Best practices for creating foundational programs

Hi, I’m Daniel Calomoto and I’m currently a technical account manager at Adobe. I’ve been using Marketo Engage for about seven years. I’m an Adobe Marketo Engage business practitioner expert and I’ve been working with our marketing automation customers for the same period of time. In this video, I will be talking about the four program types, importing a program, lead scoring programs, and defining channel tags in the admin section. We’ll be reviewing common use cases, demonstrating how to do it in Marketo Engage, and I’ll be sharing my tips and tricks along the way. Programs are like building blocks in Marketo Engage, each helping you to level up your marketing efforts. Adopting a new program type can be time consuming and require a lot of effort to set up. Keeping yourself organized early on can save you hours of work in the long run. To help you with this, Marketo Engage has a library of programs available to import directly into your instance. If you’re an admin, you can use these as a starting point for creating company specific best practice or shell programs for users in your instance to clone from. Marketo support can also set up your instance with the capability to import to or from your sandbox, which allows for easier testing in a lower environment prior to going live in production. If you’d like this enabled between your sandbox and production instances, please submit a support case with the request. Since programs play a critical role in the function of your Marketo Engage instance, let’s look at a couple of methods for creating a program in your instance. It can be tempting to jump in and start building out programs right away. Before you do, it is best to establish or revisit your company’s naming convention. A strong naming convention in Marketo Engage is essential for maintaining consistency, clarity, and ease of navigation through your instances’ programs and assets. It promotes efficient collaboration, reduces errors, and supports scalability for future growth. Now let’s create our first program. Within the correct folder and marketing activities, select New and choose New Program. In the dropdown, you’ll notice four different program types. Event programs allow you to automate multiple streams of content based on your use case. Email programs for ease of sending email communications to your customers at a specific time. These can also utilize features like Head Start and Send Email in recipient time zone. Event programs for in-person or virtual events connect natively with Adobe’s interactive webinar or to third-party webinar providers in LaunchPoint. Default programs are for everything else. Default programs are highly flexible and house everything else you need to do in Marketo Engage, from lead scoring to serving as a parent program for sub-programs or any mix of local assets like emails, landing pages, forms, smart campaigns, reports, and more. Let’s quickly look at the folder structure of the Best Practice Email Program. You have a folder for smart campaigns, tracking the behavior of people in the program, and another folder for the local assets. In this case, the email. I also suggest adding a folder for any landing pages you need which are specific to the program, and another for any smart lists or static lists. Let’s take a look at the Email Program Control Panel. The Home Screen. One of the great things about the Email Program is that the Home Screen or Control Panel walks you through the necessary components of the program. The Audience Tile. Here is where you define who should receive your email using a smart or static list. This is the who of the program. The Email Tile. Choose the email you will be sending. This is also where you would set up an A-B test. This is the what of the program. The Schedule Tile. If you aren’t A-B testing your email, this is where you would configure the send details of the email. Consider features like Head Start and Send in Recipient Time Zone. This is the when of the program. The Approval Tile. Once you have determined the audience, selected the appropriate email, and set the schedule, the final step is approving your email program. Now is a good time to double check everything is as you intend it to be. Don’t forget this section or your email won’t send. In the Navigation Tree on the left hand side of the screen, there are folders for campaigns which contain the smart campaigns for your email program. In this case, the smart campaign is changing the program status of a person who clicks a link in an email. Next, there is a folder for local assets which has a subfolder for emails. This is also where you would add a folder for other asset types if applicable to your use case. Jumping to another program type, let’s look at common folder structure for an event program. You have a folder for campaigns where all of your smart campaigns live for processing registrations, sending email invitations, confirmations, reminders, and post event follow up. Next there is a folder for local assets which has subfolders for emails, forms, landing pages, and reports. Let’s explore the simple drip nurture program imported from the Marketo Program Library. In this program, there are again folders for campaigns and local assets with subfolders for emails and reports. It’s important to note here the smart campaigns are controlling when someone is added, paused, or removed from the engagement program. Like other programs, there is also a smart campaign identifying when a person has reached a success status for the program. Channel tags can help you track how leads get into your database. Their progression through a program and ultimately enable you to analyze and measure the performance of your marketing efforts in Marketo Engage using the native reports. Navigate to the admin section and select tags from the navigation tree. Select new channel from the new menu. Save your channel. For this example, we’ll set up a new channel called SMS Message. Select the program type this will apply to. Choose your analytics behavior based on your company’s reporting strategy. Add as many progression steps as needed for your use case. For SMS, we’ll use subscribed, SMS delivered, SMS bounces, clicks link, and unsubscribed. Because the step number is used for sorting of program statuses, keep in mind that people cannot go backwards in these progression steps. They can only change status to a higher or equal value status. Use equal values when statuses are intended to switch back and forth as opposed to a progression. Success steps help you with attribution reporting down the road. A person reaching a success status indicates the program should receive some credit or attribution. Navigate to the marketing activities view in Marketo Engage. Select the workspace or campaign folder where you want to improve the program. Click on new and then choose import program. Select the instance you are importing from, for example, sandbox or production. Choose the subscription which you are importing. Select the specific program you want to import such as OP-scoring-behavior from the Marketo Program Library. Before proceeding, ensure that you have created any required custom fields as indicated on the screen. Click next to proceed. Select the appropriate campaign folder where you want to place the imported program. Click next to continue. Determine if the default conflict rules apply to your use case. From there, choose next, review the details, and finally select import. A dialog will appear showing you the status of the import. Feel free to close this. If you need to access it again, you may do so by right clicking on the campaign folder and choosing show import status. You will also receive an email alert when the import has completed or with details if the import fails for any reason, usually because a field needs to be created. Be sure to un-approve the imported emails and update them with your company’s branding and content before re-approving and using them in the program. You have now successfully imported a program. Let’s take a quick look at the Smart Campaigns included in this program. You can see a variety set up for a person’s behavior. Email clicks, form fills, and web visits, each with a weighted score set up in the My Tokens view. Clicking into this view will show you several different tokens with score values based on the value of the activity. The higher the score, the more likely a person is exhibiting MQL behavior, allowing you to pass along higher quality leads to sales. If we look at the flow steps of one of the Smart Campaigns, you can see the token is placed directly into the change score stat. This allows you to change all of your scores in one central location. There is a lot more to lead scoring than just behavior. Consider demographics, target accounts, and many other factors. If you’d like to learn more, be sure to download our definitive guide to lead scoring. Importing a program can be a huge time saver. If a program can’t be imported, it’s usually because a custom field is missing from the destination instance. Create the fields mentioned in the error email or as identified on the summary screen before initiating the import. Remember, keeping yourself organized now will save you a lot of work down the road. Congratulations! You have now learned how to organize your instance, import programs, and modify content to meet your company needs. More tutorials are available on Experience League. Thanks for watching!