounds like a lot of work. I’m not sure I want to do that. But think about adding that information every single time you create a program every single time. If you take a little bit of effort and time at the beginning to set this up the right way, you can really, really trim down the amount of time and just the errors that you could potentially encounter when creating these types of things and just make it easier for the people executing inside of Marketo. Now I’ve got a couple of other ideas for you guys just to just to get your juices flowing on how you might be able to use tokens. And some of these are very obvious. And some of them we’ve talked about, but some of them you might not have heard of. So email and landing pages are probably pretty obvious and where we can use those those data point tokens because we’ve got information about a person we want to show back to them. But we can also use that same information to do things like populate tasks and alerts for your sales team. So if you’ve got a CRM integration or even not, you can send out alerts to your sales team members and say, hey, Hillary filled out this form today, here’s all the information she put on the form and what might be beneficial to you so that salesperson can see all of that data real time in an email asset, which can be very handy. I’m going to talk about concatenating data for history fields. I’ve already talked a little bit about speeding up the program creation. I’m going to get into that and a little bit more. We also have a really cool piece of functionality called a wait step inside of a flow step. So this just tells Marketo to wait a certain amount of time. But you can also use a date token into this to say, hey, wait until this date, which is a date that you’ve specified in your program, and tell it to wait until then. So there’s a lot of ways that you can utilize tokens if you want to standardize the meta tags that you put on Marketo landing pages. I know that’s something I forget to do all the time because it’s not a super obvious setting, but this is one of those things that you can start adding to your foundation programs to say, hey, this is something we need in every single program and it needs to be standard throughout our entire instance. It really gives you that flexibility to do that. So this is not an exhaustive list. I’m about to go into some of those use cases I’ve been promising so far. So this has to be my all time favorite use case for scaling with tokens and lots of Marketo customers have implemented this really, really successfully. So I already talked a little bit about that repetitive data that you might see with an event, but here’s an actual example of how you might set up your program template or your foundation program or just an existing program to get yourself to that point. You can see that there’s a ton of information in here. So you’ve got your from your deliverability information that from email address and name, and then you’ve got all the things that are relevant to this event. So event name, event title, all of the things that would be pertinent to put into some sort of asset about this. Now, if you’re thinking, I don’t know where to start with this, but this is something I want because it can be really helpful. I would encourage you to look at a past event that you’ve run and say, hey, what were the things that we had to type and put in over and over and over into the content, whether it’s the event name or the event time, those are probably going to be repeated. You can just take a look at your past content to see which information is consistent, and then you can start to build out a token strategy for this. I will say a few years ago, I had a customer who was building tons of event programs and they weren’t using tokens and they didn’t really have to have a strategy for it. They just weren’t really aware that you could do this. And they were spending about four hours on a single webinar program to get an event program created and launched. By implementing this token strategy, they took it down to 30 minutes. We’re talking about going from half a day to half an hour, which is huge in terms of time. It’s a really, really powerful way that you can just help your teammates not spend so much time on this nitty gritty part, but spend time on strategy, spend time on reporting, what are the effects of our campaign and not bog down with the creation of the execution of that. This is definitely one of my favorites and I encourage you if this is something you’re looking to start with, this is a really, really good place to start. I’ve got two more use cases before we wrap up today. And again, don’t forget, put questions in the chat. If you haven’t been doing so already, I’m going live after this. If there’s something that wasn’t clear or you need more information on, I can’t wait to answer those questions. Let’s talk about scoring. Marketo’s best practice recommendation is that we use tokens inside of our smart campaign flow steps to increment or decrement a score so that you would build these in your scoring program in the my tokens tab using those score token types. And this just allows you to, instead of having to physically go into every smart campaign and put plus 10 or plus five for your lead scoring model, you insert the token there and you may be wondering, okay, well why do I want to do that when I could just go into the campaigns and put those numbers? While you certainly can do that, scoring is something that we recommend as a best practice. You’re constantly evaluating with your marketing and sales team. So when you are evaluating it, hopefully there might be some changes coming out of the scoring model that you initially established. So perhaps you decide that event registration is not worth 15 points anymore, that it’s worth 10 points in your lead scoring model. Well, all you have to do if you set this up with tokens is to go into that token folder, go into that token tab, and then update the value for this. You don’t have to go find the smart campaign. You don’t have to make sure that you got every single flow step. You just update it in one place. So it’s just for ease of use here that you don’t have to go hunt and peck for those different things. And also it’s just a really quick way to have a view of what your scoring model is. So sometimes we don’t write these things down or we fail to document things, but if you’re wondering what you’ve determined your model is, you can go to that tokens tab and just get a really quick view of all of the things that you need. So just quick tip there for you. Okay, we’re onto our final use case of the day before we go into our Q&A, and I want to talk about data population. So data population is really all about using tokens in flow steps. So an example that we come upon pretty frequently is capturing a comment history. So oftentimes we’ll allow people to put comments on forms and that can just be so if they’ve put an interest as other, we just want to give them the ability to put some text in there and say what they’re interested in. But as we know, when you submit a form in Marketo, Marketo is going to overwrite data in the fields that you have depending on your settings. But for the most part, that’s how it operates. Oftentimes we want to hold on to that information from a historical perspective. And so we create a custom field called comment history, but then how do we get those comments into that field? And this is where tokens come in. And so we’re actually using two types of tokens in this example here, where we would take the system date token, which allows us to say on this date. So if you look at my flow step, I’m saying on system date, the new comments are whatever were in the previous form comments field. So this is the token and this is the field, it’s going to populate all that data here, then I’ll put a bracket and then this process just repeats. So if they fill out the form again, put some new comments in, it will just keep concatenating that data all into one field. A little bit similarly, I talked about trigger tokens, and that really long list of things you can do with trigger campaigns. But let’s say we want to know the last web page visit that someone filled out a particular form on if you’ve got a form on a lot of pages, then you can use the trigger token to populate a custom field with that information, which can be really powerful and really cool. All right, so I do want to leave us with just some final thoughts today. We’ve talked about a lot of concepts during the session today. Obviously, email and asset personalization is a hot topic, and we want to make sure we’re sending relevant content to the people engaging with our assets. But that is not where tokens are limited to. We can use them in a lot of different places. So program tokens and folder tokens are a really good place to start. And then I’ve given you a lot of ideas that you can also begin to investigate as you start to establish yourself using tokens inside of Marketo engage, really, really encourage you to think outside the box of what you can do, visit product docs and visit the community there. So with all of these ideas and concepts that we’ve discussed and talked about today, I would love to see each of you begin to execute a token strategy, whether it’s something really small, such as a copyright year, or current year to something a little bit bigger, which would be in a total event program for scale. I am super excited to answer your questions today in our live q&a. Thanks so much for attending. Well, that’s awesome. Hillary tokens sure sound like a flexible tool for bringing the personal touch customers are looking for while saving time for marketers. And you know what time it is, it’s time for the q&a. So thanks so much for joining us today, Hillary. Thank you, Stephanie. I’m excited to answer the questions we’ve got. Well, we do have some good questions from the chat. So let’s dig in. Our first question comes from Andrea. Andrea wants to know, are there default tokens provided by Marketo? Or are tokens custom made by the user? That’s a really good question. And there’s kind of a two part answer to that. So the first part of the answer is that yes, there are some default tokens created. So let’s say you’ve got a lot of standard fields inside of your Marketo engage instance, all of those are available to be used as tokens. So if you create any custom fields, however, like from a CRM, or from a different data source, or perhaps you have Marketo only fields, then those would be custom that you can create. Then we also have the program tokens, like I discussed before, and those can be very specific to each individual Marketo engage program that you’re actually using. So there are some default ones that we’ve got, including the system tokens, like the date and the time, and also the trigger tokens. And there’s a full list of those in our product docs on the Adobe Experience League.

Awesome. We’ll definitely have to check those docs out. So our next question comes from Sarah. And Sarah says that her team is looking to create an email that can be shared and used across multiple clients. Can you show or explain an example of how you can use a token to change the logo and client name within the email? Yes, so this would be a really good use case for a program token. But I think we’d have to back it up a little bit and think about the overall token strategy that we have. Because you can create program tokens for anything that you like. However, you want to make sure that it’s going to match those different things. So if you have logos that need to be changed, or if you have from names that need to be changed, you’ll want to kind of get with your team and figure out what those could be. But this is a good use case for program tokens. So you could build out that logo in a program token as long as it’s in every program, and every email asset that’s utilizing that logo. That way, a marketer can come into the program, go to the my tokens tab within the program, and then they can edit it from there. So they’d be able to change that logo without having to get into the email asset. But the biggest thing to remember is that you’ve got to set this up at the program level and make sure that those tokens are in the email asset before you get going with this. So there’s a little bit of pre work that you’ve got to do. But as long as you get that done, you’ll be on the right track. Excellent. So our next question is, who can we contact with Velocity Scripting? This is a really good question. So Velocity Scripting is a little bit more of a complex scripting. And it’s if you want to bring in different pieces of information into the email or an asset that aren’t pretty standard, like a first name. So Adobe Professional Services, specifically for Marketo and Gage, has an excellent technical consulting team who assist customers in doing this all the time. This is a very common thing that we do and help with. So if it’s something you’re interested in, and you’re already a Marketo and Gage customer, reach out to your account representative or your customer success manager, and they can help point you in the right direction to see if a professional services engagement is something that would work for your team. Excellent. Yes, Velocity Scripting does sound a little more advanced. So Julie is wondering, is there a way to find out where a token is being used? She needs to delete some tokens, and she gets an error message. And she’s just having some difficulties. So any tips? Yes. So that’s a good question. There’s a couple of things to think about when you’re using tokens. So if you’re using a standard field token, like first name, or perhaps company name inside of your email asset, one thing that you can do is go to field management and look up that field. So if you have admin access into your Marketo and Gage instance, there’s a field management area that just shows you every single field that you have available to use in Marketo and Gage. But the handy thing about that is that if you select the field name, let’s say you’re trying to remove first name, then you would be able to click first name and it would show you a list of every single email asset where that token is being used. So that’s for fields that you’re using in your instance. Now, however, if you’re trying to delete a program token, because these are unique to every single program, then you would have to check inside the assets themselves. So there’s not a simple way to find out if a program token is being used inside of an email asset, which is why it’s really important to document your overall strategy and where your tokens are being utilized, because it can happen where you run into these issues where you can’t find something or perhaps someone left and you’re not able to make a change that you would like to do. So I would recommend first checking field management, and then start to kind of document everything that you have after that. That’s a good question. Yeah, thanks for that tip. So a little more specific, is there a year system token? So there is not a specific year system token, you’d have to create that as a program token. Now we do have those standard date tokens. So when Marketo can say, what is today’s system date, so it can stamp a date, or stamp the time. However, if you’re wanting a year token, this is a really, really good use case for just building a folder level token inside of marketing activities. So depending on your setup, even if you have multiple workspaces, as long as you go into the high level folder inside of marketing activities and create that year token, it will permeate down to every program underneath that. You just have to update it to be every year basically. So you’d have to come in the beginning of January each year and update that. Or if you’re looking for something a little more complex, a velocity script could also be created to populate the year or populate a date in the future if you’re needing it to read additional information from that data.

Awesome, bringing it back to the velocity scripting. I love it. So you mentioned not to use HTTPS in tokens, but for images, it’s required. So Sarah’s wondering if you can kind of clarify where she should remove the HTTPS. Yes. So the reason why we don’t have you use HTTPS in a token is because it can affect the Marketo tracking link on different things. So if you’re referencing a URL or that image, some of the tracking can be broken. And usually we want to know when people are engaging with our assets. But when you’re creating an image token, and you’re referencing that image URL, what you want to make sure and do is in the tokens tab of your program, you’ll find your token, find your image token, and just make sure to remove that HTTPS in there. Now another way, if you’re using a text token is probably a better use case for this and a little bit easier. I think that’s what you’re referencing is to just make your images, text tokens, because the URL will still populate in the email asset itself. And then you don’t have to worry about using that specific image tokens. That’s a little bit of a hack to get you around that required HTTPS.

Got it. Got it. Okay, so I even had this question pop into my mind. Carrie’s wondering, is there a limit to how many tokens can be built in an instance? That is a really good question. So there’s not a limit on the token. So think about the amount of fields that you can have in your Marketo database, right? I’ve seen customers with thousands upon thousands of different fields available, while we may want to limit that to the ones we’re using. There, there’s not a limit to those tokens. And I’ve also seen customers with hundreds of program tokens inside of their asset. Now, that doesn’t mean that you want to go and do that necessarily. But you do have the option to, to create however many tokens you want, based on the use cases that you have, I would say, you know, start small at the very beginning. But if you do have a lot of documented things where you’re ready to say, Hey, we’re, we’re, we’re going to do a token strategy now, and we’re going to set up Marketo to do this, then you can really go crazy with the amount of tokens and data that you have.

All right, thanks for that answer. So next question comes from Elisa. And she’s wondering, can we use tokens and forms? Or does auto population do the same thing? So auto population is definitely a better, a better way to achieve that. And the reason why you wouldn’t be able to use a token in a form, let’s say if we didn’t know the individual coming to the page, because they’re not cookied, or they’re browsing on incognito, it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t provide a good experience to that. So auto populate is definitely a better way to get that more personal information on those form fields itself, especially if you’re wanting it to populate data. Now, if you’re wanting it to say, like, hello, first name, and you already know someone’s name, that’s a better use case for putting a token on a form and like the HTML area that you can edit. Gotcha. So are there scoring tokens available in Marketo? Or is that something that people are going to have to create themselves? So yes, there are scoring tokens available, but you do have to create them inside the program itself. So whenever you’re creating a scoring program or utilizing scoring anywhere, you would open up your program, go to the my tokens tab. So you set up and tokens tab those different areas of the program itself. And then you could create the score token. So the score tokens have the stars by them. And you’re just able to drag those over into the token canvas, and then update the value. So like plus one or plus five or minus 20. And then you would give that token a name. So you do have to define the values and what the name of the token is going to be. But they are a type of token that you can create inside your program. Again, tokens are just so flexible. I love it. So okay, let’s hear it. What are your best practices or cautions for using rich text tokens? Oh, okay. Yes, this is this is a great question. So rich text tokens can be really powerful if you’re wanting to put a lot of information all in one piece. However, you do have to think about the amount of time you’re spending editing there. If it’s a large amount of content or information that you’re putting in a rich text token, it’s not to say that it won’t work because it will it just might be more straightforward to edit that within the email itself. Because typically, a token is going to be like, you know, a name or an event title where you can clearly see an asset how it’s going to display. If you’ve got a rich text token, it just won’t be as simple to go into your email and then say, Okay, well, what does this actually look like. So you just want to be aware that there’s going to be a place where the rich text token is going to exist and then make sure to test your content when you’re building that that way. It looks good to you. And you’ve seen some tests and you can confirm that it actually looks good there. Makes sense and always test your content. I know that role.

She wants to know, you know, she thought you couldn’t use more than one token, but the data population seemed to have two. So can you explain that a little more? All right, I’m, we might have to clarify this for me a little bit, Andrea. But so the you can definitely use multiple tokens inside of email assets or even inside of a smart campaign flow step where you’re, where you’re adding a field. So if you’re talking about like the system date token, for an example, I know, I gave that use case where you could populate comments or populate the date, you can use multiple tokens inside of a flow step or inside of an email. But what you can’t do is reference a token within a token. So let’s say, like the previous question we were talking about was the rich text, you couldn’t put a token inside of the rich text. So that’s where you can’t use a token within a token. I hope that answered your question. But if you need to clarify, feel free to put it in the chat. Yeah, makes sense. Makes sense. Okay, so is there a place where a user can review token history and what’s been captured by tokens for reporting purposes? That’s good question. So really, when we think about what a token is, typically, let’s say, if you’re using a data point in your Marketo engage instance, it’s going to be a field, right? So first name, last name, and there, the way to think about it is, all right, am I populating first or last name and email? Well, do I have first and last name as data points inside of Marketo engage, I would challenge you to think of it that way, as opposed to what’s really being put inside of my tokens in the email asset or whatever asset like a landing page you’re using, because that’s going to give you a better idea about your data quality and hygiene overall is just to understand what different pieces of data you’re using and the completeness of that data itself. And then from the program perspective, this is again, where you want to have a really good documented strategy of what’s being utilized in each program. That way, you know, without having to like, jump into every single program inside of Marketo, that you have tokens being used in certain places and what those typical or default values would be. Gotcha. Thanks for that. So is there an easy way to download all the tokens in one place, maybe Excel or CSV? So there is not as a simple way to do this, I wish there was, you know, that is a really good product idea. If you want to go to the Marketo community and vote or submit a product idea for that, that would be a really good thing for us to do. Because I understand, you know, we don’t always have some of the things that everyone wants. But again, this just kind of comes back to understanding the data inside of Marketo engage that you have, knowing what data is complete, and then knowing what tokens that you have. So field management can really be your friend when you’re creating tokens. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, I definitely agree. Go go put that in as a request in the nation. So for lead scoring, Joshua wants to know, can we use tokens to apply a score change for web visits and clicks to 100%? So you can you can definitely do that really the scoring tokens are completely up to you. Anything that a smart campaign can trigger or listen to like a web page visit, or a form fill out or a link click can be created as a score. So let’s say you wanted to assign five points for a certain high priority web page, you would just create that as an individual scoring token inside your scoring program. Okay. So what about a Google Analytics UTM tag after a token in a URL? Could that track through GA accurately? Yep, for sure. So we have a lot of customers using UTMs inside of programs. So let’s say you got a token in a URL that’s passing over some particular information, or even if you wanted to tokenize your UTM parameters in your URL, you can definitely do that. And we have a lot of customers who utilize that inside of their email assets. Okay. So I think this is our last question. And someone, you know, when you were talking earlier about creating a folder token, couldn’t you create a folder for each client with tokens at that level for logos, and these would get inherited by any programs contained in that folder? That is totally true. So this is where the setup of your Marketo engage instance really comes into play. So if that’s how your marketing activities area is structured, you could certainly do that. So if you’ve got a high level folder for each client, you just put the the logo token in that high level folder, make sure it’s referenced in all the assets, and then you’d be good to go. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Hillary. And I’m really looking forward to having you back for chapter three. Yeah, can’t wait to see you guys in a little bit.