Event Programs

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. 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 event 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 event program corresponds with an event happening at a specific date and time, and they’re intended to help you coordinate, facilitate, and track your in-person and virtual events. Event programs allow you to create placeholders to add the event to your calendar, and they pair well with other third-party virtual event platforms that are integrated with your instance. Let’s dive into the program setup. Pro tip, 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 the campaign folder in Marketing Activities and select New Program. Select the folder where your program will live, name the program, input values for any required tags, and add a description of your initiative. Then hit Create. If you’re not sure what tags to use, don’t fret, you can adjust those later. 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 a program has been created, it’s time to start adding your assets to the program. For this example, we’re going to set up an event 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 registration page and one for the confirmation page. A form. Note that you don’t have to create a new form in every program if your instance has global forms. I typically recommend using templated forms because they scale 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. Two smart campaigns. One to trigger the confirmation email and another to send their reminder email. Two emails. One for confirming event registration and a reminder email to share pertinent event details beforehand. Once those assets have been created. We’re going to create my tokens in the program. This will help us significantly streamline the build process. For this example, we’ll want to include a calendar token for our event calendar placeholder, the name of the event, a description of the event, the date, start and end time, and the place of the event. One thing to note when creating a calendar token is that the hyperlink text will be a CTA that prompts the end user to download the calendar file. If you want to add any special styling to this copy, you can add span tags directly into the hyperlink text field. After your tokens have been created, now you can input them into your assets while you’re adding in your copy and any imagery to the assets. Once your emails are complete, you’ll want to approve the assets and send yourself a preview sample to make sure the tokens populate correctly and all links in the email work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. While we’re in our landing page making updates, we’ll also want to add in the form, as well. For this example, I’m going to use a pre-built form and add to the landing page. As you’ll see in this setup, I’ve already approved the confirmation landing page. This is necessary for ensuring we can select that page for the form to redirect as we’re adding in the form to the registration page. You can also define directly in your form settings where the form will direct to as well. Now that we’ve added our content and forms to the pages and emails, next we’ll want to update our Smart campaigns. In the 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 to the Flow. An important note is that the Change Program Status flow step is a key element of measuring program success because it’s what will update the program status when someone fills out the form to attend the event. We’ll discuss more on measuring success later on in this video. For the reminder email, we’ll want to set up a batch campaign that we’ll schedule to run one hour before the event. For this Smart campaign, we’re going to want to target everyone who’s registered for the event so we’ll add a Member of Program field to the Smart list and in the Flow, we’ll add a Send Email step to the Flow. The reason we’re not adding a Change Program Status step here is because the reminder email is not considered a success status for the event channel within My Marketo Instance. Program status changes should typically align to the different successes within your channel type and are especially necessary for statuses considered a success. If you’re not clear what the success steps are for your channel type, your Marketo administrator should be able to confirm that for you. Once you’ve completed setting up all your assets within your program, you’ll want to preview your customer-facing assets to make sure they look as intended. On the landing pages, use the Preview Draft functionality to look at a draft of your pages. For the email, send yourself a draft sample with a text version to view the email directly in your inbox. It’s especially important for event programs to make sure you review your calendar token that’s referenced in your email because you want to make sure that the ICS file also looks and works the way you want it to. After you’ve previewed the pages and emails and have confirmed the content and links look and feel as expected, you should be ready to approve your pages and do a final test to make sure the trigger 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 to make sure test records are flowing through your trigger campaign and receiving the confirmation email. And that’s it! We’ve successfully built and launched an event program. Now that you’ve learned how to build an event 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. For this example, success is defined by someone registering for your event and then attending your event. 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 the report. Within this section, you’ll see a few calls 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. Total members. This is the number of people who exist in your program. For this example, it’s just the number of people who filled out the form. For use cases where you’re sending larger targeted emails to promote your initiative through the program, this number could reflect the total number of people who flowed through any of the Smart Campaigns within the program. New names and new names percent. This is the total number of net new Marketo 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 tags section. Your Marketo administrator should be able to tell you what statuses are considered a success for your program type and channel. 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 your total cost against your total members to define the cost for each person within the program. Cost per new name. This compares your total cost against your 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 elsewhere 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 and event status. If you’re not sure what actions are considered a success for your program and your channel type, your Marketo administrator should be able to provide that information for you. When creating rich text tokens for your email, if your token includes 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 want to make sure you appropriately preview your assets so that you can verify they’re getting pulled in correctly. And that’s it for this instructional video. I hope you find it helpful for setting up your next event program. Thanks so much for tuning in.