Programs, Campaigns & Beyond

Transcript

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to our very first Foundational Marketo User Group meeting. We have a great session here today to talk about how new practitioners and users of Marketo Engage can learn about programs and campaigns. And for those that are not new, it’ll be a great refresher on to that Bobby and AJ will be sharing about how you can set your foundational knowledge for the tool for the future. A couple housekeeping slides we will run through first. This session will be recorded and we will post the recording on our event page and then also on YouTube. That even make its way to experience leak. So we’ve left plenty of locations that you can view this after the event takes place. So for those that are watching on the recordings, great to see you and thanks for joining. The next thing I want to highlight before we get started is how you can join our future iterations of this foundational user group. We will have four more sessions taking place between now and the end of the year with a goal of getting you ready and prepared to take the professional certification exam for Marketo Engage. So if you want to get notified of when those next sessions are taking place, go ahead and please hit that link that I’ve pinned to the chat or navigate to the foundational user group page on the Marketo user group website.

A few house rules. Remember there is no self-promotion of any kind in any Adobe user group. Do not contact people outside of the user group without their consent. And if anyone shares any specific use cases, make sure that stays within our family here today. We don’t want to be using that without their consent. So make sure if you want to share out someone’s use case, you coordinate with them to make sure that they are comfortable with you doing so. A couple highlights of other enablements that we have coming up through the end of this year. We will be having the very world famous Skill Exchange taking place in August with a variety of different topics on different Adobe Experience Cloud solutions. So if you go ahead and Google Skill Exchange, you should be able to go ahead and register for the sessions and join. But we have a lot on AEP and apps, analytics, Adobe Experience Manager, great one on Marketo engage, and then also Workfront. So go ahead and please join up with those.

And with that, I will go ahead and turn it over to our speakers today. We have AJ Navarro coming at us from Sprout Social in San Antonio and Bobby Capola coming from Phoenix and Blue Bay. So go ahead and turn it over to them for the agenda. I think AJ is up first and we’ll go over the agenda and then we’ll hop into some curriculum.

Thank you, Brad. And thank you everybody for joining. I know some people may have the holiday off or you are also working, but either way, thank you for taking time out of your day to join our session and just make it that much more impactful. So here’s the agenda for today and what we’re going to be covering. We’re going to walk through programs, channels and tags and what that means when it comes to Marketo engage. Then we’re going to walk through some sample program creation to really get that foundation right. Then we’re going to move on to talking about the center of excellence and thinking about templates and how we scale. Then we’re really going to get into the nitty gritty of smart campaigns and understanding the logic behind the programs. And then to wrap things up, we’ll move on to talking about reporting basics and some of the basic reports that come in Marketo engage and really lay the foundation for reporting on what’s working. And then we’ll wrap things up with some final takeaways for you. That being said, let’s go ahead and dive into what is a Marketo program. So a Marketo program is the foundation for everything you do in the platform. And the best way to think about it is it’s a single marketing initiative. This could be a webinar, maybe a nurture, a one off email blast, or even something like a gated content campaign. Now, there are four types of programs in Marketo engage. The first one is email. And this is very useful for one off email blast. And if you look at the image to the right, these are also the icons that are related to the program. So when you see these, it helps just tie these from a visual standpoint. So the email is basically that little envelope looking icon there. So very useful again for one off email blast, and also some built in AB testing. Then we have an engagement program. And the engagement program is very useful for repetitive or drip emails or nurture campaigns. And again, this icon is the little plant icon. Very useful for identifying the difference between email and engagement. You’ll hear me say this probably throughout the presentation, but the main difference between some of these programs are the functionality that are built within the program itself. Then next we have the event program, which has the little calendar icon. This is very useful for things such as trade shows, live events, webinars, you’re basically going to be using the event program, mainly because the event program can tie to a lot of the marketo engaged built in launch point partners such as zoom, or any other things like that. And there’s just some added functionality around that within the program. And last but not least, probably my most favorite is the default program, which is this little suitcase looking icon. And the default program is basically a flexible, open all in one encompassing type of program. And what I mean by that is, whenever it is something a little bit more complicated than just an email engagement event, the default program just allows you to have a lot more flexibility to where you can do a little bit of everything. It’s more so as you build how you build your smart campaigns, aka the logic that you’re firing off or automation within the program and what you’re looking to accomplish. You’ll typically see default programs used and things such as like lead scoring, or like a lifecycle type of operational. You’ll also see them across like data content, they can honestly be used across a variety of things. These the default again, it’s just more of a flexible, all encompassing option. So again, we just covered the four programs, emails, engagement, event and default. And what’s important to know is that choosing the right program is really step one when it comes to scaling your overall marketo engage instance. Choosing the right program will set you up for better tracking, reporting and just overall scalability later on. So now let’s talk about tags or program tags. Tags, in my opinion, are one of the most underrated features in marketo engage. But they make a huge difference. Tags are essentially like made metadata. These are located again in your admin section. But they’re labels that you can apply to your programs to make them easier for you to organize, filter and report on. There’s a variety of different tags that you can create. Some examples are region, segment, campaign type. One of my favorite ones to use is owner. This is very useful for if you have a lot of cooks in the kitchen or different team members inside of marketo engage and they’re building different programs. You could understand who built what in case there’s any questions or just trying to get a general understanding. That’s something that we use at Sprout a lot. And again, different tags can be used for different things. So let’s talk about the region. For example, you may want to see how North America programs have performed against EMEA. Or you may want to filter your programs from enterprise versus mid market or SMB. The more consistent that your tags are, the more powerful your overall reporting will become. And the beauty about using tags within your programs is that it just adds for additional structure and meaning behind the scenes. So now I want to talk about channels. Channels are the strategic framework behind all of the programs that you will be using in Marketo Engage, whether they are marketing programs or more behind the scenes operational. When you select a channel like email or webinar, you’re not just categorizing the program, but you’re also defining the stages that people can move through and the success criteria for each one of those particular programs. Channels drive key metrics such as your lead source and program success. Channels often tie to your overall lead source strategy. They also play a huge role in your overall attribution and reporting. So getting your channels right helps align your overarching marketing activity with any pipeline or revenue goals. But most importantly, again, they just provide a consistent structure for all of the different marketing initiatives that you’re doing. The best way to think about your channels is as a marketing lens to determine how success is defined and most importantly, how it’s measured. So again, to kind of recap here, every program that you create within Marketo will be tied to a channel and those channels should usually be tied to all of your leads or so I recommend looking towards your lead source strategy to determine your channels. And again, very similar to tags, the channels and everything can be viewed within your admin section within Marketo Engage.

Now I want to talk about program statuses. So every channel in Marketo Engage has a defined set of program statuses. You again, these are located within the admin section in the very same area where your tags are located. And essentially what a status is, is these are the stages that a person will go through as they engage with your marketing initiative or your program. For a webinar that may be going from invited to registered or to attended. For an email that may be going from sent to opened to clicked. In Marketo, these aren’t just statuses just for show, they’re pretty much critical for tracking behavior, measuring conversion rates through all of your different programs, and also triggering the right type of follow-ups. You can even define what counts as a success per each particular channel and program. For example, someone who goes through your event and maybe had a one-on-one conversation or attended the Sprout booth or something similar or maybe attended your webinar could be deemed as successful. So every different program again has these different statuses in stages that they’re essentially passing through. And these also usually tie to, we’ll talk about this just a little bit later, to your smart campaigns and what is the order of operations that will typically happen. And because the program status is tied within the channel, again this is another layer that ties into your overall reporting and attribution, and then just gives you a view of what is working within your Marketo programs and where people are getting stuck within the program, where they’re slowing down or where Right. So to wrap things up on this section, talk about some best practices here around programs, tags, channels, and statuses. Number one, make sure you’re always selecting the appropriate program type based off of your overall marketing objective. Again, each program has a different function. When in doubt, the all-encompassing one is the default program. But also define the relevant tags for organizing and categorizing your programs. We talked about region, maybe segment, or program owner. There’s a variety of ways to add different tags. And again, this is just an added layer of overall organization. I’m always saying that the better your marketing efforts are and the more aligned they are, you’re going to be scaling pretty quickly because you’re typically going to be doing more of a lot of what’s working. And so what I’d like to say is that the more organized your instance is, over two to three years when you’re reviewing, hey, what was that one webinar, that one nurture workflow that we did that really worked? It just makes it easier to go find those things. With that being said, you’re going to want to establish clear channels that align with your overall lead source strategy. And with that, each channel, you’ll want to make sure that you’re reviewing the statuses that reflect the program milestones for each one of those programs that tie to those channels. So now let’s get into a little bit of the nitty-gritty and talk about how programs are built within Marketo. So one of the main ways that a program is built is programs are built in the Marketo activity section. When you create a new program, there are a few key decisions that you need to make, whether as an admin or just as a team. One of the first things that I always recommend is selecting the correct folder, aka where will your program live. Then you’re going to want to use a clear standard naming convention. And you’ll see here to the example to the right, this is a typical program structure that I would recommend, with the naming convention of ES for email send, followed by the year, the month, the day, and then overall market initiative. Again, it’s all about scaling. And so when we’re looking back on our marketing efforts or trying to find something, it’s a lot easier for me to get into Marketo Engage and go to the global search finder and type in the program number or the abbreviated name. And I can get to what I’m looking for very quickly. So you’ll also choose which channel that the program aligns to. And again, this dictates the statuses that are incorporated within the program and your overall reporting. I also just, this is completely optional, but I do like to call this out. In your program, I recommend adding a short description. So your team or yourself, even I built so many things. Sometimes when I come back, I’m like, well, what was I doing here? I like to just add a short description of what the purpose of the program is. This is very useful that I think is often overlooked. Another big thing that I highly recommend is that each program should consist of two folders. And that is the first one is your campaigns folder, which all this really means is this is the folder that’s going to hold all of your smart campaigns. But to break that down even more, it’s basically all of the automation or the logic that we’re going to be using to move things, update things, or anything like that lives and resides in the campaigns folder. That way, if I need to go adjust something or I’m troubleshooting something, I know that I can just go to my program and I’ll go to the campaigns folder and that logic resides in there. So your trigger campaigns and your batch campaigns will all live inside of here. And Bobby will touch on that in just a second. The second folder is going to be the assets folder. Think about this is just where all of the creative elements relative to the program will live. So things such as lightning pages, lists, emails, reports, this is where those things will live versus just the logic. So again, you have a campaigns folder where all logic lives, and then you have your assets folder. So anything related, lists, reporting, anything like that rolls up into that. This is something I learned very on in my Marketo experience, or just when I was first getting introduced into Marketo that sometimes even today, I don’t often see unless templates are being used pretty effectively, but I just highly recommend that you structure your programs this way. It just makes it nice, orderly, clean. And again, as a marketer, our mind has always got to be thinking about, is this scalable? So these steps do while they may seem minor, doing this and building the program in a structured way, lays a solid foundation for your Marketo engage instance.

All right. So really quickly, the easiest way to create a new program is again, you’ll navigate to the marketing activity section. Aka marketing activity is basically your workspace for building any and all logic in campaigns. There’s a few different workspaces, the design studio where creative assets live, your database, which is, I like to think of it as the big hard drive within your Marketo engage instance. And then you have your analytics section where all reporting lives, admin section, which is all of the under the hood behind the scenes. But then you have the marketing activity section, which is where all of your marketing programs, whether operational or templates or full market initiatives will live. So once you’re in that marketing activity section, you just want to make sure that you’re selecting the folder that you want the program to live in. You’ll navigate over to the right and you’ll click on new, you’ll click on new program, and this will open up the program creation window.

Now there are five quick steps to set up a strong program foundation. So one, again, we talked about this. You’ll want to choose the folder in which you’re, where your program will to you’re going to want to make sure you’re choosing the correct or you’re naming the program in the correct way. Again, you’re going to want to use a standard or a scalable naming convention. Again, I recommend using the abbreviation based off of the program type. So let’s, let’s pretend this was an email send. I would have done ES dot the year, month, day, dash. Maybe it’s an email send for a webinar invite. So I would have been dash webinar, something of that sort. And again, this is all just to make your programs easy to identify for the marketing efforts at scale. The next thing is you’re going to want to align that program to the appropriate channel. Again, this matters. You’ll see the dropdown here of the different channels that are popping up. This matters because it’s dictating all of the different types of stages that someone can pass through or hit the necessary success step within the program to tell you, did this program reach what you were hoping to do or not. Another thing is within the description window, we talked about this. I always recommend adding just a short description. This is just very useful in adding enhanced visibility for not only yourself, but for your team. Lastly, you’ll hit create. And once you do that, you are finally ready to build. So stay consistent with these steps. It makes your life as an admin just a lot easier in the long run, especially when it comes to scaling, cloning, or collaborating with any of your other team members.

So some best practices when it comes to Marketo programs. Again, keep your folder structure nice, clean, organized. And that is just something that I live and die by across the entire Marketo engage instance. Second is make sure you’re always selecting the appropriate program type. This matters for each marketing initiative, depending on what you want to do and how those things function. Follow the best practices that we talked about when it comes to using tags. There’s a variety of different tags that you can incorporate. There’s no right or wrong way of doing it. But it’s all about being very intentional when you’re creating these things and just keeping, again, everything organized. We talked about you can create tags for regions, segments. Content type is another great one that I’ve seen used across different types of emails and just all these different things. Next, you’ll want to make sure that all your programs align to the appropriate channel and to define those channel progression steps. If you’ve just inherited or are super new to Marketo engage, it does come with the default channels loaded up. While those work in most cases, what I always recommend is reviewing those and making sure that the channels, first of all, align to your org’s lead source strategy. And then two, making sure that you’re reviewing those progression steps. If you’re connected to CRM, such as CRM campaigns, typically these align and should be one to one. So again, while out of the box, Marketo engage is very, very useful. I always recommend just getting an extra set of eyes and reviewing this to make sure that it fits your org’s needs and wants. And lastly, and Bobby will layer in on this a little bit more, but you’re going to want to design your smart campaigns, aka your logic or aka your automation with care. And the best way to do this is when you’re labeling your smart campaigns, I typically like to label it to the program status, such as if I have an email program and very first thing that I’m going to do is send an email, then I will label that smart campaign, send email. And then if someone opens that email, I have the next smart campaign that says email opened or opened. There’s a variety of ways, but that’s the last tip here to just design your smart campaigns with care. With that being said, I’m going to pass it off to Bobby. Now he’s going to talk about the center of excellence. Awesome. Thanks, AJ. A lot of goodness shared there. So the center of excellence is really just building on a lot of the key pieces that AJ just went through. And it’s just thinking about a few of the themes that AJ mentioned. How do we scale it? How do we save time? How do we make it the most efficient process that we can when we’re creating new programs? And then ultimately, how do we make it the easiest to report on our efforts? So that’ll be what this section is taking a look at. So the first thing you want to think about, as AJ mentioned, when you’re either setting up your instance or maybe you’re taking over an instance and you’re really trying to polish it up, is to think about those key marketing channels or those key activity types that you are running through Marketo as an organization. Now I’ve listed a couple here on the right as examples, events, email blast webinars that may be different for your organization. These are not going to be the same at any two organizations. But the idea here is to figure out what are those common types of marketing activities? What are those common channels that we’re leveraging? And let’s have a very neat folder structure to support that. So when you open your marketing activities page in your Marketo instance, your first set of folders that you see should basically be the different channels or the different marketing activity types that you’re leveraging. Now you may have miscellaneous folders in there that are operational or some niche things, but the main folders there should be these core marketing channel types. Now the key thing I want to touch on here is within each of those marketing channel types, we want to have a template that supports each one of those. So for example, I’ll just give you a little bit of a background. So we have a slightly different messaging, slightly different imagery, maybe a slightly different promotion list. But the way that we build that program, we want to be standardized each time. AJ mentioned the different statuses, the success status of webinar, using the correct program type, such as the trade show or event program type. We want all of that to be templatized within what we call a program template. And this is going to do a few things. One, if you have different users in your organization that are coming in and building programs, they’re not going to have to remember the 17 different things they need to do to get a webinar program stood up. Those are all going to already be done for them. The second thing is it’s going to save you a lot of time, right? If every time we want to build a new event program or a webinar program, we need to create it from scratch, we can do that. But ideally, we would have kind of a standard template that we know we’re going to want to use about 80% of each time. That’s going to save us a lot of time. And then as you’re working through programs, right, when you create a program template, you may think for the time being it’s done. And then as you’re working through, let’s say, webinar programs, you may find that, hey, every time I go into a webinar program, I always find myself adding this flow step or creating this report or creating a confirmation email when they register that looks kind of like this. If you notice something like that, obviously, you’ll want to add it into the current program you’re working on, but then also add it at the template level. And that way, when you create a new webinar program, all those little things that you knew you had to add on are already packaged up in there. So, the idea here is scale, consistency, and just making it easier for everyone in your organization to use these different programs. On the next slide, we’re going to look at what does this actually look like in an instance, right? Because it’s easy to say the hypothetical, but to have it actually visualize, I think, helps understand what we want this to look like. So, within our organization, one of the core channels or marketing activity types that we do is we do industry events. It could also be called trade show, right? Industry event, the name there is not really important. The idea here is that we’re representing a single type of marketing activity. Now, within Marketo, the way that it sorts programs, folders, etc., is numerically and then alphabetically. So, when you’re using a template, you want to have that little one of your template, which makes sure that it’s going to sit at the very top of your core folder structure, right? So, that way, when you open your, in this example, industry event folder to go create a new industry event program, your template is sitting right there at the top. It’s easy to find. No one’s going to wonder where it is. And then, from there, you just clone the program into the respective folder that it should go in, as Ajay mentioned. Now, one thing I want to hammer home that Ajay touched on, but I just want to kind of expand on it here, is that folder structure at large organization is very important, right? So, I just touched on the core folder structures, such as industry events, email blasts, webinars, etc. But then, within that, you want to group these programs in a way that makes sense for your business. So, if your business is exclusive to the United States, and the only people running programs are in the United States, you may not need a regional breakout for your programs within a program type. But in our organization, it’s a very good organizational benefit of this in terms of just keeping things in the right place and easy to find. It can also be very helpful in reporting, which we’ll touch on in a minute, right? So, if you’re building an email report, and someone asks you, hey, I want to look at how America’s industry events have performed in 2025 so far. All I need to do when I’m building my email report is select those two folders that hold all of my 2025 Q1 and 2025 Q2 America’s industry events. And now, all of my emails are going to get pulled into that report with just a couple clicks, right, versus having to go one by one through each program and make sure all my emails are in there. So, very useful for grouping, finding things, but also on the reporting side, you know, can be helpful for you as well as you’re building those out.

So, just some miscellaneous best practices here. This is not directly related to, you know, building programs or folder structure. These are just some miscellaneous things that if I was taking over a new instance or building out an instance, I’d want to have at the top of my list as, you know, key to do. So, obviously, Marketo, you know, one of its core, it can do a lot of things, as I’m sure a lot of you know, but one of the main things that we do out of Marketo is we send a lot of emails typically, right? And so, one of the first things that we did at Blue Yonder when we were setting up our instance was creating a master exclusion list that is used on all email systems, right? So, this master exclusion list is going to contain filters such as unsubscribed, email invalid, marketing suspended, you know, blocklisted perhaps, or you may have other business specific things. Maybe you don’t want to mail to a specific country for a given period of time. Maybe there’s a specific account that sales has flagged to you as like, hey, do not mail this address until we say otherwise. This master exclusion list can kind of coordinate all of those different people that we do not want to mail. This is going to help in a few ways. One, there’s not going to be any erroneous emails sent to people that shouldn’t be. Two, it’s going to help with your deliverability, right? So, when you go to schedule an email, Marketo will always say, hey, this is going to send to say 2,000 people. And then it’ll say this amount of people are going to be blocked from this send. If you’re using a master exclusion list on all of your sends, that number is always going to be zero. You’re doing the work for Marketo, and you’re going to keep your deliverability rate as close to 100% as you can. So, a couple benefits there. The second thing is archiving. So, I know this is probably the most boring thing to do in Marketo, right? But this is something that can be really helpful for you because, A, it’s going to keep your folders organized, right? We don’t want 2023 events in my event folder that we were looking at earlier. I want 2025 events and maybe some late 2024 events. The rest of those can go into archive. Now, when you’re archiving, you’re not deleting the program. You’re not losing the program. If someone wants to go back and look at what an email or a landing page looked like from something in archive, great, you can do that. If they want to reactivate a landing page that was put in archive and put back into the normal environment, we can do that with just a couple of clicks as well. So, this is just something that I would recommend doing on like a quarterly or maybe if it’s a smaller instance, like a biannually pace, just to make sure you stay organized. And it also helps speed up the instance as well, which is a nice benefit by turning off those inactive trigger campaigns that live within those. The third thing is kind of related to the test, test, test bullet there, but it’s really specific to email sending. So, whenever you are crafting an email in Marketo, it looks good in the editor. Be sure that you go ahead and sample that to yourself and send that to your audience. Whenever I’m doing a sample activity, I think of it as, what would I expect if I’m receiving this email? Does the link that I’m going to click on, does that go to where it should? Does the spacing look right? Do all of the images that looked a certain way in the email editor, are they rendering that way once I have it here in Outlook, which we all know can be a little finicky? So, there’s a lot of just little things to check for. And you’d be surprised how many little things you can kind of catch when you sample it before you actually go ahead and send the email.

The fourth thing is, and I know this may not apply to everybody, but I feel like it would apply to most, is if you have a CRM, such as Salesforce, or Microsoft Dynamics, or whatever you have, making sure that that’s integrated with Marketo Engage as soon as possible is really, really important. And the reason for this is, well, there’s a few reasons, but number one, when great, important activities happen in Marketo Engage, we need to make sure that that information is shared with those in the organization that are going to go ahead and act on that. So, for example, when someone fills out a Contact Us form from on a Marketo page, that’s great. We see that in the program, the success status filled out form. Awesome. But if we’re not transferring that into the CRM for sales to be able to act on, follow up, use as reference, we’re not getting the most out of that form though. We’re not operationalizing it in a way that’s going to lead to the most success for our business. So, this can be something as big as of Contact Us, or it can be, hey, this person downloaded this piece of content, and I want that to be in their history in the CRM so that when that record’s being looked at, maybe in a few months, they can see that nice, clean history of all of those major marketing engagements. Obviously, we wanted to Marketo, but getting it into the CRM is really, really important.

Lastly, test, test, test. So, we talked about email sampling, but what I want to talk about here is specific to Smart Lists and Smart Campaigns. And we’ll touch on Smart Campaigns here in the next slides. But with Smart Lists, what I’m referring to is when you’re building a segmentation list or a Smart List to send to, and you have your different filters that you’re putting together, maybe it’s job seniority, job function, region, industry, revenue band, whatever it is that you’re using to build your list, and you put all those things together, you want to take a look at what that list of people that it spits out actually looks like. What I like to say at Marketo is with great power comes great responsibility. When you’re using these filters that can make your list 600,000 people or 10,000 people, one little filter logic error, right? Maybe you have a filter that should be contains, but instead you have like in instead of contains. Those little things right there can really affect what your Smart List actually looks like from a people perspective. So, just going ahead and testing out what that list looks like. At Blue Yonder, we have a practice where we don’t send anything regarding a Smart List until the program owner has had a chance to actually review it, take a look at it, and actually approve it. Next thing is trigger campaigns. So, when you’re setting up a trigger campaign that has logic that says, hey, if someone fills out this form, I want these eight things to happen in the flow, try filling out that form. See if that trigger campaign actually fires, right? We don’t want to tell our folks that, hey, this automation is ready to go. It’s ready to support event registration. But then people start registering for the event and there’s no data coming through, right? We want to make sure that we’ve actually gone ahead and tested that and made sure that it’s flowing correctly when it’s actually run. So, trigger campaigns is a great segue into smart campaigns. So, smart campaigns are going to be probably the most powerful tool that you have in Marketo. This is what I like to say is where the action happens, okay? So, there’s two types of smart campaigns. There’s batch campaigns, what I’ll touch on first, and that is typically used for things such as an email send or a one-time data update. The idea here is we’re saying, on this date at this time, I want this to happen for this specific group of people, right? So, you have a lot of control over it. Like I said, like a lot of times used for email sends where you’ll say at on Thursday at 11.15, I want to send an email to this group of people, and maybe I’ve recognized some data update that needs to be made to a big group of people, and you want to take that group, and you want to update their data value in the flow at this specific time, but you only need to do that one time. It’s a one-time thing, right? That’s where batch campaigns are really helpful. Now, you can get more advanced and do things like a recurring batch campaign. Maybe you have a campaign that is dripping a few emails, and you know that that smart list is going to be built up over time with new people, and you want to be sure that those new folks are getting a chance to go through your drip over time as well. That’s an example of where maybe a recurring batch, we can say, I want this to run every Thursday to whoever is new in my smart list, for example. Trigger campaigns. This is probably my favorite tool in Marketo Engage. I would say like if you’re a new Marketo user and you’re really trying to get the most out of your business, I would say trigger campaigns is really going to be the one you want to play around with and kind of focus on in terms of what you can do for your business there. So trigger campaigns are always on, and they are listening for something to happen, which then executes the flow of what you want to occur when that action or when that thing that you’re listening for happens. So a common example of a trigger campaign is like a form fill, right, where you have a campaign that is listening for a form to be filled out. When that form is filled out, X, Y, Z happens, right? Another example of this is person level activity, such as like maybe a Web page visit or an email click. Another thing, which is a little bit more advanced, can be like when a data value is updated. So maybe when a person, you know, when a person has a certain data value update in your CRM, maybe we want to do something in off the back of that. And so that’s how you can kind of help some, you know, you can operate across teams where it’s like, hey, I know when this team updates this data value, Marchetto has this always on trigger that’s listening for that, and then it’s going to execute the steps that we need to happen when that occurs. This is also, as Ajay mentioned, used for like lead scoring, right? Like when a person clicks email, automatically increase their score, right? So we don’t want to have to be sitting there and manually looking at activity and then updating someone’s lead score. We want these lead score kind of logic to be trigger based so that when the thing happens, the score automatically updates. Or maybe there’s like an alert that you have where it’s like when this thing happens, I want to send sales and alert. You don’t want to have to manually track that and send alerts to sales. You want the automation to take care of that, take care of that for you. And that’s where the trigger campaign can come in handy. So just some examples of what this looks like in the tool. The trigger campaign filters are always going to have an orange bar at the top. So I just pulled out some examples of trigger campaigns that are at the top, visits webpage, and then data value changes. And so you notice there when it says visits webpage, it’s listening for something to happen. Whereas a typical Marketo engaged filter, such as like industry or country or whatever, those are going to be static values. They’re not listening for anything. You’re just putting together filters to create your list of people. Whereas here, it’s, hey, we’re listening and whoever does this thing qualifies. Now, one note here a little bit more advanced, you can layer on filters to your trigger, which you see there at the bottom, as part of your smart campaign setup. So for example, I only want this particular trigger campaign to fire if they fill out this form and their country is Germany. So maybe for Germany, you have some specifics around GDPR where you want like if they fill out this form in their countries, Germany to run down this flow. But if they fill out the form in their countries, the United States, maybe they run down a different flow. And so you can use filters under it to kind of make sure that you have some control over your trigger campaigns in terms of who’s actually running through those flows when those actions take place.

So here’s some examples of just some basic smart campaign flows. The one on the left is an example of a event registration. And the one on the right is an example of just a batch campaign where you’re sending an email to a group of people. So on the left, our trigger, which we saw in the last one, would have been something like fills out my event form. The flow then is what do we want to do once we hear that form fill? So maybe we want to update their lead source, which would be the change data value flow step. Maybe we want to update their program status to register for my event. Maybe we want to also update the corresponding CRM campaign, as we talked about a few minutes ago, in terms of, hey, let’s make sure that that major event, that event registration is also captured in our CRM. Let’s send them a confirmation email saying, hey, thanks for registering, add this to your calendar, et cetera, et cetera. And then maybe we want to send an alert to the person that’s running that webinar or to the sales owner so they have visibility to that registration. On the right, as I mentioned, it’s more of a batch campaign, kind of a simplified flow where it’s just, hey, I just want to send an email and I want to change their program status to sent. Right. So very simple. So these are just two kind of common examples that you might see in terms of a smart campaign flow. All right. Basic Marketo reports. So we’re going to go through three of the most kind of basic types of reports that live in Marketo. And those are going to be email performance reports, email link performance reports and people performance reports. Now, email performance reports is when you want to look at the overall email performance and you want to look at those core KPIs within each email. And then within the given set of emails that you’re looking at, you want to see that data averaged out at the bottom. Right. So, for example, if someone said, hey, I want to see the performance of all emails in Q1 of this year, you would want an email performance report. You would set your time period to Q1 of this year and then you would have every single email sent in Q1 and then you’d have your average data at the bottom for the Q1 email performance. So what link they clicked in each email, it’s not even telling you who actually clicked in each email. It’s just giving you that email by email and giving you all those core KPIs that we use in email marketing. Now, on those core KPIs, those are going to be deliverability rate, open rate, click to open ratio and unsubscribe rate. A couple of things on this deliverability rate. One of the things I mentioned earlier in terms of helping that stay at the level you wanted is using some sort of a master exclusion list. There’s also some other things you can do on the back end that I’m not going to touch on here, but that’s definitely something you want to see at about 95 percent or higher, ideally. An open rate. So open rate is looking at the subject line and preheader strength of your email primarily. Right. And so when I’m thinking about KPIs and I’m thinking about how do we improve them at an organization, I like to make sure that everybody is very clear on for this KPI, what is the variable that is affecting that? And so for open rate, we’re looking at subject line preheader. Sometimes I’ll hear the question of, oh, my open rate was low. I need to change up the content of the email. Not so fast. Right. So you want to make sure everyone’s very clear on what can affect what. The reason I like click to open ratio and did not call out click percentage here is because click to open ratio is focusing exclusively on the email content strength. So, for example, if you have a low open rate, let’s say you had 10 opens on your email, but eight of those 10 people clicked through. That’s an 80 percent click to open ratio. That’s telling me that, hey, I may have had a low open rate. I only generated 10 opens. But once those people opened it, once my audience opened the email, they were very clear on what to do. And so I’m going to click through to learn more. That tells you my email content is spot on. The way I’m structuring my email is spot on. It’s just my subject line or maybe the time of day that I’m sending was the issue. Right. The reason I don’t use click percentage here as a core KPI to call out is that click percentage is looking at the number of clicks divided by the number of emails delivered. And so in this instance, if you have a very low open rate, you’re going to naturally have a very low click percentage as well. And so that metric is skewed by your open rate. And when I’m looking at these, I want to make sure that these different variables are isolated. Email click performance. This is looking at the link by link performance within an email. So the use case here is if you have multiple CTAs within a single email that are driving to different places, you may produce an email performance report that says, hey, this email got 10 clicks. Awesome. But the person running that program may want to know what did they click on within that email. That’s where this is going to be your friend. You can build one of these for a given email and it’s going to show you the breakdown of clicks by by CTA or by URL, essentially. Very common use case here is like something like a newsletter, maybe where you have a bunch of CTAs. Finally, people performance. This is going to allow you to see not necessarily like asset performance data, but it’s going to look at it’s kind of like a segmentation tool. So, if someone asked you, let’s say you have a field at your organization that you use to determine job seniority, such as like contact level, and you’ve got values in there, executive, director, VP, et cetera, et cetera. If someone asked you, hey, what’s the breakdown of our database in terms of job seniority? Like how many, I know our database is 100,000 people, but how much of each seniority level do we have in our database? A people performance report is a great way where you just throw that attribute that you want to break the data down by, let’s say, job seniority. You look at your database and it’s going to give you those totals for each level of seniority. Seniority is just one example. This could also be used for things like job function, job title, even country. I want to see the country breakdown or the region breakdown of a given list of people. So, it’s really a tool to just segment people by a given attribute that you want to look at.

As AJ showed on one of the previous slides, ideally in every program, you have a folder for reports. That’s a nice, easy place to go ahead and start step one. But technically, you can build a report within any program or any folder, or you could also build these in the analytics section of MarketoEngage as well. I typically would recommend building the report, if possible, within the respective program as AJ showed. But there’s some reports that you’re building that maybe are not specific to one program. Maybe you’re looking at large amounts of data. And those are probably going to be better served in the analytics section of the tool, where you can keep those kind of broader, major reports that you’re creating. In terms of a step-by-step process, step one is to right-click on the folder where you’d like to create the report. You click New Local Asset. Once you click New Local Asset, that’ll pop open this little window here. You click Report. And then once you click Report, it’s going to ask you where do you want this report to live. So, like I said, if you’re building this within a program, it’s going to naturally default to I want to build this in this program. Your type, as we mentioned, there’s a few different types of core reports. You’ll select your type. For this one, I just selected Email Performance. And then you’ll name your report. So, maybe Email Performance for Campaign XYZ, right, just so it’s easy to find at a later date and everybody can view it and it makes sense to them. And with that, I will turn it back to Ajay for a wrap-up.

All right. Thank you. That was awesome information. And I tried not to blow this slide up with too much words here. I do recommend revisiting a lot of the best practice slides that we have in here as well. But these capture a lot of the main ones. So, just recaps. Number one is the program types. So, remember there is Email, Engagement, Event, and Default. And each one of these is designed for a specific marketing function. So, always remember to choose the correct program type based off of what you are trying to do. And never forget that the default program is basically the flexible, anything you need can be built in here type of program. The second thing is tags. Using tags add structure and just power your overall filtering and organization and reporting when it comes to your MarketoEngage instance and your programs specifically. The next thing is your channels and statuses. Remember that your channels define where each program is categorized plus the success criteria. Statuses are all the different stages that a person must progress through within the program in order to reach the designated success.

Next is the smart campaigns aka action or aka logic or automation. There are two types of smart campaigns. Batch which is basically anything that can be scheduled or trigger. This is MarketoEngage actively listening for a real-time automation. These smart campaigns are the logic that drive engagement, scoring, lead flow, and everything else within your MarketoEngage instance.

Remember that when you’re focusing on building out your programs in terms of program creation, you’re choosing the appropriate folder for the program to live. You’re using a structured naming convention. You’re aligning it to the appropriate channel. You’re using any related tags and you’re also holding the folder structure around campaigns and assets to house and organize everything that you’re doing. Lastly, one of the best ways to scale and save a ton of time is to utilize that template. This is a great tool for excellence. No matter if you’re brand new to Marketo or you’ve been doing this for years, this is something I actively use. It allows you to have a go-to place to have templates so you can build and clone at scale with consistency which is key. It mitigates and minimizes the opportunity for errors to happen and this is just a place for you to centralize your best practices when it comes to how programs should be built relative to your organization.

All right and I’ll take us home. We have a last page here which is just asking for everybody to fill out a survey so if you would be so kind, please go ahead and take your phone out scan that QR code and go ahead and fill out a little bit of survey about your experience today or I will just drop the link directly in the chat here or you can fill it out as well. We are looking for ways that we can improve these sessions as this is our first iteration of doing a foundational user group so we’re looking to optimize for the future. So we really want to hear from you guys as attendees on ways that we can make this better for future new users of the Marketo engaged solutions.

Be sure to join us for the next time. We’re all going to be chatting about personalization. I saw Beth Corby in the chat. She will be our primary speakers for next months so it’ll be taking place on July 10th at 3 p.m. My plan is to actually get that event posted later today or early tomorrow so that everybody gets notified and gets registered for that one and with that we will go ahead and close out today’s sessions. Thank you all so much I really appreciate your collaboration and our work together to make you a better Marketo engaged user and get you certified for a professional exam by the end of the year. If you have any questions feel free to use the discussion that takes place right on our event page or contact Bobby or myself or AJ on LinkedIn. We’ll open up the DMs for you but we’ll see how you guys later. Thanks.