Session 2 of 2026: Deploy a Monthly Newsletter

Transcript

All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to session two of our Foundations of Marketo Engage for 2026. We have a great session here today. I’ve got two speakers that we’ll introduce in a few minutes. For those that have not met before, I don’t have a slide introducing myself, but my name is Brad Bedford. I am the Champion and User Group Program Manager for Marketo Engage. And this is a special Marketo User Group that we have just focusing on educating practitioners to get ramped up to take the professional exam. So the biggest thing to remember is stay engaged, attend as many sessions as you can, because we will be handing out 10 certification vouchers at the end of this year. So we have a few more. This is session two. We have four more sessions that take place. And if you are one of the most engaged members, stay active in the chat on the discussion pages. And then we also have a new place for you to get engaged to called a discussion group on Experience League. We’ll have more to talk about on that, on places that you can stay involved. Session three. Then this session is being recorded. So for whatever reason you don’t feel comfortable being on the session, no worries at all. Feel free to drop. We will post the recording on Experience League and have also on YouTube in a few days. And if you have any concerns on that, feel free to email myself or advocacy at adobe.com. A couple quick reminders, everyone, for housekeeping. The first of which is if you are interested in being an Adobe champion, we have applications open right now through June 5th. We will be selecting another great cohort of about 40 champions that will be announced later this year. But applications are closing on June 5th. So shout that out. That QR code is live. Tell your friends. It’s live. I think Andrew is applying this year. So if you want to be one of these speakers in the future, this is probably one of the greatest places that you can go ahead and do so to raise your hand. A couple reminders on upcoming events. The Adobe AI Forum does continue. We have three stops coming up here over the course of the summer. Boston, Columbus, and LA. But if you’re in some other locations around the world that you’re looking at, hey, when is this coming to my city? Scan that QR code. We have a lot of upcoming AI forums throughout the globe. And I think this is one of our really popular event series that we have. So probably continuing this into 2027. So take a look and simply bookmark that page. Then we have one more event that I wanted to shout out before we go to summits, which is insider tours. So if you’re located in San Francisco, we have an incredible speaker lineup set for an all day session, all day sessions on June 17th, all led by Adobe speakers. So if you’re looking to hear more about the AI agent, the MCP, all the new things that are coming to Marketo, build with AI, this is a great opportunity for you to hear about that from the actual Adobe team. So if you’re located in SF or you have team members or colleagues or professional people in your network, this is something I would definitely direct them to because it’s going to be a great one. And then finally, we have our upcoming regional summits. So if you weren’t able to join us in Las Vegas, but you want to get that experience, I feel the passion that is Adobe Summit. We have them coming three locations in EMEA, three locations in APAC. So we have Australia, Sydney coming up first, and then London and Germany shortly thereafter. But we also have other stops taking place in Tokyo and Delhi, and then also in Paris. So stay tuned to continue to join these sessions and user groups. We will continue to promote these as we get closer to each. Then if you really like user groups a lot and you’re looking to attend a user group closer to you, let’s go to the next slide because we have a few planned for this month. We had a big rush over the last like probably like month or so just coming out of Summit, a lot of excitement.

Obviously, things slowed down a little bit here in the Northern Hemisphere with summer travel and holidays. So we have a few planned in North America and a few planned internationally outside of the U.S. So great opportunities for you to join those. And for the virtual ones, you don’t have to be located in those cities or in those regions to join. Feel free to join on if you’re looking to hear about what they’re chatting about and that topic is of interest to you. And then finally, I know some people are asking, hey, this is session two. What happened to session one? I may miss that. So great news. I thought of this. On the next slide, there is a screenshot recording of how you can watch session one. Also as a reminder of what we reviewed on session one, it sets up what we’re talking about today. We all we talked about the general navigation and how to get through the UI that is Marketo Engage. So maybe, you know, hey, how do I you do basic get around, get the programs, get to database, get to assets. All of that is available in the session one recording and then also finishing with the common pitfalls to avoid. We had two great speakers, two Adobe champions on the last one, Alex Seabrook and Raven MacLaren or MacFarlane, excuse me, who were fantastic speakers. So definitely take a look at that prerecorded session. And then as a reminder, stay engaged. Ten certifications coming up by the end of the year. And with that, plenty of talking from me. I will turn it over to our speakers, Andrew and Akande, who can go ahead and introduce themselves.

Awesome. Well, thank you for teeing that up, Brad. We appreciate it. Andrew and I are looking forward to this user group as like a user group leader myself for San Diego. I always enjoyed user groups and it’s really nice, you know, like a test when you just know the material. So we’re going to be going through today newsletter 101, the mastering the art of the newsletter. But let me just tee it up first and foremost to kind of introduce ourselves. Oh, actually agenda first. So we’re going to talk today about newsletter use cases, audience selection, email structure, authoring, the pre-send checklist and then measuring success. And then number seven, that’s not on here. I’m going to add it before our deck is done is your homework. We, you know, we, we love homework, right? Everyone loves homework. Homework’s amazing. Well, we have some homework for you and that’s going to be tied to creating your first ever newsletter. But Andrew, I’ll pass it over to you to introduce yourself and your background. Yeah, thanks Akande. Hello everybody. I’m Andrew Dimmick. I am a marketing operations manager at ObservePoint. I’ve been a market user since 2020 and it has been a really awesome experience. I, the very first time I hopped into a Marketo instance, it was a learning curve. But as I’ve now been six in six years into my journey with Marketo, there’s still much there’s still so much I’m learning every single day, but it started from trainings like this, learning from people, learning from peers who have used Marketo for a while and learn some really awesome tips and tricks. And it starts with the basics and I’m really excited to be here. I became Marketo certified back in 2020 as well. So if you think that you can’t get certified right after learning Marketo, practice, study, you can get that certification. It’s really, it’s a really valuable thing to put on your resume and good for your career, good for your learnings. And that’s me. I’m currently in the Salt Lake City area. Moved here about a year and a half ago before that was in Arizona. So yeah, I traded the desert for the mountains and it’s been pretty awesome.

It’s quite a, it’s quite a trade, you know, I think there’s a lot of benefits. Nice to be here. My name is Akane Davis. I’m VP operations at GEW Consulting. My role is really just in the tool, working in it day in and day out. And it’s been an awesome experience. And similar to Andrew, my background coming from, you know, the platform that should not be named Salesforce into Adobe and into Marketo Engage has been an awesome journey since that transition happened. Also a champion, as Brad mentioned, and a certified master in the platform. So again, pursue those certifications. Great to have on a resume and also just really great to have from a knowledge standpoint as well. I’ve noticed that my understanding as my understanding of Adobe products, particularly Marketo has deepened my understanding in my, my overall strategy and way of thinking has changed to be really impactful for the companies that I’m able to work with as well. But yeah, with that being said, Andrew, I’ll let you kick it off for the first, the first part of this. Yeah, let’s do it. We’re going to talk. I want to spend some time here in the beginning, everybody just talking about newsletter strategy, right? I’m a firm believer that we don’t execute without a clear strategy. So we don’t teach without a clear strategy. We have to understand where this fits in and like how to actually design a good letter. How would you even, how would you even know what’s good and what’s not? Because that informs what we do inside of Marketo. So let’s go on to the next slide. We’ll talk about a couple of things. So first is why, like, why are we even talking about this? And really is a newsletter is a really, really effective way to keep your audience connected with you. It’s because it’s a, it’s a recurring touch point. It’s something that’s consistent and we know that there’s consistent presence with your audience. Then you have consistent engagement with them. And just, here’s some numbers, just to kind of give you some, some reference about why this is a valuable touch point. So back in 2022, so Forrester, one of the analytics firms, they came out and they said that, you know, the, the average B2B buying cycle, that buying journey takes about 27 different touch points, different ways of marketing touch points. And that’s definitely changed a lot. 2022 is four years ago. And now we’re seeing that there’s a lot more focus on buying groups. It’s not just one person who’s engaging. There’s, you know, buying center, maybe six, sometimes even 10 people, all of them having the same number of multiple touch points. So you can quickly see that we need to have quality touch points with your audience. And it’s all about showing up. And that’s where what our newsletter really, really fits into your marketing strategy is it helps you increase your mind share within your target, your target market. There’s a concept in, you know, marketing theory around top of mind and top of mind awareness. And it makes you, are you, do you have the recall that when somebody is thinking about a solution, you are the first brand that they think of? Like when you think running shoes, do you think Nike? Do you think Adidas? Like what is that brand that comes up first in your mind when you think of a different type of product or service? And that’s where a newsletter fits. That’s a really, really good place to fit into be. And now we’re even seeing, there’s some more Forrester research that came out in 2026 that 68% of B2B buyers go into a purchase process already having a front runner identified. 68%. And it’s 80% of the time that front runner wins. So it is very, very important that we stay top of mind with our buyers. And again, newsletter is an effective way to do that because it is a recurring presence. There’s usually some type of schedule, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, even weekly, depending on the type of newsletter. And the goal being, like we said, to maintain that mind share or even increase it, but also to just provide value. That might sound just like a buzzword, but like that’s what we’re doing here. We’re trying to become a trusted source of information with our audience. So whenever they have a problem, they immediately think of us as the solution. Or it could be our customers, right? It could be somebody that is already doing business with us, that we want them to still be thinking about us, still see us as a good resource. Because if we are not seen as a trusted resource, there’s a likelihood of churn, likelihood of them not renewing their contracts with us. So we want to do that. Let’s go on to the next slide. And with this is a question, right? We’re in 2026. Everyone talks about AI. Everyone talks about sensationalist claims about certain channels are dead. I’ve heard this about email. Maybe you have too. No, it’s not. It definitely is not. And I, for one, have seen how effective it is at ObservePoint, where that drives a lot of registrations for us, for our own events. It drives a lot of, we have a lot of good nurturers that are running that are getting people to, they come in through some top of funnel offers that we have. We send them some follow-up content and that pipeline still works. Is it the same as it was 10, 15 years ago? Of course not. But when used wisely, newsletters are a very simple yet powerful way to stay top of mind. Some other reasons why newsletters work is the fact that it really is one of the few channels that you own everything. Like when you build your own database and that database grows over time, you own that. That isn’t something you have to go out and pay. You’re not paying a third party data provider to bring in some names or to find prospects. You’re not paying an ad platform to go find and get in front of people. You own that channel. So, and these are people that should, if they’re subscribed, they should trust you. You want to deepen that trust. So, the important thing to know, right, is that just sending a newsletter, that isn’t going to work. Just sending content for the sake of content doesn’t work. Remember, even though that number, we said that number is 27 touch points back from 2022, you shouldn’t just fill those up with random touch points. They need to be meaningful no matter what the channel is. So, don’t waste your touch points. Think about what does your audience find valuable and send that to them on a recurring basis. Let’s go to the next slide.

So, let’s start with then, we talked about why newsletter is important. Let’s talk now about the different kinds of newsletters because it is more nuanced. There are a lot of different ways that you could approach sending out newsletters to your audience. And the first, like there’s really two ways to think about what type of newsletter you’re running. The first is its identity. It’s like, who is this coming from? Is this coming from a company? Is it coming from an individual? Is it coming from, or even like a, like a community or like this market-user group, right? Like, is it, who is it coming from? And then the second thing to think about is its purpose. Like what actually is it providing? What value is it delivering? What’s the actual meat and substance of that newsletter? Let’s go to the next slide, and we’ll just briefly talk about the identity. You can see from this screenshot, right, or that I was showing that I gave two examples of, one was a newsletter from a company that I subscribed to. The other one was an individual newsletter from someone that I follow. And so it’s really, when you think about the types, it’s what voice and what relationship is trying to be created. Are you trying to create a relationship as your company? Or are you trying to leverage somebody’s network to build an audience that way? So it could be a company newsletter that’s set on behalf of the organization. It could be a personal one, like from an executive, or again, it could be a community newsletter. All three of these work. They’re all viable strategies for what the voice is. Again, it all depends on what type of relationship do you want to create with your audience? Let’s go to the next slide, where now we talk about the purpose, right? Here’s a way to think about, I like, this is how I think about the different groups of newsletter types of content. It could be like a product newsletter, maybe you’re, where you’re sending it to your customers, trying to get them to drive product adoption, or even maybe free account users, right? If you have a PLG motion and you’re trying to show that you’re innovating and that you’re sending, you’re making a lot of updates to your product to get them to want to become a paid subscriber, that could be a good example of a product newsletter. It could be an informational newsletter where you’re sending best practices and frameworks and the way that you think about things. It could be promotional, like if you are in the B2C space, there are people that do use Marketo that do have kind of a paid B2C motion. Are you trying to drive any type of paid conversion? Are you curating content for your audience? Are you doing thought leadership? Is it a product that you just talked about, events or even internal? I actually know some people that use Marketo to send out internal kind of employee newsletters to get their companies aligned on their KPIs, right? So this is, there are a lot of ways you can think about this. If we go to the next slide, we can see, and the main point one I want to make by highlighting both identity and purpose is that newsletters are often a combination of these. Let’s go ahead and let’s go ahead and skip forward to the next slide, where you could do like a CEO-style newsletter, where that’s that personal focus. And it’s focused on thought leadership, maybe curated content, trying to build the reputation that your CEO has with the audience. Maybe they carry a lot of the brand weight with them. But this is really common in kind of Series A and even B organizations where you rely a lot on your founder to build momentum early on. So that could be the focus of your newsletter. Maybe you’re a more established newsletter that has a really significant following. You’re more focused on product enhancements. Or it could be a customer newsletter. Maybe you’re focused on building community, again, product enhancements, inviting customers to private events to build customer advocacy. Again, and here’s just some screenshots and examples of the company I work at, ObservePoint. We do quarterly product newsletters to everyone that has a free account or is a paid customer. And it’s not just, hey, here are the cool, awesome, exciting things that we do to our product. We also tell them, here are some things that are upcoming. Here are some awesome things that we have that you might want to pay attention to that we think are exciting for you. So again, this is more just to kind of get you thinking that successful newsletters are a combination of a lot of different types of aspects. And it’s up to you to figure out what is your audience, what’s going to resonate the most with them and what is going to have the most momentum based on your go-to-market motion. Again, are you PLG? Are you sales led? Where’s that momentum come from? What is your stage? All of those should help inform what type of emails am I going to send out. Let’s go to the next slide. The last things I want to talk about is what really makes a good newsletter, right? We’ve talked about some of these characteristics. And so the best way I can think of is before you schedule a newsletter to send, ask yourself these questions. Or if you’re trying to figure out your strategy, think about this. Number one, does it provide real value to your audience? That is the most important thing, right? Do not waste those touch points. Is it giving them information that they actually want? Some of those screenshots that I sent, I screenshot those two examples because one, I really care about AI adoption and what I can do better to implement that into our marketing workflows. So that is something that I found really valuable, was a really good example of a good, pardon me, a good newsletter touch point. Same thing with the other screenshot that I gave. I’m subscribed to somebody who I really trust and look up to when it comes to PLG, that is, ObservePoint has a PLG arm. So I follow a lot of what she says because she’s been able to do it successfully. Real value, not wasting touch points, giving your audience information that they can go and apply and find useful. The second thing, there’s a good way to think about is would someone be disappointed if they missed your email? Like if they didn’t get this email, would they be like, gosh, why didn’t I read that? That would be really, really valuable content for them. And the last is, does it encourage some type of meaningful interaction? And the reason I said this and not maybe a more specific KPI is because your newsletter can have different goals. Are you trying to drive people back to your website? Are you trying to drive signups? Are you trying to drive registrations for a webinar? Are you trying to get people to further engage with your brand? Like think about what is a meaningful interaction measure from this newsletter touch point. There’s one more slide I have before we get into the bulk of what I think what Connie is going to talk about is, let’s talk about some of the mechanics behind this in Marketo. So if you’re new to Marketo, there’s two kinds of ways that we can send emails. There are batch email sends and there’s automated email sends or triggers. And newsletters, by their nature, it’s a batch set. It’s a single point in time to a defined audience on like some type of recurring basis, like a monthly newsletter, or a quarterly newsletter, or maybe even a one-off email. It’s something where there’s a specific day and time. And you can see that in the setup, like I have two screenshot examples here. Right? If you set this up as a batch, you’re just using filters in your smart list. And it will say batch campaign and you choose when do you want it to run? Like, do you want it to run on a schedule? Or do you want it to run once? That’s, that’s what we’re thinking about when we’re using newsletters. It’s a single point in time sent. Now, triggered emails are great for things like welcome series, nurtures. These are things that rely on the orange triggers inside of a smart campaign smart list. Right? Where you’re triggering on some type of behavior or something that happens to then send out newsletter or excuse me, send out emails. Newsletters focus on the batch component. It’s a single point in time. And now we’re going to talk about how you actually do that. How do you actually get in schedule, schedule out a newsletter? Awesome. Yeah. And Andrew, there was a couple of comments that came in and I want to make sure that we address them. There’s a couple of things. A thought. So Brittany says, I like this too. Would someone be disappointed if they missed the email? That’s a great question. So when you’re thinking about content, a great way to qualify it. The second question came in from, I believe, Saket. With the advent of AI, can we accurately predict the most appropriate recipient time in various time zones to get max ROI in terms of click and CTR? What we can do is actually have this be delegated towards that recipient time zone. That’s one component of it. And I think if you’re evaluating performance overall, there’s a lot of ways to kind of get to that end goal. So what we’re going to do right now is talk through how we build out an email program inside of Marketo. I’m going to go step by step in real time, just to kind of show you, put into practice what we’re talking about. But before we jump into the tool, let’s kind of talk about the steps that are involved in this process. And usually I’ll start with the asset, talking about the email asset. So as we’re building out the email asset, there’s three things that we want to take a look at as we’re going through this build out process. The first is when we’re creating an email asset, it is a distinct thing from an email program. If you’ve already done a session one, you probably know that but as a recap, a program is kind of like a container for your marketing initiative. So an email program different than an email asset, but an email asset will live inside of an email program. And the first thing that you want to make sure that you do is identify your email properties, things that include as you can see here on the right hand side, your from name, your from email, your address domain, the subject line, everything that would essentially encompass the brand and how this email is going to appear in your inbox before it even gets opened. Then we’ll look at email templates. So making sure that you choose the right template that leverages the models that you want, the brand theme, the elements that you want to leverage, essentially creating an email that makes sense for this type of newsletter sent. And then we’ll look at content quality so that we can identify your content quality score within the email to determine how how well will this email resonate with my audience? Are there any things I should be paying attention to and taking care of? Once we have our email asset built out, the next thing that we want to do is define our audience. And there’s two ways that we can really define our audience inside of Marketo. The static list, this is probably, you know, brass tacks for anyone who’s ever sent an email out of any ESP. This idea that you have a set list of people that will never change no matter what happens to them. They could be all valid emails, they could be totally invalid, they could unsubscribe. But that static list will never change. That’s a fixed snapshot of your leads, and won’t change unless you manually update it yourself. On the other side, which probably we’re going to look at more is the smart list component. That’s a dynamic SQL query real time rule base that reevaluates every time that it’s going to be sent out. So if you’re thinking about your newsletter, and you need to use static lists for whatever reason, that’s really like a one off one time upload for that audience in that point in time, a smart list is going to be real time database, excuse me, going to be a real time SQL query based on your database, that’s going to be automatically updated every time subscribers qualify. So if you’re thinking about your newsletter being a your audience from last month using a smart list may or may not be the same as the following month, following week, whatever that might be, or if your newsletter is different for different parts of your organization. But smart lists is where we’re going to spend a lot of time and just to kind of quickly show you in my smart list criteria, I’m looking for the most qualified people. So I want your person status to be marketing qualified, you visited a website at least three times in the last 180 days and click the link in an email and you’re not bought activity. That’s like a standard that I use for most cases, because I want qualified people who are engaged and are marketing qualified to receive my my communications. Next up, we’re gonna have to consider how we name and adjust our structure. Now, this typically lives at the very top of it, of this process. But I like to put it here because usually when you’re building or you’re creating your assets or creating your email program, the idea of maintaining clean database and nomenclature when it comes to naming things can be a little bit confusing. We’ll dive into this in more detail. But the idea being here, I typically like to do year, month, day, the channel that you’re sending and the audience that you’re going to send it out to. So for example, we have 20 2605 21. So the 21st of May and 2026 is a newsletter and L for newsletter, we’re sending it to our customers and this will be a product update newsletter. That’s a way we can have a consistent naming nomenclature across the board. Now in our last session, you can see that they did a similar version or similar flavor of that. The very front of it because just to keep things nice and tidy and visually pleasing. Marketo leverages and a one to 10 or one to nine, a through z naming. So lowest value at the top highest value at the bottom. Keep that in mind as you’re going through things. And then finally, before we send out our email, we need to make sure we’re doing a pre send QA checklist. Now for the email program, there’s four things that you want to look for. And we’ll identify that through doing our demo as well. But one, you want to make sure your audience is selected to you want to make sure that you have the right email chosen. And if you’re going to add an A B test, that would be the point that you can do that here. Three, you’re going to schedule it so the time that you want to send that out. And then finally, once those three items are solidified, then you can choose the approval step. And also for the time to call back to that earlier point, this is where we could choose recipient timezone and also give it a headstart. So it starts processing a little bit more in advance. Now within the email asset itself, we’ll look at this as well. You can actually run a simple spam report, which is nice, you can send a proof to your inbox, and even render the email to see how it would appear across users. But with that in mind, let’s build it. And that’s Bob the Builder, but I’ll be the one building it. So give me one second to pull up my my Marketo environment. And we’ll jump right in. Jim Collison, CFP® TeamViewer and while Akande is pulling that up, we had a question in the in the saying, is marketing qualified the field value for person status? Exactly. So this is that’s a unique flavor for our own instance, you can have each instance be distinct to yours, right. But for us internally, person status is a field that we have not only in Marketo and also in Salesforce. And we use marketing qualified instead of MQL. But more or less, Julia, the exact same thing. All right, so now jumping into marketing Marketo, we’re going to dive right into marketing activities. And I’m going to come over here to Foundational MUGS 2026 and start building out my email program. So here in session one, I can open this up and see all of the the wonderful, beautiful programs that we already have built out here. And then we have session two, which is where I’m going to start my build. So in session two, I’m going to right click, choose a new program. And I’m going to choose my default for email, that’s going to be my email type. We have channel email, team FM, I think that’s probably fine. I’ll leave that as is. And then let’s add in our name for our email. So I’m going to use today’s date just to keep things nice and simple. So 2026, 05, 26. And then this is for our newsletter channel. This will be for our marketing audience. And this will be for our general newsletter as a final sort of audience. Now we’ll go ahead and hit create. And then we’ll start building out everything that’s in our email program. So again, at face value, we saw these tiles before, but just to reiterate, our audience is going to be who we send the email to our emails, all the email that we’re going to choose, we can add in our AB test, the schedule is when we’re going to send it out, and then our approval as well. Now something I like to do with all of the programs, and I imagine if we go to the previous session, and we open up this email program, we’re going to see the same thing. I like to have my folder structure live inside the email. So I create a brand new folder inside my email program called assets, which will contain my email form reports, anything like that. And I’ll create another folder called smart campaigns, just in case I want to bring in maybe a sales alert or something to identify folks once they’ve actually qualified for that. So within my assets, I’m going to go ahead and create a new local asset. And I’m going to call this a smart list. And I’ll call this my send list. Now inside of my send list, this is where I can start dragging dynamic filters and query my database in real time to know exactly who’s coming in and what they might be engaged in or interested in. So I’m going to start pretty basic and do some of the things that I would expect to do from my standpoint if I was looking to send out an email. The first thing I would do is grab email address, bring this in, and make sure that my email address contains an at symbol. Very simple, very straightforward, but I want to make sure that anyone who has an email address that doesn’t contain at is filtered out automatically. And I’m going to do something similar for my unsubscribed audience as well. So I’m going to type in unsubscribed equals false. So now I know the folks that I’m reaching out to, they won’t be unsubscribed. They’re going to have legitimate emails. And then we can kind of look at some of the, I guess, more telling indicators on who I would actually want to send this to. So if we’re thinking about activity or engagement or even status, you know, person status, let’s see if we’re able to grab person status. Let’s say that I wanted to find anyone who has a person status. I’ll click my dropdown value here and choose known. Anyone who is known in my database has an email address that contains at and their unsubscribe is false. And then let’s just say for the sake of this, I want to flag anyone who’s been engaged with our content in the past. So I’ll say visited webpage and I’ll say webpage not contains, and I’ll click on my plus icon right here. The plus icon within your smart list criteria filter allows you to add several values back to back. So by clicking this, I can open up this new window and choose preference and unsubscribe. So these are values that would be containing. So I’m essentially saying I want you to visit any page, but not anything that was preference or unsubscribed, because that probably doesn’t indicate the type of intent that I would want to send my audience to. So with this, I have my smart list criteria here. It’s one and two and three and four. And this is the logic that’s being applied here. If I wanted to change my logic or adjust it at all, I could click this dropdown and choose an any filter. So instead of having an inclusive logic of one and two and three, I could do an any filter logic, which is one or two or three, or I could use advanced filter logic. Now, if you’re sending out newsletters, advanced filter logic probably won’t be used extensively, but let’s just say for the sake of this example, that I wanted to find anyone who visited the web page or had a person status of known and met the criteria for three and four. So I would simply change my and right here to or, add in my brackets. And now I’m looking for anyone who visited a web page in the past 180 days or has a person status of known and has an email address that contains an at symbol and unsubscribed is false. So with that, I’ll go to my people tab and see how many people in my database will query. This is a sandbox environment, so we don’t have anybody. That’s perfectly fine is what I expect, but that would reflect based on my database, who we have inside of our MarketoEngage instance. So let’s now navigate. Now that we have our audience, I’m going to come to my program here, go to my audience right here, go to my smart list, and I’m going to drag in member of smart list is a part of my send list.

And now we have our audience selected. Now, when I go back to my main email program, it’s telling me nobody’s there, right? So for the sake of this example, we’ll assume that somebody was there. Or if I want it to be like just to catch some names in here, I can just simply remove my smart list criteria filter here and then just say email address is not empty. We’ll come back here and we should see, okay, we have 1400 people that have qualified. Now within your audience tile, if you see we have people and then blocked this 25 number right here, we have 25 people that for whatever reason cannot receive emails from Marketo. So this is giving us an idea of how many people qualified for the send based on our smart list criteria and how many people would not receive emails. So now that we know that number, we know our audience, the next step is obviously going to be to create our email asset. So I’m going to come back to my asset folder, right click new local asset and choose my email designer. And I’ll call this email, the name of my email email, and I’ll say subject line MarketoEngage is awesome. And we’ll hit create. Now we’re actually going to create our email asset. The first step in creating our email asset is once we, oh, I don’t have permissions to create it. That’s interesting. Let me go ahead and pivot slightly what I’ll go ahead and do. Maybe I’ll come to newsletter right here. I’ll go ahead and clone this email that we have right here. So I’m going to clone my email into my folder. Apologies on that. That’s interesting. We’ll go ahead and call this email and we’ll open it in our editor. That way we can start working in this email as well. So I’ll go ahead and share this tab for the email that we’re going to be working in. And you can see here, we have a few elements of our email that are already fleshed out. In our main canvas right here, we have the from name, from address, reply to, subject line. And on the right hand side, we have our content and our modules as well. So for example, our content being logo, color band, banner, tile, title, free text button, and then our modules, the different modules that we could drag and drop into our email. Same similar thing though from a property standpoint, I would want to update my property. So for example, instead of Raven, I’ll do Akande Davis. From address, I’ll do Akande at Adobe.com. My reply to, let’s say inbox at Adobe.com. And my subject line instead of join our event would be check out our newsletter. Under email settings, this is where we can identify this is an operational email, which would bypass unsubscribe marketing suspended. We have a few other options as well to send a text only version alongside our standard, include a view as web page link, and include a custom pre-header if we wanted to have something a little bit more tailored beyond just what was in the email itself. But once we have our property set up and we have our design ready to go, then we can come over to email actions, hit the dropdown, and hit approve and close. And this will actually approve the email, put it into my email program, and allow me to select it. Oops, because that closed automatically, let me go back. And allow me to select it out of my email program. With my email set right here and approved, that little green check mark is going to appear. And I can come over here to send sample and do some of those QA requirements that we identified. So being able to send a sample, let’s say I wanted to send one to myself, Akande at gmwconsulting.com, include the text only version, or even come down here to generate a sample version based on tokens that are available by a person from email. So if there’s someone in my database that I know is going to qualify for my email newsletter and I want to see how it renders, I could choose that person or based on the trigger criteria that might exist. But with that being said, I can go ahead and send myself a sample email and that’ll populate inside of my inbox. And then I’ll be able to see how that email is going to render. If we ever need to preview, we can click on the preview tab here as well.

And we can see how this email is going to render across desktop. We can also do mobile device. And then up here at the very top from that QA standpoint, clicking the dropdown and choosing by person, by list, or whatever we might need to do to capture that audience. So now that we have our emails selected or built up, let’s select our email to So I’m going to go back to my email program here.

I’m going to choose the email that I want to be sent out. I’m sorry, a little bit of a…

My one pass is starting to pop up. Let me see if I can pause it for right now.

1. I’m sorry guys, this is just bugging me right now.

We’re doing it live. This is the beauty of Marketo. And these are Marketo things, by the way. I have one pass enabled on my browser and sometimes it’ll take over like a dropdown, which is what it’s doing right now. But I can actually pause it. Let me go ahead. Here we go. All right, now I got my email selected. Forgive me everyone. That’s a little bit tedious. The last thing that we’ll do is come to our schedule section for ready, set, schedule. And I’ll choose a time that I want this email to go out. So let’s say I’m going to send this out on June 30th and we’ll say at 10 a.m. Pacific. But what we’re also able to do here, harkening back to that previous question, is click on recipient time zone to then have this email go out 10 a.m., no matter where you are in the world, whether you’re in Europe, Australia, wherever you might be, it’s going to appear in your inbox at 10 a.m. Then once everything is ready to go and we’re ready to schedule this out, we can hit approve and that email is going to be approved and ready to send out. Now I’ll go ahead and hit approve. I’m going to cancel it right away, of course, but this essentially is an email that we’d be able to tee up. And once we have our newsletter with our little circle, you can see right here it says waiting to run. That means it hasn’t run yet. It’s teeing up. Once we see a green check, then we’re ready to go from that standpoint. But I’ll go ahead and unimprove that just to make sure that we’re set there from that standpoint and we have our email program ready to go. Now with that being pulled up, and yeah, thank you, Julie. This is how a MOPS person, you’re going to be thrown a ton of curveballs and I want to make sure to acknowledge that. Now I’m going to navigate back to my smart list criteria here at the email program level because we had a couple of questions come through. One was are blocked emails typically unsub’s, bounced and failed contacts? That is correct. They’re typically going to be unsubscribed, hard bounces or failed emails. However, there’s a couple things that we can do to further remove those blocked records. One thing that we can do is look for any records that might qualify as marketing suspended, email suspended, and then I’ll add in the criteria for unsubscribed as well. So I’m going to say unsubscribed or marketing suspended false, email suspended false, and unsubscribed as false. Navigate back to our high level program. I’ll refresh this. We still have 21 that are blocked from sending. That could be those hard bounced or invalid emails. So if I wanted to pull in, say, hard bounced, rather bounced, email bounced, email bounced, is empty, and navigate back and be able to see. We still have 21 blocks, so that could be for a few reasons, but ideally it’s going to fall into one of those four categories. So unsubscribed, marketing suspended, email suspended, hard bounced, and email invalid. So another question come through. Actually, I’m getting caught up on these. Andrew, can you feel like maybe the ones that you saw? Yeah, there’s a handful. There’s some really good questions.

The first is, this is a question for Brittany. Do you have any best practices around sending to larger lists in smaller batches? So approximately 200,000. Is there a way to send control batches easily using a smart campaign to segment the larger list with flow steps the best way? How would you approach that? That’s a great question, and that’s actually, we’re doing the foundational mug, but I’ll entertain this because this is a little bit more advanced as well. The way that you would want to approach that is maybe deviate slightly from leveraging your typical email program structure and instead leveraging smart campaigns. So the way that you would want to approach that, there’s a few ways to kind of dice in them, but I would go ahead and start a smart campaign and call this send campaign. And what I would do is identify my send list. So in this case, if I came into my smart list here and I had my send list already built out, I would do member of smart list, bring that in, and then member of smart list inside of my send list right here. And what I would do based on what you shared is I would have a send email step with an ad choice of random sample. Now that might have been what you were alluding to with flow steps, but I would essentially say random sample is 10% and then I would have that email get sent out based on that random sample audience. So essentially if the random sample audience matches 10%, I’m going to send out this email. Then what I would add in from a staggered standpoint is wait maybe one hour or 30 minutes, something like that, and then have another send email step based on a similar random sampling. What you could do to make sure that your approach is really segmented out, you’re not sending the same email to the same people over and over, you could do a remove from flow step or have them added to distinct lists that you then send at a later time. But there’s a couple of ways that you could do that. But simply put, I would do something kind of like this to say if random sample is 10% send this email, remove from the flow if they were sent.

Was sent email is my email. I’ll remove them from this campaign and then repeat that send down here as well. So that would be the best way to send a staggered send within Marketo. Again, the context here too is when you build out a program, so if you have a unique use case for your newsletter, you do it once really well and then you just clone and iterate on top of that. That’s where Marketo gets really nice. So in the instance where I didn’t have permissions to create a problem, I did a lot of things with that as well, which is great. One other question. Before we get back into this. This is a question from a Margit who is asking about how do people become marketing suspended. How does that actually work? Absolutely. Another great question. So within your Marketo engaged instance, you should be looking for things that would indicate someone is unqualified or potentially not someone you would want to send out emails to. So marketing suspended is usually a toggle that you set up tailored to your instance to suspend people based on your own criteria. Email suspended means the email to make it to their inbox that’s handled by Marketo. Marketing suspended could be the result of somebody bouncing more than three times for a soft bounce. It could be someone being inactive despite receiving several emails. It could be a competitor or someone that you don’t necessarily want to get emails. It could be a customer that you know doesn’t want marketing emails for a set period of time and they in the sales cycle or renewal cycle. Marketing suspended can be based on what your requirements are but out the box unsubscribed and email suspended will take care of all of your bad actors right off the bat. Marketing suspended can be more based on your requirements. Great. There are a couple other ones but I think they’re gonna fit much more nicely when we talk about QA. Awesome. Awesome. So from a QA standpoint the last couple of things that you would want to obviously send that proof to yourself, review your audience, check who’s blocked and then there’s a few other things that you could do as well. So naturally within the sandbox environment on my send list there’s a few things that are kind of implied here but if you have governance requirements around can spam, GDPR, that would be baked into your send list as well and be another step that you could take to actually review the content from a QA standpoint. A pre-check if you will. You can also set global smart lists that will be built within your Marketo Engage instance to layer on top of your audience list and I imagine that we do have something like this in our sandbox. Let’s just go ahead and grab it but let’s say member of smart list in marketable leads for example. Anyone who’s a part of this marketable lead send list or this marketable lead smart list will now be filtered out within my send list as well. So there’s a couple things that you could do from that standpoint but pre-check, send it to your inbox, make sure it looks good, review and remove any of those blocked people if they are and then approve it in advance of when you actually need that email to go out. Any others that stood out to you Andrew before we pivot back to some of our homework and other items? Yeah so well there’s one question is are we going to, since we’re having some trouble getting the email created, are we going to be able to see the new email editor as part of this demo? I think we’re learning some challenges. You know what we have 12 minutes left. I want to show the new email editor so I’m gonna show it but because it might be a permissions thing I’m gonna go into my Marketo instance to make that happen. So I hope that’s okay for the team but I think it’s so valuable to actually demonstrate this and get people aware and familiar with it because it is genuinely a game changer. So I’m coming back into our instance I’m gonna go ahead and share my screen. While you’re doing that there was another question from from Sockit, I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly, about can you enforce any types of governance policies to screen the email footer of Marketo email to flag it if it’s not adhering to GDPR or can-spam data privacy laws? Yeah Marketo by default is gonna make a requirement for you to have unsubscribe in there a thousand percent. If you don’t have it it’s gonna add it and force it in manually but Andrew I don’t know if you were gonna say something else. No that’s exactly what I was gonna say. The Marketo forces if it’s not operational Marketo will insert the unsubscribe link outside of checking for specific you know private data privacy regulation laws like GDPR or can-spam a lot of that’s up to you as part of your QA and governance process right so make sure when you’re sending out an email does it fit that requirement but yes Marketo will insert that unsubscribe link always unless it’s operational. Absolutely but great questions so now that we have this pulled up you’re gonna see a totally different view from an email property standpoint so it’s gonna be more reflective of what was in the slide deck but on the right hand side we have the from name email reply to subject line branding domain and some of the things that we would expect to see. The biggest difference I think the biggest impact that you’re gonna experience is actually building out the content so when I click edit email content there’s three ways that I could develop my email from scratch I could also import HTML and then convert that HTML into Marketo friendly HTML to be my WYSIWYG or I could choose a template either sample templates or save templates in this case I’m gonna go ahead and choose a sample template and we’ll be able to use this template. Now on the left hand side this is we’re gonna have your structures and content so structures and content essentially allow you to be able to navigate between different pieces of content within the file within the the file and then adding in your content as needed on the right hand side you can edit all of these items pretty easily it’s very intuitive across settings and styles you can set standard headers if I were to click into this text block right here I can have this text block show and hide on all devices I could have this text block show and hide on all devices from a style standpoint I could have the text the the formatting be totally distinct based on my requirements the crazy thing and I think this is where you’re you know the the purple dust is they used to say would come out of the top of your head I can now design emails for light mode also dark mode all of the changes that I make will be sticky based on that mode that I’m selected in images can be set for light and dark mode and also for desktop and mobile devices as well now naturally baked within the email editor we have generative AI around copy and also images leveraging either nano banana or Firefly based on what your organization allows but you can choose that based on your brand settings if I was to come in here from an image setting and say I want to generate AI I can choose the types of prompts that I would put inherently I don’t like fiddling around too much with prompts like I don’t like saying hey that’s slightly wrong tweak it this way instead I like this visual component where I can choose and manipulate items based on what I select and then even choose my generative model based on what I’m looking for and then with on top of that the content quality score I can have AI essentially evaluate the content within of my email to say hey is this good content is it bad content does it align with my brand and my requirements and it’s gonna give me an answer as you can see right here for overall quality and then we can coordinate and collaborate within the tool using the native comments feature within the the builder itself so a lot of cool things for the actual email designer which I’m sure will come in another mug but just wanted to give a quick sneak peek on that before we pivot over to measuring newsletter success which I think will be important yeah wonderful thank you so much Conde for fantastic demo I think a lot of really awesome things going on inside of Marketo and the new email designer lots updates take place that regularly so if you have not been to there get in there start poking around that’s definitely the future where Marketo is headed let’s talk about how do you measure success and I think a lot of these metrics now for those of you who might be more seasoned maybe who were further along in your careers might know a lot of these but if you’re brand new to not just Marketo but email marketing you might not know what are the benchmarks and what how do I know what to do how do I measure if this newsletter or even my email was any good so let’s look at those right now so the first is a couple things when you send an email you know Conde was showing you that the four tiles right where you choose your your smart list then you choose the email you schedule and then you approve after you’ve sent your email this is what you will see you’ll see a dashboard that will give you an overview of the performance of that email from that email program and there’s a couple things you need to understand so sent when you see sent inside of Marketo this means that the email was actually was processed and queued and delivered from Marketo’s servers so Marketo was recognizing that hey I have processed this and I have sent it out then delivered is when Marketo receives recognition that the recipient’s email server actually accepted the email like it wasn’t immediately rejected like it was a bounce or a spam block or you know their inbox was full based on you know a soft bounce that’s that actually means that it was it was received by the recipient and so when you see kind of this top left corner where it says email send there’s it’s mostly green and there’s a sliver that’s what we want to see right we want our best practice delivery rate is night at least 95 percent if your delivery rate is lower than 95 percent then you probably need to optimize your list maybe you need to clean up your email list because you’re sending to people that are bouncing or they have invalid emails I personally like to shoot for around at least 98 that tells me that I’m really dialed in my database is clean but 95 percent I would say is your floor for your delivery rate we have a question about showing deliverability later show is bounced a lot of it can be timing so maybe it could be a soft bounce right where you could receive an email could be delivered today but you send an email in two days there could be like a processing delay it could be an issue with maybe their inbox got full Marketo actually records a little bit more advanced instead of Marketo records the bounce category and there’s some really good documentation where you can create lists inside of Marketo to save those bounce categories to give you information about why they’re bouncing because that does happen you where someone receives an email then later it bounces so that that’s what that’s what delivered means when you’re looking at this dashboard go to the next slide where we talk about some other things the first is the engagement score so the engagement score this is Marketo’s proprietary score that takes into account uh engage like engagement behavior things like opens and clicks program success so like for example if you have a goal of your newsletter is to drive somebody to create a free account you can use a smart campaign to change somebody’s program status to converted or filled out form and then Marketo will look at that information and think hey this email drove people to reach a successful stage that that was a good email there’s good content here it also takes into account disengaged behavior unsubscribes all that goes into what this score represents then we look at the and that score is on a scale of zero to 100 so obviously the higher the score the more engaging that content for that email then we get the actual email specific metrics so opens in your open rate which is just people who opened your email a good benchmark a good best practice is you want at least 15 especially in b2b figure out what is best for your industry though because there are some industries where that open rate you want to be closer to 25 or even higher so figure out what that benchmark looks like for you and your historical data and try to improve on it the more people that open the more people that look at your content then clicks and click rate so this is anyone who clicks a link in your email and good baseline shoot for at least two percent here if you’re less than two percent that means your content wasn’t compelling enough for your audience then click to open rate in my opinion this is my opinion i like click to open rate better than click rate because it actually tells me it looks at the ratio of unique clicks to opens times 100 and gives you so basically if out of everyone who opened this email what percentage of them clicked because then i’m looking at okay i my subject line gets people to open my email so that’s what i would optimize there now i’m looking at once they open this email did it move the needle for them so you want at least 13 here obviously shoot for higher and then unsubscribed means you’re opt out so somebody gets your email and they either fill out an unsubscribe form or they use a one click unsubscribe if you’re familiar with that and like gmail has that setting where you just click to unsubscribe try to keep this less than one percent i personally like to keep this less than half a percent because the more unsubscribes you get then the more likely you are to be you know you could be flagged for spam or you know maybe you’ll get put into a promotion inbox of the promotion inbox in gmail so keep that in mind as well lastly we didn’t talk much about this but here’s a sneak peek of something if you want to get really interesting inside of marchetti tests marchetti will give you a dashboard that shows the results of that test where you can see performance those same metrics delivers opens clicks based on each version of your test to allow you to get a good sense of what happened and what the performance was like and then again here so when you’re inside of marchetti you can create reports to tell you how did your email perform right and there’s two kinds of reports inside of marchetti there’s an email performance report and there’s an email link performance report the email performance report shows just all those interactions with your emails those same metrics on sends and delivers and opens and clicks and you can filter on you know various times like was it the last seven days or was it all time which emails you want to view or even fields maybe you want to create a filter this down to people that have a specific status or a certain industry right and you can view your your metrics that way and then the email link performance report shows you how did individual links perform in this email so not just how many clicks did we get but what links were clicked how many times were they clicked what’s the distribution across that individual email all really important stuff now last but not least with a little bit of time left there’s one thing that we we have to make mandatory right which is homework so if you want to become a marchetti guru you have to send your first email dare i say send your first newsletter so there’s a few things that we would love for folks to do one build and schedule a basic email program for your newsletter one to create a training folder create that email program following a similar sort of approach get your static or smart list try out both honestly build one email maybe some draft content schedule that email program make yourself the only person in that static or smart list and then send that email to yourself using the email program and then of course you want to check for spam send a proof and then see the results dashboard next that we recommend and brad i don’t know if you want to speak to this at all but we recommend joining the marchetto or certification study group so that way you can start working on your certification and if anyone is curious about like email design questions about the newsletter i’m sure andrew and i andrew is probably fine with this find us on linkedin and ask us questions we are we are 100 down to support as as uh as needed or on experience league which is where that qr code links to so the reason why i called this sort of this uh study group out is that it is specifically a group for people to talk about how to prepare for marchetto certification so couldn’t think of a better place for everybody’s a part of this group to go ahead and join so highly recommend joining that group it will be a part of the uh after session email that i’ll be sending with the recording as well all right i think that is it andrew thank you so much for your time is there any parting words that you’d like to uh to finish the group with any any nuggets that you want to leave with them golden nuggets um for me it would be get out there and practice so this is a this is kind of my rule of thumb um you don’t have to do this but i like to do it is try to find something you can test in every email you know not something superficial like a subject line like a like a or a cta button color like nothing like that but try to find things that you can test in every email because the faster you test the more you learn what works with your audience um so i highly recommend doing that that’s something that’s been really valuable for me yeah and i would probably say the the the road to a great career in marquetta with adobe in general is paved with simple things like a newsletter so don’t don’t feel um you know approach it with a enthusiasm and yes test test and test yeah appreciate you guys and your time today yes thank you all you’ll have uh another session coming up in june talking about how to announce a newly released product or feature so uh we’re taking your newsletter to one step even further than that all right we will see you all on the next one see you all in the discussion group and see you all at all the in-person upcoming events that we have talk to you later bye everybody