The Power of a Smart Campaign

Transcript

Hi everyone, welcome to Experience Makers, the skill exchange. Today we’re going to be covering the power of smart campaigns. I’m Hillary Sachs, I’m a business consultant with Adobe’s Professional Services. Let’s jump in. So today we’re going to go over an overview of smart campaigns and just the different types that we have inside of Marketo Engage. Then I’m going to focus on the four different components that make up a smart campaign and how we use each one. And then finally I’m going to wrap up with smart campaign management and best practices around smart campaigns. We’re having a live Q&A after this session so go ahead and put any questions that you have during this time into the chat and we’ll hopefully address those when we get the chance. So as we get started, the first thing I want to talk about is a smart campaign overview. And before we dive into the nitty gritty, let’s just go over what a smart campaign is inside of Marketo Engage. I like to consider it the workflow engine of Marketo Engage. It does all of the work. Anytime you need to take an action on a person record inside of Marketo Engage, you’re going to use a smart campaign. I’ve listed out a lot of really common use cases below and we’re going to dive into some of these throughout the session today and we’ll focus on the different concepts for each one. This is not an exhaustive list of all the things you can do with a smart campaign, but it’s a really great starting point for us to talk about some of these different things. Some of these concepts will be really familiar to you and some of them may be a little bit different. So before we get into all of these components, let’s talk about how to find these smart campaigns. It’s hard to execute them if you don’t know where they are. So smart campaigns are going to exist as a part of marketing activities and within marketing activities, they can live inside a Marketo program or they can exist outside of a program in a folder. Now I recommend that you always put your smart campaign inside of a Marketo Engage program just because it’s easier to keep yourself organized and understand the purpose of that smart campaign. So as a reminder, you’ll navigate to marketing activities and that’s where you can create your smart campaigns. So let’s continue to talk about the different types of smart campaigns. Within Marketo Engage, we have three different kinds of smart campaigns that you will encounter. And on the right hand side of the screen, you can see the different icons that represent them inside of your Marketo Engage instance. The first one is a batch campaign. So a batch campaign will run one time at the time and day of your choosing. The second campaign we’ll talk about is a recurring batch campaign. It’s exactly what it sounds like. And it’s a campaign that runs recurringly at times and dates that you define and choose. The third smart campaign is called a trigger. And a trigger is an always on listening campaign. It’s ready and waiting to react into a qualifying activity. I’m going to go through several different use cases for these campaigns and some of the different ways that we can create them and use them in the next slide. So let’s talk about batch campaigns first. They’re really common inside of Marketo Engage and we use them very, very frequently. One of the most common ways that we use them is to send an email communication. This is probably the top of everyone’s mind. Whenever you first stand up Marketo Engage, you want to send emails out to the people in your database. And because of this, we often execute this type of email communication with a batch campaign. Now Marketo is really amazing and doesn’t just do only emails. It does so much more than that. And so a couple of other really good examples outside of just your standard email would be data management. But what does data management actually mean? So data management can come in the form of a variety of things. The example I want to talk about today is normalizing some of that firmographic data that you might have inside your Marketo database. So let’s say for an example, you have several different data sources integrated into your Marketo Engage instance. That could be a CRM, an external database where you put data in. You might have a lot. Let’s continue on with that example and say that one CRM system sends over country information abbreviated, but your secondary database sends it over spelled out. So instead of US, you get United States. Already you can see how this could become a problem. It’s really hard to create a targeted list or narrow down a group when your data isn’t consistent. And so we can use a batch campaign to help us normalize data inside of your Marketo Engage instance, which actually will make your subsequent smart campaigns more powerful in the future. And by doing this, it allows you to be able to group together certain things that may or may not be helpful to you. So country is a really good example of what a lot of customers use batch campaigns for. So these run on a recurring basis, sometimes every night, sometimes every week to just clean up the data in your database, a really useful and powerful tool. This can also run the same way for job title or industry. Oftentimes when people fill out forms and we let them type information in, they don’t always give us the correct spelling of a word, or perhaps they missed part of their title. Having some normalization campaigns can help us achieve better data consistency overall and just enable you to create better targeted lists and reach a better audience with your communications. There’s a couple of other use cases too. This is not an exhaustive list. And some of the other things that we can do are populate and depopulate static lists. And this can be really useful for ad platform integrations that we have with Marketo engage or Adobe audience manager, and that integration with Marketo engage. Some other things that you might want to do with a batch campaign or send appointment reminders or a happy birthday email to customers in your database. And we know that those things want to happen at a specific time and date of our choosing because we’re relying on some other data point to do that. All right, now I’m going to move on to trigger campaigns. And I just want to remind everyone who’s listening in today that we will have a live Q&A after this. So if you have questions about any of the information I’m covering today, please put it in the chat and we will hopefully get to all of those at the end of the presentation. So jumping into trigger campaigns, trigger campaigns are a little bit different than batch campaigns. Like I’ve said, so these campaigns are always on and listening for a qualifying activity. And what that means is that they are going to take an immediate action depending on that activity. So let’s go through the example of a form fill out. You probably have a contact sales or request a demo form on your website that you drive people to. You want them to fill it out. When that happens, you likely want to take another immediate action based on that hand raise. So if I fill out a form and say I want to have sales contact me, I do expect a response and a follow up from the sales team. So a trigger campaign would allow you to listen to that form fill out and then take immediate subsequent actions based on that, which could be sending that person to your CRM, sending a follow up to the person that filled out a form to say thank you. A member of our sales team will be contacting you shortly. Perhaps you also alert the sales person of a new interest or a form fill out by this individual. That way they have all the relevant information about the person who has reached out about them. This is not the only thing that we can do. We can also track Marketo program success. In earlier sessions, you’ve learned about Marketo programs and the power of tracking the success for your programs and initiatives. One of the things that is a best practice for us is to always set the program success. The reason why we want to do that is to make sure that we’re tracking the effectiveness of our programs inside of Marketo engage. Often times that success criteria is going to be dependent on a person in the database taking action. That could be anything from filling out a form, like I said before, or visiting a certain web page. It could be clicking a link in a CTA. You get to define what it means, but we get to use Marketo smart campaigns to make it actually happen. I already mentioned syncing a record to a CRM is usually something that you want to do in a timely fashion. You don’t want to hold back any qualified prospects or leads from going over into your CRM system to be able to be contacted by the sales team. It’s always a really good practice to evaluate the urgency and the need of something to happen immediately. Okay, there’s a lot of questions about which kind of campaign is best. When we’re thinking about it, I like to ask several questions before I ever create my campaign and know that you might have to work with your marketing operations team to come to these resolutions or judgments. It could be different depending on your unique use case, but these are really good rule of thumb to start with. The first thing that I like to ask is, is there a specific time and date that my campaign needs to execute? If so, your best bet is going to be a batch campaign. The reason why is because a batch campaign can be scheduled at a time and date that you choose. If your campaign needs to go out on March 1st at 8am, use a batch campaign. If the answer is no, it doesn’t have to go out at a specific time or date, you might want to consider using a batch campaign anyway. They’re really straightforward to operate and execute and it’s easy to see who’s qualified for your list. But sometimes, okay, that doesn’t apply. The next question I like to ask is, should my campaign react to an action taken by a person, like those forms of lots I mentioned earlier or a hand raise request or any type of immediate reaction that we want to take? So does my campaign need to react immediately to something? If the answer is yes, you’re likely going to want a trigger campaign. Or let’s look at the opposite. Can it wait? If it can wait, you probably don’t need a trigger campaign and you can use a batch campaign. So the next thing I want to talk about is a couple of use cases specific to Marketo Engage programs where we can use these questions and evaluate the type of campaigns that we might want to use for this. So the first use case is an email send program. This you might be familiar with inside of your marketing activities area because it’s that little mailbox icon and you can use the control panel to send out content to a person at the time and date that you choose. However, success tracking is not automatically built into that program and so you have to explicitly define the success for your program and create a smart campaign to handle that. In most cases, customers are going to create a trigger campaign and that is probably going to be something like listening for a click on the CTA of the email asset that you sent out. So that’s going to lead you to determine the success, but you’re generally going to want to react immediately to that email click. That way you can then mark that person as successful in your program. That’s important because we want to track the success of all of our initiatives and Marketo programs. Let’s dive in for our next use case, which is webinar management. So in these crazy unprecedented times, we have been hosting so many more webinars and online virtual events than ever before, just like we’re all doing right now. And there’s a lot of different use cases for the different types of campaigns in just this one webinar program. So let’s set the stage and think about the different things that we have to do. The first thing that we have to do is invite our audience. And when we think about inviting our audience, typically we want to do that at a date and time that we choose. You’ve probably been working with your marketing teams to create promotional collateral for this. Perhaps there’s a landing page that you’re launching at the same time when you’re doing this and this needs to be a coordinated promotional effort. So I like to go back to my questions and say, is this something that I need to choose a date and time for? Well, the answer is yes. And so when you send out that first webinar invite, you’re definitely going to want to use a batch campaign. It allows you to get your targeted list ready and send that communication whenever you want. However, let’s think about the other things that happen once that email goes out. So you send your email and it has an invitation for people to register for your event. So they click on the registration button, they fill out a form to register and indicate their interest. First of all, this is really great. We’ve captured probably some new information about them. But we need to take some immediate actions next. So when we capture that registration information, we want to send a confirmation email and say, Hey, thank you so much for registering. We’re really excited you’re coming. Here’s the event details and here’s how you log in. We want to make sure to give them a follow up to let them know that their registration is successful. And we want to do that immediately. It doesn’t really, it’s not a great customer experience if we wait 12 to 18 hours before we send a follow up. We want there to be a real time personalized interaction. And so that is an excellent use case for a trigger campaign. But not only is it great for sending a follow up to the person, we also want to capture that registration status inside of Marketo engage. And depending on your different integrations, you may have this already, but you might need to set it. And so we can then immediately update that person’s status inside of the webinar program. That way we have an accurate count of the people who have indicated their interest to register. So that’s the beginning part of the event before it actually occurs. Now our event has happened. We recorded our webinar. It was a great success. And we want to send a follow up to the people who attended or who did not attend. And now this is something again, let’s go back to those questions and ask, does this need to happen at a time and date of my choosing? The answer is yes. We need to send out that follow up at a time that makes sense once our webinar recording is ready to be reviewed. And we want to communicate to the people who either attended or didn’t attended. And so by using a batch campaign, we are able to straightforwardly execute that information and get that content over to the person who either attended or did not at a time that we choose. And so you can see that there are a variety of ways that you can use both triggered and batch campaigns in just one type of program. And now these aren’t exhaustive lists over anything that you can do, but they’re really common examples of some of the things that customers do most often with these types of campaigns. All right, now that we’ve kind of talked about like the theory of smart campaigns and very high level, the different things that they can do, I want to dive in to the components of the smart campaigns themselves. So let’s talk about the four components. I’m going to go through all of these in greater detail. So the smart list is going to be who your smart campaign is targeting. The second part is the flow step, and this is what is happening to that list that you’re targeting. The third part is the schedule, which is going to be when it happens. And then finally the results. So wow, let’s look at the stuff that we actually did, the emails we sent out, the scores we changed. I’m going to go through all of these in detail. Let’s start with the smart list and the filters. So if you’re familiar with a standard smart list asset inside of Marketo engage, this functionality is going to look similar, but if you’re not, that’s okay. A smart list is just a targeted query on your Marketo engage database. It lets you pick from a variety of things inside your database to target that person. And those are called filters. So whenever we put a filter on a smart list, the first thing it’s probably going to be representative of is of fields in your Marketo engage instance. So this could be custom fields that you’ve created. It could also be a standard field. So first name, last name, email address. It could be fields from a custom integration or your CRM system such as sales owner or sales email address. And these can all be really, really important, powerful targeting things for you to input into your smart campaign. And so not only are fields available for you to use as targeting data points, but you can also use activity history. And so activity history gives us an idea of what an individual person or people are doing inside of the Marketo engage database. And that could be opening an email. It could be filling out a form like we’ve talked about before, visiting a website. It could be that if score was changed. We could also look for things like non-activity history. So perhaps we want to look at people in our database who have not engaged in a certain amount of time because we want to clear them out for some reason. They’re not communicating with us. They’re not interested. And so we can look back and see, well, I want to pull a list of everyone who has not engaged with our website or opened an email or clicked on any emails or filled out any forms. We’re able to look back and see what people are doing or not doing. And this can be really helpful and powerful when we’re thinking about the people we want to target and how we’re building a really personalized communication for the people in our database. Now, there’s a couple of things that we need to think about with this. We’ve talked about the types of campaigns. And so if you only have these filters inside of your smart campaign, that means you have a batch campaign. So that means you’re going to schedule it and run it at the time that you want. A couple of really other important things to note is that the filters are going to be green. So if you see these green boxes inside of your smart list, you know you have a filter. They are also going to be numbered. And the order number of them matters. And I’m going to talk about that in a little bit and what we can do to manipulate the order of those filters. So let’s jump into that. It’s called filter logic. So filter logic allows you to combine the filters inside of your smart list in a very specific way. Like I said before, the order that you have them in matters and they will be numbered for you so you can see what they actually are and what order they’re going to go through. So whenever you create a smart list, you have the option to choose the logic that you want your filters to operate with. And the first one is going to be all filters. And what that means is that your filters will execute with and statements in between them. So let’s say I want to send a webinar invite to anyone in my database who has the job title of CEO and is in the industry of financial services. That’s where I want to use my all filters because it puts and statements in between those filters and combines them together. When you use all filters, it’s going to cast a little bit of a smaller net on the database. So you’re going to be really targeting and narrowing down the information that you’re going to pull out of that list. So the more ands that you put in a smart list, likely the smaller your overall targeted list is going to end up being. Now the converse of that would be any filters. So perhaps you want to cast a really wide net on your database and you’re just kind of looking for anybody who qualifies. So that could be anyone who has a job title of CEO or is in an industry of financial services. You’re not combining them together. You’re giving yourself more options. And this is a good way if you don’t have a really targeted list you’re trying to achieve and you just kind of want to boil the ocean. The last one is advanced filters. And let’s talk about that next and some best practices for these. So advanced filters themselves can be complex to set up, but if you start right at the beginning, they don’t have to be. And so advanced filters means that you can combine both ands and ors together and allow you to achieve a really specific targeted list. So perhaps you want to target every single person in your database with a job title of CEO, an industry of financial services, and who has either opened an email or filled out a form or visited your website in the past seven days. The advanced filters would give you the combination to put those ands and ors together in a way that can give you a really targeted specific list. But it can be complicated if you have a lot of filters in there. And so I really recommend document your filter logic and criteria. So this could be meeting with your marketing campaign team and just getting a really good idea of what that content actually is and how we should be targeting our list. And so by doing that you will have a better understanding of what you’re actually trying to target and then you can translate that into the ands and ors inside of Marketo Engage. All right. So now that we’ve got an understanding of some of the advanced filter logic best practices and how to apply those, let’s move on into how we utilize triggers and bring those into a smart campaign with filters. So as a reminder, I know I’ve said this before, you’re going to use triggers when you want to react to something in real time. Inside of your Marketo Engage instance on that right hand side search bar of the smart list what you’ll see is a list of triggers available and they’re going to be denoted with that little down arrow so you can get an idea of like this is something that’s about to occur. And another kind of easy way to think about it is that triggers are typically going to be in the present tense. So fills out form versus filled out form or opens email versus opened email. So if you can look and see from that way if you’re searching from one that it’s a trigger versus a filter. Another really, really easy way to tell is that the triggers inside of your smart list will be orange and they will always stack to the very top of that smart list. So unlike the filters that you have that are numbered in which the order matters, the triggers themselves their order does not matter. So let’s talk about how they can work with filters. So let’s say you put a filter and a trigger inside of your smart campaign. What that means is that your smart campaign will trigger when that action happens. So let’s say a form fill out but it will only process people through the campaign if they meet the qualifications of that trigger. So let’s say for example you sync people over to your CRM based on a hand razor form fill out and they have to give their job title or perhaps email address. Hopefully they’re giving your email address on that form. And so when this occurs you may have certain rules in your CRM that one you don’t accept students while it’s great that they’re doing research. You don’t want to send them over to your sales team. So you exclude people who don’t have appropriate job titles in that smart list filter. And so by combining the trigger and the filter together this gives you a really powerful way to react to something but not reacting to the entire population of your database that might do something. Another really good example is perhaps you don’t expect accept free mail domains inside of your CRM. So that could be Gmail or Hotmail Yahoo and you can exclude those email domains from processing through your campaign. So they just never go into your CRM system at all. And this can give you a really powerful way to get the correct and qualified people over to your sales team without actually having to send them the junk that you don’t want. Now it’s important to realize how triggers and filter logic work. So triggers like I said can be combined with those filters before and they will always sit at the top of your campaign. So it’s going to react to the trigger and then filter by anyone who qualifies for those green filters you’ve put on there. Now you can have multiple triggers inside of your smart campaign smart list and these will react independently of each other. So you can kind of think about it as in this example here fills out form and then whatever else my filters are. It’s never going to evaluate all triggers at once. They operate independently of each other. Okay, let’s talk about some fun things with smart campaigns, which is the actual action parts of them. And this is the flow step. These are just some examples of the flow steps that we can use inside of a MarketoEngage flow area not exhaustive list. But these are really common ones that you’re probably going to use over and over and over again. Obviously send email is one of our most popular but I would say change data value is going to be probably the second most popular one. Oftentimes we need to append and update data before we can say sync someone to CRM. Perhaps we need to update a contact person record status to say they’re engaged or they’re not engaged or we want to update a product of interest because they’ve indicated that with a form fill out. I’ve talked about before changing a program status and how important that is for your overall MarketoEngage program performance reporting and the importance of that and we have to tell Marketo what exactly we want to do in that flow step section. And so in the flow step area, it is a canvas just like the smart list where you can drag and drop and arrange the flow steps. And so the order of your flow steps do matter. So let’s talk a little bit about advanced flow step functionality and what that means. So just like your filters, the order in which they are inside the canvas matters and you’ll be able to see this in the numbers of the flow steps themselves. So the processing order is the number of the flow steps. So the first thing that would happen in this example here is a change data value and then a sync to CRM. So why does the order matter? Let’s say for this example that I have, we send people over to our CRM based on a form fill, but we have certain required fields and we have to have country filled in. It cannot be a blank value. And so I know that I need to update that country value before I can ever send someone to the CRM because it will fail and it’s not really worth my time if the person’s not going to be able to get inserted into my CRM. And so the first thing I want to do is make sure to evaluate my country. And if it doesn’t have a value, I want to update that value. And this is where some of our advanced functionality comes in. So ad choice is a super powerful part of smart campaign flow steps and probably one of the most common ones that I use with customers all the time. And you can see in this example here, I don’t want to overwrite a country value if it’s already present. I just want to add it there. If the country value is not present, I’ll set it as not available. So ad choice functions as additional qualifiers in your flow steps. You can kind of think about it with that, like if then statement, if country is empty, then update it to not available. If it has something in there, I don’t want to overwrite it and I’ll just do nothing. And then it moves on to the next step. This can also be a really good use case for those data management country normalization campaigns. So let’s say you’ve got all variations of United States inside of your database. You could evaluate with an ad choice and say, okay, if country contains U.S., U.S.A., United States, you get the picture, then change that value to United States. And then you can do that with every country. That way you don’t have to have an individual smart campaign for each one. It just allows you to be so much more efficient and scalable with the campaign build that you have. Now let’s talk about wait steps because these can also be incredibly powerful and are very common when you have a lot of data processing going on. So wait steps are exactly what they sound like. They put the person processing through the campaign into a wait for the time that you choose. They’re pretty cool because you can actually just type in five minutes or 27 hours. It’s kind of free form and it allows you to define a time that you want. A really good example of this in our CRM sync example here would be waiting before sending an alert or adding to a campaign. One of the reasons why we might want to do this is because if we send an alert to a salesperson, there has to be a salesperson assigned for them to receive that. So if I’ve sent someone over to a CRM, they might go into a round robin, they might go into a queue. It just kind of depends on your processes. And I want to alert the salesperson once those processes have assigned out that prospect record. Well, if there is no salesperson assigned, I can’t send an alert and my smart campaign then is not as useful. And so this is where a really good understanding of your own business processes are really important but you can use the wait step to help manage what’s happening inside of that campaign so you don’t have to worry about someone missing an alert because we want all the leads and contacts that we can get outside of our form fill out. Let’s talk about the schedule. So for batch campaigns, this is going to be pretty straightforward. Like I’ve said a million times before, you choose the time and date that you want the campaign to run. And so you can choose to run the campaign now, schedule it for a later date, or set it on a recurring schedule. This could be daily. It could be monthly. It could be weekly. Just depends on what you want. You choose the time that you want it to start. Trigger campaigns are different. Trigger campaigns you just activate because they are listening for something. They’re not going to create a list. They are listening for an activity to take place. And so you have to determine once your campaign smart list is set up how you want to operate your schedule if it’s a batch campaign. There’s a lot of other important items on that schedule tab and that’s going to be smart campaign settings. So smart campaign settings do a variety of things. The first thing that you can do a smart campaign settings are limit how often someone qualifies for your smart campaign. And so this could be you don’t want someone to process through your CRM sync every time they qualify or perhaps you are running a demographic scoring campaign over job title and you don’t need to score someone every single time because they have a job title. You might not want someone to qualify for the campaign so you can set a smart campaign limit to make sure that only the people who you want to go through it can you can choose the number of times they flow through the campaign. There’s also what’s called smart campaign limits and smart campaign limits are set in the admin area of your Marketo engaged instance by your admin or by Marketo support. And this is a global instance wide setting and what it will do is limit the amount of individual records that can process through a campaign at any time. So let’s say you have a smart campaign limit of 1.5 million. If more than 1.5 million people qualify for that smart campaign it won’t run because of the limits you have on the admin area of your database. However with the right permissions if you’ve been granted those you can override this limit. I will say it is there for a reason. I’ve seen many customers accidentally email their entire database the wrong thing or accidentally delete records out of their database when they didn’t mean to because they did not have a smart campaign limit. However it’s up to you to decide if that is going to be something good for you and your business. And the next thing you’re going to want to do on the schedule tab is to review any blocked people. So let’s go over what the blocked people look like on that schedule tab. You’re going to see a couple of things in addition to the settings. If you have a batch campaign this only applies to batch campaigns. You’re going to be able to see a hyperlinked list of qualified people and it’s always a really good practice to check this because let’s say for a webinar example you’ve created your smart list. You’ve set up your flow steps and you get into the schedule tab and you see that a million people qualify to be invited when you were only expecting five hundred thousand. And that might be a red flag that your smart list is incorrect and you need to go back and check it. And it’s a really good way to see the exact people at the point in time that you ran the list that they’ll qualify for the campaign. Now another thing that you’ll see is blocked people and blocked people are people that will not receive marketing email communications out of the campaign. It doesn’t mean that they won’t flow through the rest of the steps but if you have a send email flow step they won’t receive that email asset. And so the reason why they might be blocked could be for a variety of reasons. They could be unsubscribed. They could be marketing suspended. They could be block listed. They could not have an email address. Sometimes that happens or they could have an invalid email address. Marketo does not send emails to people with that list of qualifications. So if they meet that they will not be getting an email communication. And it’s really good to review that that way you have a good idea of who and who is not going to be receiving the email. Okay let’s wrap up with the smart campaign results tab. So after you’ve run your batch campaign or perhaps after you’ve activated that trigger campaign well you want to know is it doing what you set it up to do and the results tab is there to help you. So if you have a batch campaign and after it’s run you want to go check and see what happened you’ll be able to click on that results tab jump into it and see a ton of information. If you sent an email it will display delivery information about that email. Was the email delivered? Was the email bounced? Did the person open or click? It gives a lot of data about that. But it also will show you the data value changes or CRM syncs. Perhaps you sent someone to a CRM and it failed. You’d be able to see that in the results tab of your smart campaign. Let’s say you have a trigger campaign that you activated a week ago. You come to the results tab and there’s nothing in the results tab. That may be an indication that no one has actually done the triggering activity that you are requiring and it might be a way for you to investigate something that’s going on but there might be a lot of activity there. So that results tab is a really good way to check and see if your smart campaign is functioning in the way that you want or if it’s not functioning in the way that you want and it’s a really good way to review all of that information. Okay, I’m going to wrap up this section by talking about managing smart campaigns. And as a reminder, we’re having a live Q&A after this so continue to put those questions in the chat and we will get to as many of them as we can. All right, let’s jump into some smart campaign best practices. So we talked a lot about the different types of campaigns that you can create inside of Marketo Engage and when to use each one. So this is not in a completely exhaustive list of our best practices, but just some good ideas to get you started. And so one of them would be using trigger campaigns for low volume activities like autoresponders or confirmation emails. You’re probably not going to have a ton of people flowing through them all at once. If you do have things that are running at a really high frequency all the time, it might be best to limit the amount of flow steps. That way people can flow through and process quickly and efficiently. And my biggest recommendation is just use batch campaigns whenever possible. If it doesn’t meet into your question of does it have to react to something immediately and right now it’s a really good use case for a batch campaign. And then another thing that you’re really going to want to consider is what’s actually happening in the campaign. So this is where you might have to get with your marketing operations team and just kind of really think about the actions that are occurring in your Marketo engage instance. But evaluating those flow actions can be really important because let’s say for a form fill-out, an email click, a certain web page visit, you take the exact same action regardless of the qualifying activity. This is an opportunity to combine all of that triggering activity into one smart list in your smart campaign and then do the actions with one campaign. It’s much more efficient for you and you don’t have to manage three or four campaigns that are all doing the same thing and it’s just scalable for the future of your database. Another thing that we talked about at the beginning was data management and normalizing information that you might have inside of your Marketo engage database. Typically we like to run these later in the evening. So schedule this first a time where you don’t have a lot of activity happening, which would be email sendouts or perhaps syncing people over to your CRM. Late in the evening is typically a time where there’s just less activity overall. And then you also just want to spread that schedule out. If you’ve got everything running at 11 p.m., it doesn’t have to be at 11, you could run it from 9 to 4 a.m. Just a time when there’s less activity and you can use your best judgment when you’re setting things up. And my biggest tip, and I know I talked about this before, is always check the batch campaign member count. You never want to be surprised about the amount of people who are going to be running through your campaign, whether it’s going to be too many or too little. You want to be confident that you’re targeting the right number. Let’s talk about a few other things within smart campaigns themselves. So we have what’s called the smart campaign summary tab. If you just access the first area of a smart campaign and this will give you a lot of really good information if you don’t want to dive into the smart list tab, the flow tab, or the schedule tab and just want to get an overview. It’s going to give you a status of the campaign, which will be the type. It could be triggered or batch if it’s active or not. It’ll tell you who created it, when it was modified. And then it’s also going to show you the amount of people who’ve processed through that campaign overall just to kind of give you a general idea of, oh yes, my campaign is working or it’s not. And then you would also be able to see all of the different smart list triggers or filters, the flow steps and the schedule. And then in other tabs of this, you would be able to see any places where the smart campaign is referenced, the amount of members who have increased over time and then the membership by week. And then finally any email activity that you might have. Another excellent way to manage smart campaigns inside of your MarketoEngage platform is through Campaign Inspector. Now this can also be enabled within admin inside of your MarketoEngage instance if you don’t see it. And it’s found in the marketing activities area. And Campaign Inspector is really cool because it allows you to see a list of every single smart campaign in your MarketoEngage instance and what the flow steps are, which can be really nice if you’re trying to find all the campaigns that are syncing someone to CRM because you can’t remember which ones you built. It happens, we’ve all been there. And so you might want to evaluate this. It’s really cool because you can filter by active campaigns, you can filter by triggered campaigns or just batch campaigns and you can export it into Excel, which is really nice if you want to do some more advanced filtering or find out additional information about those campaigns. And so this can be a very handy tool. It’s accessible via each individual workspace. So if you have workspaces set up, it will be per workspace. So if you have no workspace, then it will be global. If you do have workspaces, then it will just be for each one. So as we wrap up and move into what’s soon to be the Q&A portion of our session, I just want to remind you of the things that we covered today. So we did an overview of smart campaigns themselves and the different types. And then we talked about all those components, the who, the what, and what will happen, the results. And then we kind of talked about best practices for smart campaign management. And that wraps up our session on the power of smart campaigns. Thanks, Hilary. I hope you now see that smart campaigns are what make Marketo so versatile and powerful. If you have questions, you can drop them into the chat and I’m already seeing some come through. Please welcome back Nico with the answers. Hi Jess, how are you? Good to be back. Great. Great to have you back. So let’s dive in. The first question that’s come through is how could I send someone a happy birthday message using a smart campaign? And is that possible? Yes, this old chestnut. So it is definitely possible. It’s something that, you know, we get asked about every now and then. It probably was one of those marketing tactics, which was really popular a few years ago and it’s dying out. And you know what? I’ve got nothing against sort of wishing people a happy birthday. So I’m all for it. It’s one of those things that is probably not the most intuitive things to do within Marketo. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily blame Marketo. It’s probably just about how we kind of use and understand our data. So the first thing a lot of people will know is that when we store someone’s birthday or something like that is we can store that against a person’s record within Marketo. Now, my birthday will say, you know, when I was born, you know, 1995 or something like that, obviously I’m in my mid 20s or not, but you know, something like that. So we’ve got our birthday. Now, typically what you would do then is you would say, all right, well, when my birthday comes around, send me a happy birthday message. The only problem of course is our birthday was however many years ago, way back when. So what we can do actually is utilize a little feature of Marketo called using the next anniversary date. And what this does is that we can use a wait step. So we trigger something, we, you know, find some reason to get someone in our particular campaign and then we run them through our campaign and they go into a wait step and essentially what we do is we say, all right, let’s wait until an anniversary of their birthday message or of their birthday. And then as soon as that date comes, for example, a year’s past and they find that anniversary date, then they’ll go ahead and send out that, that message. Now within that wait step as well, you can obviously then customize it a bit further. So you don’t have to wait until the day to wish them a happy birthday. You might send them a message one month before saying, Hey, guess what? It’s your birthday month. Here’s 10% off or something like that. So yeah, I think it’s a neat little feature, not the most intuitive thing, but yeah, good luck with it. Yeah. And I think those advanced wait steps too could wait until it’s Monday through Friday or within business hours as well. Is that right? Yeah, that’s exactly right. So those wait steps actually can be really powerful things because what they can do is they can give a bit of a human element or a human chain to it. So, you know, typically as marketers, what we do is we go to quite a lot of effort to make life easier, not just for ourselves, but also for our prospects and our customers. And one of the ways that we can make life easier for them is not sending them an email at 1 AM in the morning, but sending them the right message at the right time. So if we can have a wait step that says, all right, I’ve automated this message to send out to you, but I’m going to make sure that it sends to you at 10 AM as opposed to 1 AM. Well, I think that’s just giving you that little bit of extra oomph and ability to cut through and have a good conversation with your particular customers. Yeah. And probably improved click through rates as well. So the next one would be, and I’d say along those lines of niche and a little bit more complex, Marketo 2.8, oh, you could say is what is the executable smart campaign feature that was released recently? And is it like requesting campaign that flow step? Yeah. So that’s a good question. So it is absolutely one of the newer features of Marketo that has only come out, I think, in the past six months or so. And when I first came out, I thought to myself, well, this is an interesting feature, but, will people use it? To be honest, what I’m saying is I didn’t really understand it. And I had to really dive under the hood to get an understanding of what was going on there. Now, one thing that I found really interesting is that, yet again, I think our product team have really knocked it out of the park here because they’ve given us the feature, which is actually going to save us so much time and make life so much easier for us. And it’s similar to that requesting campaign workflow. So for those that don’t know, what we used to have is, and we still have, is this ability to request the campaign, which means that typically people qualify for a campaign for some reason. For example, a trigger has occurred, like they’ve clicked a link in an email or a data value has changed, they’ve been synced into our database, they fill out a form. Those are reasons why people might qualify for a campaign and then they run through our flow. Using a request campaign, essentially we were able to push when someone was going through a particular campaign. So we could then get them through a flow and then ping them off into another campaign and it could do its job. Now the executable campaign, I think is an extension of this, but it’s done in such a kind of a much more neater and more kind of logical fashion. So what we can do is we can push people onto a campaign at a time of our choosing and run them through a whole bunch of different flow steps based on that. And some of the use cases that we’re seeing people use these for are things like normalizing their data. So it’s not uncommon that when someone goes through and gets processed in our marketing automation system, we want to clean some things up. Maybe we want to make sure their phone number’s in the right field. We want to make sure that their phone number starts with the country code, all those kinds of things. That’s that data normalization piece. We want to make sure that if they live in New South Wales, we’re storing that data as MSW or something like that. You know what I mean? So about normalizing that campaign. So using that executable campaign is a really nice and neat way of automating those processes and finding a way to push people through those different campaigns. Yeah, that’s great. And then the next one also related to dates and being able to automate certain ranges. How could you find something, for example, that happened eight days ago and do that in a more automated fashion using a filter, a trigger? Yeah. So I mean, some of these questions, these are great questions, but these are definitely in that good old ballpark of these old chestnuts again. So finding someone from a particular date range. Well, if we’re lucky, what we can do is we can just use natural language. And when we have our date range pickers within our smart lists, we can go ahead and we can use a constraint and we can say, all right, well, maybe what we can do is find someone in a particular timeframe last week, this week, the week before, this quarter, last quarter, whatever the case may be. That’s really nice and neat and a really simple way of doing things. Or we might be able to go ahead and be really explicit. So we could say, I’m looking for people who did something before this date or before that date. Now, that said, there’s always those times that come up where we need something probably a little bit more customizable. So for example, I need to find everyone who did something eight days ago. And the way we can explain this is by exploiting some of the cool features of Marketo and using two of the same smart list filter. So let’s imagine that I’m looking for everyone who’s done something in the last week. So what I can do is I can find everyone, oh, sorry, in the last eight days. So what I can do is I can go ahead and I can set up a campaign that says, show me everyone in the past eight days. So if you can imagine in this past eight days, well, we’ve got, what’s today, Thursday. So we’re looking all the way back to last Wednesday. So as long as I find anyone within that timeframe, we’re good to go. But if I want to make sure it’s on a particular timeframe, those first couple of days, what I can then use is a second filter that says in the past before Sunday, which means I’m looking in the last eight days, but I’m ignoring anything that happened after Sunday. And what I’ve done there is I’ve narrowed that down. So if I’m looking for a particular small piece, I’m using that natural language and I’m sort of combining that with a few different aspects of how I put together my campaign. And I’ve then got an automated and a natural smart list that will always be on ready to go. Yeah. And so what Nico and I are talking about, there are those operators or those dropdowns, when you drag in a date field, you can say in the future, in the past, in the past before. And so in future is a great one as well. If someone’s renewal date is coming up in the next 30, 60, 90 days, you can use the in future operator for that. So these are really great, lesser known, but super powerful pieces of this filtering and smart list logic. So another one here, whoops, I forgot to turn on a trigger. Have I lost data? Yeah, it definitely happens. So sometimes it happens to the best of us. Don’t worry if you have forgotten to turn on a particular trigger. Now I’m imagining here something, the reason you’ve got the trigger running is maybe your monitoring if someone’s clicked a link in an email and therefore you want to make their success metric go to that, you know, record that goal or something like that. Now the good news is if you’ve forgotten to turn on the trigger, don’t worry about it. So you can always rerun those particular campaigns as a batch campaign. So for those that don’t know, we’ve got trigger campaigns and we’ve got batch campaigns. Now our trigger campaigns are listening 24 hours a day, seven days a week, waiting for an action to occur, like clicking a link in an email. Now our batch campaigns on the other hand are looking through our entire database and they’re finding whoever meets that particular criteria. And then I would initiate a campaign in that way. So if I’ve forgotten to initiate my campaign or turn that trigger on, in fact, I wasn’t listening at the time for someone clicking a link in an email, for example, what I can do instead is run it as a batch campaign and I can search through my database, find everyone who’s clicked that link in the email and run them through the same flow. So, you know, either way, one of the key things I like to make sure our clients understand is that Marketo has got your back. You know, it’s always sort of logging in and running these kind of campaigns and it’s picking up and it’s storing data and it’s capturing data from all sorts of different sources. It’s just waiting for you to go ahead and find a neat, nice way to use it in your campaigns. Yeah, exactly. You know, just because we weren’t listening for it doesn’t mean that Marketo didn’t capture it. So you can always go back and catch yourself up, really. All right. And then one of the aspects and we may have to introduce this concept of tokens, but the question is, can I use tokens in my smart campaigns? Yeah. OK, well, let’s start there with what is a token for those that don’t know. So a token, you know, depending on on your background, you might think of as a variable or you might think of it as just a placeholder. You know, basically what a token does is what we can use that placeholder. Let’s use that word and we can fill it with information and reference that. So, for example, I might have a token called my event name and I can put in experience makers live. And it means that when I go ahead and clone my campaign, amongst other things, I can just go ahead and update that token if I wanted to go ahead and change the name of my event for my next campaign and so on and so forth. So a common thing that comes up is, hey, how can I find and use that token within my smart campaigns? Now, the first thing actually is, well, guess and know you can use tokens in your smart campaigns, but there’s one caveat. The first caveat is that you can’t use it within your smart lists. So I can’t go ahead and create a smart list and say, hey, can I find everyone who was registered for my event name? It just doesn’t work like that. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense for us. But we can actually go ahead and use that token within the flow steps of our campaign. So I could go ahead and change a data value and I could say, hey, the last event someone went to was my event name. And it’ll go ahead and update that record based upon what’s being used within my token. So, you know, being able to use tokens in that way is able to save us quite a lot of time. Now, the other way you can use tokens is actually referencing something that we talked about just a little bit earlier with those wait steps. So you can use tokens as date tokens within your wait steps. So what I can do is I can say, let’s wait until a certain date token is met and then I can add two days, minus two days, whatever the case may be. So you can definitely use that token within your smart campaign. And that allows you then to have to if you can sort of understand how the tokens work as those kind of those variables or those placeholders means when you’re setting up those campaigns, you’re not setting it up for a specific reason. It becomes this almost reusable and sort of variable program or smart campaign, which can be used across all sorts of different use cases. Yeah, wonderful. Excellent explanation. That is all the time we have for the Q&A for this section, Nico. So thank you for helping our audience get a better understanding of smart campaigns. My pleasure.