Ask Me Anything

Transcript

All righty. Get our cameras sorted. Let’s see. So, everyone, Welcome very much to our final my camera session of the year. Today we have two fantastic presenters, Kate Kolbert and James Letham, who will be going through some of your questions today that we received in the registration process, as well as live in this session today. These webinars are designed to be interactive, so especially in this Ask Me Anything format. So we encourage you to ask questions in the question box throughout the presentation. Just go ahead and type them in there. And we’ve set aside the last ten minutes or so for that live Q&A. And we will do our best to answer as many of those questions for you as we can. Just to quickly go over a few of the housekeeping items before we get started. We are presenting an Adobe Connect today and we are live. But don’t worry, this session is being recorded and it will be able to be viewed on demand and shared with other members of your team at a later time. You’ll get the recording for this event, in an email from us tomorrow afternoon. I’d also like to point out that the top of your screen there is a black bar and an icon with a hand on it. There you can drop down and find actions that you can utilize throughout the presentation. So if you like what you see, feel free to, you know, applaud, laugh, like and so on. You know, we’d love to see your engagement throughout the event. So please, we encourage you to utilize that feature.

Finally on the final screen, there will be a handout available for download. From there, you’ll see some exciting Marketo related webinars that will be happening next week. So be sure to download that and take it with you. So as we’re closing out this webinar, we’ll also have a few survey questions at the bottom of your screen. If you can just take an extra minute or so to answer those questions, we would greatly appreciate it. With that, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Fabian Castillo and I am a new face in these Adobe webinars, but I’m mildly seasoned veteran here at Adobe with about five years collective experience. I myself joined Adobe through Marketo and was a former Marketo user in my previous roles working in demand generation. So I love how valuable these webinar sessions can be with our experts today. So if you have any questions or comments about today’s event or just about your experience with Adobe Connect or any of our customer exclusive events, please reach out to me and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. With that, I’d like to hand it over to Kate and James to introduce themselves.

Sure, I can go first. Like you said, my name is Kate Calvert. I’m here on Adobe’s business advisory team. January will mark eight years with Adobe.

And let’s see. I’ve been on the business advisory team for about two years now. Before that, the other six ish years were on the consulting team. I came to Adobe by way of the visible. Or. Now let’s Marketo measure, acquisition back in, 2018 and kind of ever since then started working in Marketo engage as well.

I based in Seattle and yeah, that’s a little bit about me.

So you will hear me. Okay. Looks like my mics going off. Great. I’m, I’m James, so my experience was helping admin. Marketo. Marketo. So as our internal dogfood, either of the dogfood that we sold and, as well as, Marketo measure internally as well. So I came into the Marketo acquisition, left for a brief sabbatical and then came back recently as a technical advisor. So Kate and I worked very closely with customers, and best practices and, you know, gotchas and why you should do this and maybe not that. So, we’re always happy to to answer questions. And we both presented at, Adobe Summit this last March. So, I’m excited to, to be next to Kate again.

Awesome. Thank you both. With that, I think we can go ahead and get right into it.

So we’re going to start off with, the registration questions we received, starting with the first one, regarding webinar optimization. The question was, I’ve noticed when I’ve registered for some Marketo events, it sends me a calendar invite as my confirmation. Would love to learn how that is done. Could you to show us to that? Yeah. For sure. I can take a lead on that one if you want.

I think my blanket, advice for that has kind of always been like, turn on the the webinar registration confirmation from the actual webinar platform, whether that be like Adobe Connect or, or zoom or on 24 or whatever it is.

They have a lot of functionality within those confirmations. This is your link to join. This is your your calendar file, things like that. It can be hard to get, like Apple calendar files, like different ICS files. On top of that, you can also send or, webinar registration confirmation for Marketo that has a save the date if you’d like. You can tokenize everything in that too. I think that, just from my personal experience, the when you register for a webinar like the branded email that you get might be, you know, the links might be hidden in that, when I would register for a webinar, I’m always looking for that, like operational, no frills confirmation email that just says, like, this is how you join, add it to your calendar. I think the webinar platform forms do a really good job of, categorizing a lot of that for you. So I would say do do both. Or just just do the webinar confirmation from the platform. But yeah, that’s that’s where I would go. You can get creative with some coding within Marketo as well. It just takes a little bit of like development work to get those, like the Google Calendar links in there with like the right times and dates and time zones and, and everything else. So yeah, that’s my thought, my thoughts on this.

Yeah, I feel like James covered that pretty well. I would just add something that’s, similar. Just try to send out reminders periodically, kind of ramping up towards the event. I mean, there’s a lot of webinars out there. There’s a lot of things going on in general. And like for me personally, sometimes I’ll sign up for things and kind of forget about it. So it’s nice to be reminded, like a week of a few days out. So you make sure that you can show up as you intended.

Great. Thank you both. Yeah. Next question is how to quickly set up and update programs that need to be changed over the new year.

Yeah I can that’s a that’s a timely question since we’re approaching the end of the year.

I mean, I think that like the first thing that comes to mind for me is obviously it’s going to be a different calendar year. So you want to make sure that your, you know, your copyright, all that is updated to 2025. And, you know, as time goes on. So, I think in that specific example, a good way to do that is with tokens, you can actually kind of code into the token. A way to update the current year so that you don’t have to always go in and, you know, change it to 6 to 7. It’ll run that for you automatically. So, tokenizing that is great. You can also build that into your, like your email templates or your landing page templates to kind of take it a step further.

But kind of like beyond that, I would say like the, like the overall kind of idea here would kind of come back to having program templates for changing, like everything or more things, not everything. You’re probably not changing everything year to year. But if you have program templates that you can clone for, let’s say, your webinars or your nurtures, and maybe next year you’re going to try something different with, what you count as success or when you’re going to trigger the emails, for example, if you have it in the program template, that’s very scalable so that you don’t have to click into everything or like rebuild.

So that’s kind of what I think of when we think about a new year. James, is there anything that you would add? I think you nailed it. I think the the like the get your scripting that you can put into a, a landing page template or an email templates. Really helpful to not have to worry about that. But you did say something that kind of, like, piqued my interest there with, when you’re doing reporting. Sometimes those milestones change. So, for example, like we have a, we have like a customer marketing adoption nurture where we want people to adopt Marketo. Obviously, if you use Marketo more Marketo engage more, you have a higher likelihood of, of renewing, which is what we want you to do. And so if that if all of a sudden, you know, the rising tide lifts all ships, all of a sudden everyone else is a little higher. Maybe you move that bar a bit, to get people to adopt more, whatever that score may be. So it’s good context. I mean, data is only as good as the story that you tell around it. So it’s a it’s a great thing to, to document, make sure that you explain.

Yeah. What is next for us. Let’s see next session we got is what are some features not often utilized in Marketo but should be. Can you touch on that. I have a slide for this actually. But Kay if you want to go first and then I can talk about the slide that I have.

I mean I feel like there’s a lot of things that are not used, you know, person to person. So you have visual. Let’s see that. That’s probably exciting. And then I can kind of I. Do have a visual. My ideas. And I do have a visual. Let me let me pull that up and see what go here. It should be this slide cuz we’re seeing this with random samples. So, this is a we got a couple of these questions in before, and I built this, right after hearing this because I think that, you know, between all the add ons for Marketo, obviously, you know, there’s like ABM stuff, your content personalization, your RCA, your Marketo measure, all that. I think that within the platform that comes in like natively in in the actual platform itself, random sample is something that I love to use. And it can be, you know, you can put a random sample as like a filter. So basically that would say, as we see here, it would be that we are my, my smart list. This is just like a scoring example. Let’s say we want to change something about scoring. We want to see if, people who download, pieces of content, or maybe they register for a webinar or event or some any form fill that someone has, but not a demo. I mean, demo kind of. They’re like AP1 mql they get sent immediately.

If we want to change their score from this from 40 to 50, what I would do in this is, there’s a couple things here. So like the smart list is basically the same form fill and the flow would say that we change everybody’s score to 40 plus for person score. You can tokenize things within your scoring program. But then the next thing would say random samples 50. That’s taking 50% of all the people that come through here, which really what ends up working in here, if you look at the results, is that every other person gets taken out. You could do 25%, which would just say 25, 50% get taken out of this flow. They’ve had the, the the person score increase of 40. That’s great. The other 50% that stay get added to this static list that says scoring tests. And then we add another ten points. So what I would do with this is let it run for, you know, a quarter or so and then take all those people that are on that list and see if the increase in score is, like if you do some sort of linear regression. Look, if that’s actually a valuable increase. It’s always helpful to know that what you’re scoring on is, is actually like a higher propensity to buy the product.

And this is all this is all assume that, you know, one form filled doesn’t end up as, an mql. Let’s say in this scenario, a 50 or 75 for a score would be our mql threshold.

So certain engagements, you want to push them Q automatically, but random sample is great. It’s also if you have like 50,000 people that you need to update something on, but you want to do it in batches for a random sample, it’s ten, and it’s going to do 5000 people at a time. And then you can, you can just up that each time it runs, to make sure you clear up that 50,000. You don’t do them all at once. So it’s an easy way to, like, parse out certain parts of your database.

I feel like, that’s one that’s been around for a little bit, but kind of you forget about. Or at least I don’t often think about random sample. So I think that’s a great thing to remember is available.

What comes to mind for me, is maybe like the newer features that everybody now has access to, which is really exciting. Interactive webinars, for example, and then also dynamic chat. Everybody has access to them. So it’s kind of, you know, you might as well try them. Even if like taking interactive webinars, for example, even if you already have a current platform, you could still kind of try this out and see if you like it. You know, if maybe this can help you cut costs with the other provider or supplement if there’s a use case for that. Or, you know, maybe you aren’t currently doing webinars. This could be an easy way to try to experiment with something. And then, you know, maybe maybe it goes, well, maybe, you know, it’s great results and everybody’s excited about it. And you want to add, webinars as a, you know, new channel to engage with. So same kind of, thing with dynamic Chat where, you know, if you already have a provider or you’re not doing it already, you can, you know, try it out, see if you like it or, you know, start doing it. So yeah, I kind of think that there, there’s not really like a reason not to, to see, how it goes for you.

So I would definitely look into trying to use both of those. I think. Yeah. Oh, and I see, a question that just popped up in the question pod. How many interactive webinars is the limit since this is related? Let’s address those right now. I am not super involved with the contracts, but I think it is 12. Is that. Does that sound right, James? Yeah, I believe it’s 12 per year. And, this is with like the with like the free like almost like a freemium. Like the free piece. That, it’s 12 per year and then none can, consecutively or not consecutively. I’m forgetting the same time. At the same time. Yeah. So, Yeah. You can’t run. I think that there’s, there’s certain, like, tiers of, add on for, like, a purchase if you want, but, yeah, it’s the other thing is that you get a lot of that data into Marketo without having to do, like, special API calls and coding to, to action off of afterwards. So especially with surveys and things like that, that can be really helpful.

Yeah. Perfect. Thank you for catching that. And, yeah. And, keep sending in those questions into the chat. We’ll get to the, the full ones on near the end and then anything that relevant will catch them on. Right. Right away is that’s what we did here. Okay. So for the next registration question, we received, do we need to warm up our domain before sending emails, as we typically do? Or is domain warm up? Not necessarily. When you’re using Marketo.

So definitely if you have I mean, the answer is yes. But it’s a little nuanced for if you are on a dedicated or a shared IP, absolute, if you have a dedicated IP, you want to take the time to create an IP warming plan and be really careful, because you’re the only one responsible for the health of that domain. So you need to kind of slowly ramp it up so that it can, you know, start sending at at your normal capacity. So you’ll you’ll definitely want to have a plan and stick to that strictly with a shared IP. It’s it’s a little less intensive or extensive.

Shared IPS themselves are usually already warm from the all the other brands, the other senders using the. So the actual IP doesn’t need to be warmed itself. But your new domain to it. It’s a good idea to warm that up to kind of introduce the new domain to the IP. So, I mean, I feel like I feel like this is a little bit of a controversial thing on, on the internet, people feel differently. I feel like it’s good to, to still warm it. But I don’t think that it necessarily needs to be as extensive as if you were doing a dedicated IP.

Yeah. And how would you define like warming an IP? Yeah. So, I mean, warming an IP you don’t want to, like, get out there and just start sending to a lot of people and a lot of non engage people, for example. So when you’re warming it you want to you want to start small. You want to start with your most engaged records. That already you know appreciating hearing from you essentially. And then over time you want to increase how many you’re sending, in terms of the volume of emails, but also the amount of recipients. So it’s much more nuanced than that. That’s kind of like the short of it in my mind. We also, I should mention we have deliverability consultants who can help with a IP warming plan. It is a paid engagement. I should, set that that expectation. But yeah, that’s. Yeah, I mean, that’s how I define it as well. I think back in, you know, when I started out, people were talking warming IP and I was like, listen, I don’t know what that means. But, yeah, especially if you’re migrating from maybe another platform to Marketo. I would do your best to, to migrate and send emails to the most engaged individuals first. Who’s opened your emails? Who’s going to your emails? Who hasn’t unsubscribed or hasn’t ignored you for a while? And and then move out from there like in a phased approach. So just I mean, that’s exactly what you just said. Okay. But that. Yeah, that from especially from migrations, I think it’s I think it’s really helpful.

Perfect. Thank you for that. See, next question from the registrations is what are some best practices around duping are you can share with us? I can take that one to start if you want.

I think that, I would say use, so especially if you use Salesforce or Dynamics, I know a large percentage of Marketo users also have Salesforce. Marketo kind of snaps to the architecture that you have in Salesforce. So if you have duplicates in Salesforce, you’re going to have to get some Marketo. Marketo basically just see that Salesforce is sending a lead over. It’s not going to look to an end to based on if Salesforce sends a lead. So if Salesforce sends a lead over Marketo, Marketo was like you say, it’s new lead to new lead for us to.

So because of that, if you do your do you do things through third party tools, lean data, chili, chili pepper.

Specifically in your CRM, your Marketo instance is also going to mirror that and respect that merge. So that’s one big thing. You know, like I’m a big fan of lean data. I think lean data is great. That’s what I’ve always used in the past. I know that there’s competing tools. Don’t just take my word for it. They don’t pay me to say that I, but I just I love their product. And you can look to leads and contacts if there’s, like, a new lead in contact and through a flowchart, like, merge them to existing individuals.

I think that’s one thing. I think the other thing I would really say is, like, it’s almost like a whack a mole, and sometimes you just have to sit down with a big old pot of coffee and just, like, grind through it and look at where, where did this duplicate come from? Who created this duplicate? Was it an API user in Marketo? Was it, manually added by a sales rep? Was it, you know, like you have to go through the way that that duplicate came in and then solve that issue first, or else you’re just going to be essentially playing whac-a-mole at that point where you’re just like merging and do merging and do merging and do and not looking at how they got out into the system.

Yeah. I mean, it’s a it’s a really common issue. And you just have to have a lot of like operational rigor around, around duplicates and what can and can’t happen in systems.

Yeah. Duplicates. I mean, I don’t think there’s a company out there that doesn’t have some struggle with duplicates at, like, some scale. But I agree, I think like understanding very clearly how duplicates can arise is important for prevention. And like James mentioned, just staying on top of it. Yeah. It’s not the most fun thing in the world to go. And, you know, mainly merge them or however you’re going to tackle it. But staying on top of it is really important so that when you do have to get in there, it’s not as like soul crushing, like not a huge volume.

And James would say this, but just like, really echoing you, you want you don’t want to keep digging yourself out of the same hole. You want to investigate what is causing these duplicates and like, stop the bleeding. You want to you want to fix it. For example, maybe, maybe a lot of them are coming from Salesforce, which is pretty common. And maybe you need to, you know, train the sales team that, hey, it’s really important to search for a record first, as opposed to creating it. Things like that. So yeah, staying on top of it, finding the causes, alleviating them. Yeah. For sure. They’re definitely an important step to. Yeah. Getting through and then keep it moving. Let’s see, the next question we have is how can we restrict user permissions to someone was able to edit the program. So we send send test emails to about 4 to 5 people but not mass emails.

I saw I was on the I was like, I have like, my dog is here and he can hear everything that happens all over the world. So he likes to market things. I’m just making sure, I always like to use an example. Let me look at the participants. We don’t have a Jeff in here. That’s great. I always say, like Jeff on the content team. Maybe you don’t want Jeff sending out the email to your whole database. You know, if it can happen, it it probably will happen. So I think that, I think that’s one thing that you want to be sure of. So you can create, like, a different role, for Jeff from the content team. You know what I’m talking about. When I said, Jeff, everyone has that person and they’re like, oh, yeah, it’s actually, you know, Sally or something like that.

But, everyone has a Jeff. You’re right. Robin. And so you want to create, like, it’s a specific role for Jeff essentially to not be able to execute smart campaigns. So that means that Jeff won’t be able to enable a campaign to send, Jeff also won’t be able to, you know, activate or deactivate a trigger campaign, things like that. So you’ll have to have your power user come in and double check Jeff’s work. This also could be someone who maybe is interning for you, and you want to teach them Marketo and have them start building out programs, or they’re, like, a bit more junior in their role. I think that, you know, those the systems of checks is, is super helpful. And the other thing you can do also is, is enforce campaign limits. So if you put, on the admin level, you put a campaign limit of, 10,000 so Jeff can send an email to provided that Jeff is in a power user role, Jeff can send an email to 9999 people as soon as that either batch campaign or smart campaign gets update gets over that 10,000 limit, you’ll have, either an admin or maybe we call like admin, like like a regional admin. Go in and edit that for the send specifically, and then bump it back down. So there’s a few ways to go about that. I think user roles are actually like the the most important way or like the most effective way to, to manage that. Okay. Did you have anything to add on that one? I think you covered that pretty well. The only thing that I was thinking is, you know, even if you don’t have a Jeff that you’re particularly concerned about, I still think that smart campaign limits are a great thing to set up regardless, just as kind of like a safety net, like a failsafe. Everybody can do it. It’s in the admin section of the Marketo account. You basically just put in like, a hard like a, a hard coded number. You know, you’ll want to kind of think about what makes the most sense for you. But our general rule of thumb would be like 25% of the database. So, yeah, just recapping, it’s even if you’re not worried about somebody going crazy, it’s a nice thing because accents do happen.

I mean, yeah, if you don’t put a smart filter in a smart campaign and it just pulls everyone through, you definitely want to fail safe there. Like if even if it’s like 100,000 people and your database is like 150,000, that would at least stop the that specific thing from happening.

Good to know. Classic Jeff. See the next question is is Marketo recommended for cold email marketing or is it primarily suited for other types of email campaigns? I would not recommend Marketo for cold email marketing, especially if you’re on a dedicated IP. Definitely. Marketo would be is more geared towards working with your engaged people. And you also want to keep in mind that, in, in like the contract that you sign, like you, you agree that you’re not going to, email me like purchase lists, which that’s kind of where my mind goes with cold email marketing. So we we would strongly recommend that you’re kind of taking consent, like agreement into consideration and only emailing the people that have consented, that have agreed to receive your corresponding.

Yeah. Yeah. Agreed on that. I think like that kind of leads into, you know, in anything with with like GDPR, Castle canned spam, things like that, like in a preference center. I think all of those are pretty essential for, like, you. Yeah. You have to have consent to email someone. Now. Yeah. The I think the only thing outside of that is and this is all like, we also got a question about, about GDPR and, and doing, preference centers, which are we can totally chat about that. The I think one of the most important things is talk to your legal team like you, like, you know, can people call the email? Sure. Can sales reps do it? Sure can they like, is that like a different type of communication? Probably. Can your marketing team do it? That’s I mean, you talk to your legal team. What case said about purchasing lists like there’s we do have some like some strict boundaries around that. But yeah, other than that totally echo say okay. Yeah. And, I didn’t even think about it from a like a legal perspective. And I’m not a lawyer, but, like but the legal definition between cold email and spam is, is a little, a little murky. So it’s definitely something to to be, fearful about. Sure. Sure. Good call. Let’s see, does Marketo use its own software for sending emails, or is the volume of emails sent depending on the strength of the sending domain? Speaking of emails. It’s definitely a question for James being on the marketing team at one point.

Yeah. So I mean, I’m no longer in the marketing team, for for Adobe or Marketo. But we yeah, we, we did, and I and we still do, we have a lot of large, enterprise customers who, who utilize Marketo as well, who have databases in the tens of millions. So there’s certainly, yeah, there’s there’s certainly customers who do it. A lot of them are on dedicated apps. Probably all of them, if they’re ever in like that big of a range. But Marketo certainly has a processing power to do that. I don’t think that they’re we’ve really had any issues outside of that. I think I think a big piece of that is like sending to people who you have consent to send to so that you don’t get marked as spam.

Because the more that that, like, you can get some domain hits that essentially are not great.

So I think, I think that’s a big piece of it. However, like processing power, Marketo shouldn’t have an issue with that. If you’re looking at, databases in the tens of millions, you’re probably a good candidate for like, performance tier increases to make sure that or being on like a dedicated pod, you know, you can share it and you can share pods, for, like server pods, for instance. So as you move up and want to be able to scale a lot of that and process more and more and send more and more emails, I think definitely, something to look at, if you’re in that realm. But I mean, single digit millions for database. No problem. It’s an interesting question. I feel like I’m always curious to know if different, you know, companies are using their own softwares. Yeah. I mean, and there’s some of, that, like, some of our add ons are really good for, really good for like more small to medium businesses. And some of them are great for for like enterprise businesses and we’re very honest about that. I think that, you know, we’ve just we’ve just switched, a few of our technologies, actually, and there’s going to be challenges, obviously, with the like a the bigger a corporation is, the more like red tape and the more things that you have to go through. Whereas if you’re a 100 person tech company and you’re like moving fast and breaking things and improving on those things that you broke and then like, that’s kind of the the nature, then I think that there’s there’s a lot more opportunity to like, use things in-house. But that’s not to say we don’t use it because we absolutely do.

Perfect. And to kind of go along with that, we received a question in the chat, I think could be relevant for that as well. The question is we implemented dynamic chat early this year, but we saw low engagement. Do you have any recommendations to increase engagement with the chat bot? I love to hear that your, that you implemented it. That’s great. Yeah, I think I think it depends. I mean, without knowing more about, like what? How you’re using it and what the low engagement is. But I would start there. I would kind of look at, you know, what pages are we using it on? Are there more optimal pages that we could be trying this? What am I, asking for in the chat? Am I keeping it simple? Maybe just asking for their email? With, like, a strategy of trying to get the other pieces, you know, later on, maybe from forums or what have you. So kind of like, are we are we asking for too much? Is it too much of a, a barrier to entry? I don’t know if that’s the right term. When are like, when are we flagging it or is it immediate? Are we letting them, you know, read for a little bit? Who are we sending it to? Are we or, like, deploying that to I mean, like, is it is it appropriate for our customers or not so much. And it’s more appropriate for prospects. So I think, I know that’s maybe not the most, like, concrete helpful answer, but I think it’s investigating what’s happening and kind of experimenting with different ways to optimize. Yeah, I know that was a live question. So I don’t know, James, if you had any different thoughts. The only not different spots is just an addition, like, probably considering like, what does low engagement look like? Sometimes it’s the nature of your, your audience as well. Like when I worked for K through 12 at Tech Company, a lot of our the people who visit our site were teachers. Teachers don’t buy our products. IT directors do. So it was like we would get good engagement from teachers. But that doesn’t help us entirely because they’re not the ones that make those decisions.

Especially for, you know, a whole school district’s technology. So I think that there’s there’s certain things to think about, like, do you have low engagement with, like, influencers in your buying cycle, or do you have low engagement with the decision makers? What are some industry benchmarks? What were you expecting to have for engagement, like conversions and things like that? But yeah. And then another thing is like, you could be setting them straight to the bottom of the funnel, like, here, check out this demo. Or request a live demo that’s personalized to you when they’re like, hey, I just want to know a little bit more high level about, like, what your company does and, and about this industry. So it could be a good thing to change up the, the, the offering and like the delivery with that. And see if that might help.

Awesome. Thank you. Let’s see next on the registration questions. Kind of a general one here, but what what do you have? What best practices do you have in terms of keeping a database clean? Yeah, because this was a pre-registration question. I think you we were able to put in a little visual for this, so I think it’s easier to, for you than to kind of like, work on on you. Let’s see if I’m able to work this UI to get to my slide.

Okay. So hopefully you can see this. Okay. It is, a big image. So I know it’s maybe a little hard to break to, to read. But backing up. So it’s definitely important to, to take data management serious in your Marketo instance. And you need to have, data management. Or you should have a data management program, kind of an operational program that’s helping maintain the cleanliness of your instance. So what I have on the screen right here, we as of about a year ago, we have a brand new best practice library available for all customers where you can import program templates directly into your Marketo instance. There’s I think 19 of them.

This one is operational, but we also have like trade shows, more like marketing efforts. Anyway, back to the the matter at hand here. This one is a great starting place if you don’t already have something.

I don’t know how to make it bigger for me. Okay, there we go. So you can see that in here. There’s some smart campaigns for capturing person source, which is really important for understanding your database and reporting. There’s also smart campaign for normalization. For example, there’s the United States because you don’t want your data to, you know, want James to be listed as the United States and need to be listed as U.S. So you can kind of use these as examples and grow from there. So for example, maybe you, have a lot of mismatch in job titles or states like Washington or TWA, things like that. You can expand on this using it as an example.

There’s record management block listed as a system field where if you set a record to block listed, they will not receive anything, even if it’s an operational email. So maybe you want to do that for your competitors or, I don’t know if I see people on social media that you don’t want to add any fuel to the fire. There’s also a smart campaign for setting to partner because it’s nice to have, like a field to isolate your partners because maybe they don’t need certain funds.

So really, what I’m what I’m saying here is you definitely want to have a program because some of these things are not going to happen automatically. And, you can you can start with this even if you already have something, you can import it and maybe, you know, steal some pieces, that you don’t have.

But yeah, I think I love that this question was asked because definitely your mind is in the right spot of trying to be proactive and and keeping everything nice and tidy. Yeah. You get out of this. James, is there anything that you want to add aside from the program library? Yeah. Program libraries. Good. I think you have to consider what your CRM and. But, like, integrated technologies except as data. So, like, as you said, with like your state is WA instead of Washington. That might fail a Salesforce sync because Salesforce has a restricted picklist and you can’t like, override it. So those are things to keep an eye on. But yeah, it can just affect that down down funnel. Like you get a really qualified lead in and then all of a sudden like it’s through like the Facebook integration, they put someone in in Facebook, it like defaults to the two letter. And and then Salesforce wants the full name. So you just have to really be careful with that. And, and then you’re into the like you’re off to the races essentially with like this race condition of like this lead came in, we’re passing it to Salesforce. What happens in that like ten minutes and it’s presence in in Marketo. There’s a comment in the chat. Always always check with your Salesforce admin. Yes. Absolutely. Right. Yeah. You don’t already have a relationship with the admin. You’re definitely going to want to start one. Yeah, totally. Take them out to lunch every week if you can. It’s you’re you’re going to ask them for so much. So.

I’m going to get all Salesforce admin Jeff. Same. Next session we have this I would like to know how the experts organize their lifecycle stages and funnel and what programs they use to move people through that funnel.

Could you walk us through that? Yeah, yeah I can. So, that that was what, I built in, in our internal Marketo instance for selling Marketo. So, you know, I think the, I think the lifecycle is something that, it’s really hard to get it right and perfect. And it’s, similar to a lot of other technologies and pieces like scoring. Like, you have to do it a couple times to know, okay, this is why I don’t do something like that. So I think the first thing and, I mean, I could spend forever on this, and I won’t, but, try to keep it for, like, a couple minutes. The first thing I would look at is like a will never buy bucket. And that’s, going with what Kate was talking about with the I mean, essentially, those are like people who can’t literally can’t buy your product. So for Marketo, it could be like students.

It could be competitors, it could be employees. They just they don’t work for a company that can buy your products. So put them in the will never buy a bucket. And then when you reach your compliance limit, for the number of leads you have, look at that bucket first and see can we just delete these people? The answer is probably yes. The second piece is I like to create a, a default program that essentially has a status in that program within your channel tags, of every single status in the life cycle. That way you can see is there a mismatch between like if someone is in an opportunity and their leads statuses, their contact status is opportunity. But we don’t recognize that they’re in they’re in an opportunity in our life cycle program that would indicate that we’re missing something, that we’re not triggering off of the right thing. That’s coming over from the CRM, whether it’s Salesforce or Dynamics. So things like that. And I think the last piece that I’ll mention with that is to have, I mean, you want to have a success path. So that’s like the ideal path of a lead getting created. They engage, you become qualified lead, they get accepted, they get pushed into an opportunity and they’re close one. So now they’re a customer. So that’s a success path. And you don’t want people move backward in that path. If they get accepted they couldn’t. They can’t go back to Mql from there they can get recycled. So they can drop out of that and like get disposition or the opportunity, let’s say, is close loss. And they get pushed over to recycled from that. They can then bubble back up after a certain amount of time. But you really want to have that success path defined and not allow people to go backwards in that, because that’s when you start messing with the date fields. You know, if you have a date field, you should have a date field for each of those stats. And so you can see how long does it take for someone to go from Mql to Sal, for example? You know, is that six days too long, like you reps should be able to take a look at that and work within an SLA of like a couple days or a few hours, whatever it is like. We send you a lead, you determine whether you’re going to be calling this lead or not. And then from that to qualified, like, how long does it take for a lead to be qualified? Can we speed that up? Do we need to slow down. So really like it’s hard to do it right. I would say if you haven’t done it before and you need to implement it, it’s really worth spending like a bit of your budget if you have one. I know that’s like a lofty expectation that people have budgets. A lot of people in Mops don’t, but spend that some of that budget on an expert to do your life cycle. We if you have any questions of who to recommend, I have tons of recommendations, but, it’s definitely something that has a lot of gotchas. So that’s what. That’s what I would recommend. Okay. I know you’ve looked at a lot of life cycles. I hope I kept that been a certain amount of time. Yeah. I mean, life cycles are that it’s definitely not a one size fits all. So we can’t really be like, have these stages have these be the criteria because it does. It varies by industry. But even within industry it varies by different businesses and how they how they run and what their kind of their funnel is. So it’s hard to kind of give a prescriptive recommendation there. But I think it comes, you know, back down to just really sitting down and mapping out what that journey is and being in agreement, not just within marketing, but with sales as well. Right. Because if you can’t be in disagreement on what an Mql is, right, that’s just going to cause friction and and problems. So a lot of partnership and defining what that is before you even start building, if you don’t have your life cycle built out, in Marketo already.

So I think just taking the time and like understanding that it’s not going to be the type of task that you just sit down and bust out in an afternoon, it’s going to take a little bit more thought and a little bit more time. And that’s okay because but because it is worth it.

Awesome. Thank you. Let’s see. This question we have is what is the maximum number of emails we can send through a single email account in Marketo? It’s makes me wonder what what this person is planning.

So, the, the kind of the, the benchmarks for this, if you will. They are published online on Adobe’s website. But generally, unless you’ve purchased, a higher performance tier, I think is how we refer to it generally. Best case scenario, it would be a max of 1 million, emails per per hour. Is kind of the the general, I can’t think of the word, but general rate. We’ll use that word. Yeah. I mean. We are we have some very large customers.

I think as you, as you said there, we have a lot of that published online. We have, if it’s a concern, we have, higher limits that can be purchased for, like, batch, emails. I like 3 to 5 million per hour. But if you’re sending more than a million per hour, I think that there’s hopefully there’s nothing wrong with the lists. First of all. But that’s a pretty big that’s a pretty big list. I would say. Also makes me think of dedicated IPS, if you are, you know, sending that money, you might want to be on a dedicated IP or like at least be talking about it.

Okay. For sure. Let’s see. We have blocked a lot of clients from our instance, as we do not want them receiving marketing emails. Can we set up a separate work area that doesn’t keep the same suppression list, so that we can email clients? Yeah, I have a slide for this one as well. Which is pretty, I mean, it has like a dumpling on it and I’m hungry, so, but, this is, this is something that I had, presented on previously, but I generally think that there’s three buckets of people in your database that email, you have your marketing communications. So it’s like, hey, we’re doing a webinar. Hey, come join us at this event. Download this piece of content, whatever it is that you’re sending off, marketing, and then you have your customer messaging. So, hey, we need to, basically let you know that we’re doing this, this and this, or we are we’re excited that you’re on board. We want to send you in an adoption nurture. And then you have your urgent operational, alerts. So if, let’s say your, Marketo goes down or something like that, we need to email people that are Marketo admins and say, hey, market is down. We’re looking into it. I don’t care if you’ve unsubscribed. We have a business relationship and I have an obligation to send you urgent messaging. So I think that, there’s a few things you basically want to build your marketable lists around that’s like your marketing communications. They could be customers, they could be prospects, but they’re not unsubscribed. They have a valid email address. They’ve opted into your communications. You have the consent to reach out to them. And then your customer messaging is like their customer and they’re not unsubscribed. And, we’re sent. It’s just a completely different message. Essentially, that you’re sending them because you don’t want to send that message. The prospects. And then obviously your urgent operational alerts are marketing emails operational. So even if they’re unsubscribed, you know, even if they’re, they’re email invalid or marketing suspended, whatever it may be, we’re still going to send them that email.

That, you know, I think that I’ve worked in organizations where there is another bucket of people that you never contact, which I was also trying to, like, delete them from Marketo if that was the case. But it was it was like, this is an organization. They’ve asked us this part of the contract who wrote it into. We never emailed them for marketing urgent alerts. Whatever it is like our CSM is handling that relationship. Do not email them at all. I would probably will email Marketo just so you don’t mess anything up.

So yeah, exactly. Give them the boot. But yeah, I think in general, like these are the three buckets that people can, can, can fall into. Okay. Would you, would you add anything on this? I would just, highlight the marketing suspended. You mentioned that, but I would just kind of double down on that is another system field and Marketo, in case anybody’s not, familiar. But basically, if you set somebody as marketing suspended, that tells Marketo that they will not receive any, you know, promotional, any marketing emails, but they would still receive any emails that are, that are marked as operational. So kind of Jim’s was talking about like emergency use. But even like beyond that, like, like transactional emails, like, you know, maybe they, they sign up for a webinar. They’re, they’re obviously expecting to hear from you. Right. So if you’re not taking advantage of the marketing suspended system field, it sounds like this would be, would be helpful in this situation. It was described in the question.

Yeah. I think the, the only other thing I would add to this is don’t build this into a segment, because you can have people in, like the customer messaging and a marketing communication bucket. It’s more of like a Venn diagram between those two. An example being like you want to send, and I guess you could build it into a segmentation, but someone’s going to fall in, you know, you have to be able to, to prioritize that, like with the waterfall appropriately. But if you’re let’s say we’re doing a Denver event, we’re doing a happy hour. We want prospects and customers to join for that. So if you want to send to one segment for that, then that would be, because segments are mutually exclusive from one another. So, yeah, I think just like be really careful how you build that out.

Awesome. Thank you. Right. We’re nearing time, so I think we have time for one more question, and we’ll use that to ask. What are some best practices you have to improve the Marketo Salesforce Sync.

Classic. A big question for the last four minutes. I mean take it away James. Yeah. Thanks. I brevity is not my strong suit. So we get this, we get this question a lot. We work with our customers a lot. If you have an issue with the sync and you want us to, like, help you out with that and kind of point you in the right direction, reach out to your CSM or your Sam, solution account manager. We’re happy to chat about it. I think, the high level is to, don’t give the Marketo sync user and Salesforce admin access. That means that they’ll be able to see all the fields and all objects, and it’s just like a complete flooding of data into your Marketo instance. They need to have their own profile so that you can effectively, effectively select which fields they have access to. You know, the more data that gets changed in Salesforce, if it’s a if it’s not a formula field, but it’s an actual field that gets updated, market is going to bring that over. So you’ll see if you go, let’s say it’s I mean in this scenario it’s SDC if you go to admin and then Salesforce and sync status, if you see that some of those objects are pulling in like 10,000 or 9000, updates, that means you likely have a backlog and you need to hide some fields in the Marketo sync user. Because it’s it’s unsustainable to let that backlog go through.

That’s all I’ll say on that. But let’s if you ask that question and you want to chat further about it, I’m super happy to.

Anything to add. On? Okay. I think I’m gonna leave. Leave that one untouched. It’s it’s pretty broad. But yeah, I think, you know, reach out. Also, something that I, that we haven’t said is, that nation, the kind of the community where people post that, like, I’m really impressed how active it is there. So you can always maybe your questions been asked. But if not, definitely put it out there. Like a lot of people really love to respond. I think it’s kind of like competitive in a sense. So definitely don’t don’t accept that. Yeah. Let them continue over you. Yeah. Or or like or like try to answer your own question with the wrong answer. Because people like people like correcting others. I saw that somewhere, and I was like, so smart.

Yeah, for sure. There’s some legends in the community there. Yeah, a lot of really smart people.

Awesome. Speaking of smart people. Thank you both for joining us today. And while you screw all of these questions that we see from everybody, so I want to just quickly wrap us up for today, on this screen. There we go. On this screen, we have some resources for you in the weblink section. And you’ll also find the white paper. So please don’t forget to download that on your way out, as well as fill out our survey questions below. Let us know if you’d like more info on Marketo and if any of the features that we talked about today in the presentation. Any questions there? Any questions we weren’t able to get, to today? Please feel free to reach out to your solutions account manager. If you’re not sure who that is, you can reach out to me directly and I will put you in touch with the correct person.

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That’s, honestly, that’s all for us today. Thank you all for attending. Thank you so much again. Kane and James, for joining us today. And, leading us here and for everyone in attendance and listening at home. Have a great day, and we look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events. Thank you very much. Thank you. See you later.