Personalize with tokens

Hi, I’m Kate Colbert and I’m currently a Senior Business Advisor at Adobe. I’m a Marketo Certified Expert and I’ve been working with our marketing automation customers here at Adobe for about six years. In this video, I will be talking about Marketo Engage tokens, from defining functionality, reviewing common use cases, to demonstrating how to build it in Marketo Engage. I’ll be sharing tips and tricks along the way. Starting with a definition, it’s helpful to think of tokens as variables that you can leverage in your emails, landing pages, smart campaign flow steps, and much more. Benefits of tokens include personalization, quicker program build time, and decreased likelihood of typos or human error. There are many types of tokens in Marketo, but today we’ll be focusing on person and my tokens. To demonstrate how you can use my tokens and person tokens, we will take a web content program as an example. We will define my tokens at the program level to populate information about the web content, such as the title and type, and we will use person tokens to customize the first name in the salutation for each program member. Let’s take an example of how these tokens can come together in a web content program. We’ll start by navigating to Marketing Activities so we can start putting our web content program together. I’ve already created a program, so I’ll click into it and open up the Local Assets folder. My web content program has a landing page with a form to request the content, and a follow-up thank you page, and an email to deliver the content. We will use tokens to help populate information quickly and consistently. For the email that provides access to the content, I want to include the title of the content, what type of content it is, and a personalized thank you note. Instead of hard-coding the values, I’ve designed my email template to have tokens that will display the information. Let’s look at where we tell Marketo what these tokens should represent. At the program level, I’ll click into the My Tokens tab because this is where my tokens are defined. It’s helpful to think of my tokens as custom tokens that you can create as you see fit at either the folder or program level. There are a variety of token types available in the right-hand menu as you can see, but we’ll be focusing on the text tokens for our example. Text tokens are basically strings of text, like a text box. In my program template, I have placeholder text that clearly explains what information should be filled in. One by one, I’m going to update the value with the information that I want to render in place of the token wherever I use it. So for the token for my content title, I’m going to input complete guide to Marketo tokens. Next is the content type. It’s an ebook, so I’m going to input ebook. Next I need to define the URL where the content lives, so I’m going to input my URL. However, notice that I’m not including the HTTPS. Whenever you are inputting a URL, do not include that part inside the token’s value if you want clicks to be tracked in your email. Now if I go back to the email asset, the tokens are still going to render here in the edit view. However, when we go to preview, you can see the information that we just defined on the My Tokens tab pulling through. It’s helpful to use the view by drop down to preview what the email would look like for default or a specific person. You can even select a specific list and then easily click through the various people that belong to that list. I recommend also using the send sample feature to send an actual test email to your own email address. To recap, we’ve been looking at custom My Tokens so far, but let’s look at an example using a person token. We could leave the salutation generalized to just say hello like it is right now, but instead I’d like to say hello to each recipient by first name. To do this, I’m going to use a person token. I’ll click into the module and start by adding a space. Then I click the ellipses icon to insert a token. In the token box, I’m typing in first name to quickly isolate the token I want, which is lead first name. Now you’ll see that a default value is optional, but I strongly advise that you always define one. The default value is what will show if a person record doesn’t have that field defined for whatever reason, first name in our example. You’ll want to pick something that is general and appropriate for your audience. I’m going to use marketing leader. Now back on the preview page, we can again use the view by functionality to see this person token in action. Awesome. The emails now personalized with person tokens and streamlined with My Tokens. Thanks for joining me to learn how you can start incorporating tokens into your Marketo strategy. I hope you found it helpful and consider using tokens in your next program build.