Smart Campaigns 101

Smart Campaigns are the engine of Marketo. In addition to using Smart Campaigns to send out emails and programs, you can use smart campaigns for a variety of use cases. Learn how you can use Smart Campaigns for data normalization and automated alerts.

Transcript
Hi, I’m Dylan, and I’m currently a Senior Technical Support Engineer at Adobe. I’ve been using Marketo Engage for four years. I’m an Adobe Certified Expert Marketo Engage Business Practitioner, and I’ve been working with our marketing automation customers for four years as well. Smart campaigns are the backbone of the Adobe Marketo Engage platform, so how do you get started with using them? In this video, we’ll explore the different aspects of smart campaigns and provide tips to help you master this feature, as well as a few practical use cases for implementation. There are many ways to use smart campaigns to address records in your database with specific flow steps. Today, I’ll talk about how to make a smart campaign, as well as two examples of how you’d use them. In addition to using smart campaigns to send out emails and programs, you can use smart campaigns for data normalization and automated alerts. Data normalization is crucial for maintaining a clean database. You can create a batch smart campaign to identify and correct data inconsistencies, such as country values that don’t fit your approved list. Smart campaigns are also an easy way to set up automated alerts for specific actions. We’ll cover both of these use cases after I show you the components that make up a smart campaign. Let’s start by understanding what a smart campaign is. Think of smart campaigns as low-code programming within Adobe Marketo Engage. They allow you to create if this, then that statements to manage the people in your database. You can create a smart campaign within a folder in marketing activities. The smart list tab. This is where you define the conditions for your smart campaign. You can use filters and triggers to determine who qualifies for your campaign. Filters are queries on the fields in your database, while triggers listen for changes in your data. For example, a filter would show you people who work at a specific company, whereas a trigger would look for when someone moved over to that company and how to change data value. The flow tab. This is where you decide what actions to take on the people who qualify for your campaign. You can perform actions like data value changes, program membership changes, sending emails and alerts, and even CRM updates. The schedule tab. The schedule tab allows you to activate or schedule your smart campaign. For batch campaigns, you can set the frequency of people flowing through the campaign and choose whether to ignore communication limits or block non-operational emails. Triggered campaigns fire each time a person qualifies and can be activated with a simple click. Anyone who manages a database knows that data hygiene is one of the absolute most important things to keep in mind. Smart campaigns can help with a lot of the manual work we often do in order to keep our databases clean. Let’s take country normalization as an example. You can create a batch smart campaign that runs nightly and listens in the smart list tab for anyone who has a country value that doesn’t fit within your approved list of values within the smart list section. Then in the flow, you can use choices to update common misspellings or incorrect values, as seen here. Most marketers have, at some point, been asked by a member of their sales team to send alerts when a person record that’s owned by them does some specific action. Smart campaigns are a really easy way to set these alerts up, in a very automated way. In the smart list tab, simply select triggers based on what your rep has requested. Then in the flow, drag over the send alert flow step and select who you want to send it to. You can choose the record owner, or you can type email address in the other section. You can even use tokens within this other section. As you gain proficiency with building smart campaigns and smart lists to action with flow Make sure to keep in mind that there are best practices for smart lists that include limiting historical filters, limiting the use of nested smart lists where one smart list includes a member of smart list filter which creates nested logic, and other key tips which are outlined in our best practices for smart list documentation on the Adobe Experience League. Congratulations! You now have a better understanding of smart campaigns and how to leverage this powerful feature in Adobe Marketo Engage. Dive deeper with Adobe Marketo Engage Champions for more tips, considerations, and best practices.

Additional Resources

Documentation:

Expert Customer Blog posts:

recommendation-more-help
65ee5e5e-b058-48c8-aa13-bacc3d5848ce