Create and measure a default program

Hi, my name is James Lelum and I’m currently a Customer Technical Advisor at Adobe for the Marketo Engage product. I was a member of the Adobe Marketo Engage 2022 Champion class and I’ve been using Marketo Engage for about seven years. I’ve been working with our marketing automation customers and consultants for years as well. Our Marketo Engage programs represent a single marketing initiative and can be thought of as a container with all the appropriate assets to support an initiative. There are four different program types, email, event, default, and engagement. In this video, I’ll be talking about the default program from guiding you to create one, showing you how to measure success, and sharing my tips and tricks along the way. Out of the four different program types, the default program can be used the most creatively and is the most malleable program type for a variety of different use cases, such as landing pages, data processing, operational maintenance, and so on. Let’s dive into the program setup. Side note, I typically recommend cloning existing program templates if your Marketo Engage instance has them, but building a program from scratch is simple. First, you’ll want to create your program. Right-click over Campaign Folder and Marketing Activities and select New Program. Select the folder where your program will live, name the program using your team’s naming convention, specify your channel, and add a description of your initiative and hit Create.

Setup. The Setup tab of your program is where you can update your program tags if you need to adjust them after you initially create the program. Select your period cost for the program or edit any special settings for your program. Period cost can be edited at any time if the actual spent amount differs from the predicted cost. Once the program’s been created, it’s time to start adding your assets to the program. The assets you use will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. For this example, we’re going to set up the default program for a landing page that’s being used to gate content. With that in mind, we’ll need to create the following assets. Two landing pages, one for the web form to gate the content, and one for the confirmation page.

A form. And note that you don’t have to create a new form for every program if your instance has global forms. I typically recommend using templated forms because they scale more effectively and create a consistent experience across web pages. But for this example, we’re just going to create a local form directly in the program. An email for delivering the gated content. And a smart campaign to send the email when the form is filled out. Once those have been created, we’re going to create my tokens in the program. This will help us streamline the build process by allowing us to update repeated information in a single place. For this example, we know that we’re promoting a piece of gated content, so we’ll want to include everything that might be repeated across multiple assets. The name of the content, a description of the content, and any relevant links. After your tokens have been created, input them into your email and landing page assets while you’re adding in your copy and any imagery. Once your email and landing pages are complete, preview them to ensure they look as intended, then approve them. While we’re making updates to our gated content landing page, we’ll add in form. For this example, I’m going to use a pre-built form. This is also where I’ll select where the user will go after they fill out the form. My confirmation message landing page. You’ll need to make sure the confirmation message landing page is approved before you do this or it won’t show up as an available landing page to select. Once you’ve completed setting up the assets, you want to preview them to make sure they look as intended. On the landing pages, use the preview draft functionality. For the email, send yourself a sample. After you’ve previewed the assets and have confirmed that content and links look and feel as expected, you should be ready to approve your assets. Some things I typically look for in an email draft are typos in the subject line or body, the preview header, who the email is coming from, that the links work as intended, and that all the tokens have populated properly. Now that our assets are ready, we’ll set up our trigger smart campaign. This is a key element of measuring program success because it’s what will update the program status when someone fills out the form to receive the gated content. In this trigger campaign, we’re going to add a fills out form trigger to the smart list and we’ll add a change program status and send email step to the flow. Now let’s do a final test to make sure the trigger smart campaign works. You’ll want to activate your confirmation page first, then the web form page, then the trigger campaign. From there, you can fill out the form using a test email address to make sure your leads are flowing through your trigger campaign in receiving the confirmation email. And that’s it. We’ve successfully built and launched a default program to deliver gated content. Now that you’ve learned how to build a default program, let’s discuss reporting. It’s important to understand how your program is performing, optimize for success, and prove the impact of your marketing efforts. To review the program’s performance, we’ll want to create a program performance report by right clicking within the program and selecting new local asset. In the setup tab under the program section, we’ll want to make sure that we have the correct program selected for our report. Within this report, we’ll see a few columns by default. Let’s discuss what each of these mean. Channel. This is the channel type of the program, which is selected when you initially create the program and can be adjusted in the program setup. Note, if you were attempting to change your program type after you built out the smart campaigns within the program, you won’t be able to change the channel in your program setup if the smart campaigns contain a change program status flow step. Total members. This is the number of people who exist in your program. For this example, it would be the number of people who filled out the form. New names and new names percent. This is the total number of net new Marketo engaged person records that were created within your program and the percentage of those people out of the total members in the program. Success and success percent. This is the number of people who completed actions within your program that qualify as successes, and the percentage of those people out of the total members in the program. Success actions are defined for each program type and channel in the admin area of Marketo under the tag section. Your Marketo administrator should be able to tell you what statuses are considered a success for your program type and channel. For this example, success is defined by how many people filled out the form on the landing page. Total cost. This is the sum of all period costs within your program, which is essentially the total cost of a program. Cost per member. This compares the total cost of your program against the total members to define the cost for each person within the program. Cost per new name. This compares your total cost against the total net new records created by the program to define the acquisition cost. Cost per success. This compares your total cost against the total number of successes within the program to define the cost to achieve program success. Let’s summarize some of these best practices that were shared over the course of this walkthrough. When building your program, email assets must be approved before they can be referenced anywhere in your program, such as in a smart campaign. When adding a form to a landing page, remember that if you wish to set up the page to redirect to another Marketo page after someone fills out the form, you’ll need to make sure that the other page is already approved before you can set it up for redirect. When using smart campaigns within your program, make sure to include change program status within your campaign flows to track program success. If you’re not sure what actions are considered a success for your program and channel type, your Marketo administrator should be able to provide that information to you. When creating rich text tokens for your email, if your token includes hyperlinks or any styling, make sure to create a corresponding text token to input into the text version of your email. When using my tokens in any of your program assets, you’ll want to make sure you appropriately preview your assets so that you can verify the tokens are getting pulled in correctly. If you need to adjust your program channel type after you’ve created the program, you won’t be able to change it if change program status is included in any of the smart campaigns within the program. A pro tip of using default programs is to utilize tags, channels, and program statuses to track performance. A related pro tip, irrespective of whatever program type you’re using, in any outbound smart campaign, you should always include a flow step that changes the program status when the campaign executes. This will help you understand and assess overall program performance. That’s it for this instructional video. I hope you find it helpful for setting up your next Marketo engaged default program. Thanks so much for tuning in.