A-B-C, Easy As 01-02-03: A Guide to Numbering Your Program Tokens

Amy_Goldfine
Level 10 - Champion Alumni
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Marketo Engage’s program templates and tokens are the backbone of a scalable marketing operations Center of Excellence. A robust template library will help you quickly and accurately implement webinars, gated content, events, and more. The more you can tokenize your program templates, the less time that you have to spend editing individual emails and landing pages.

 

However, managing a large number of program tokens can start to feel overwhelming. And the automatic sorting into alphabetical order is not usually the most logical way to order your tokens. Case in point: “E” comes before “S,” but “Start Time” precedes “End Time.” How many times have you accidentally transposed start and end times when copying token values into your program tokens?!

 

You can keep your tokens organized by forcing Marketo to sort them in the way that makes sense to you—by numbering them! This article will walk you step-by-step through implementing a numbered token strategy. We’ll use a webinar as an example, since they tend to be very token-heavy.

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Step 1: Source of Truth 

 

One of the keys to an effective Center of Excellence is to have a single location where all the key information for your Program is documented. We call this a “Creative Brief” at my current company, and we just clone a Google Doc template. You may use a spreadsheet, a form, or even a ticketing system. The result should be one place that is the “source of truth” for the Program. For example, it would contain the webinar title, day, date, speaker names, speaker titles, landing page URL, etc.

 

Ideally, your “source of truth” doc should group the tokens into logical sections. For example, the first section would have the logistics of the webinar, the second would have all the speaker info, the third would have the abstract, etc.

 

Numbered Tokens - Creative Brief.png

 

I’ve attached our webinar Creative Brief template as an example at the bottom of this post.

 

Step 2: Determine Token Order

 

Clone your webinar program template so that you can work on the new template without messing up your existing one. From the My Tokens tab, select all (CMD+A on a Mac, CTRL+A on a PC), and paste into a blank spreadsheet. Delete the unnecessary rows and columns so you just have your tokens, and double check that all your tokens copied over.

 

Compare your tokens to your “source of truth” doc, and order the spreadsheet rows in the same order as the source of truth. 

 

Step 3: Number Your Spreadsheet

 

This is where you need to plan for the future. It’s tempting to just start adding “01” to the front of your first token and go straight through. However, that doesn’t leave any room for future additional tokens in each group. It’s better to leave unused numbers after a section and skip to the next multiple of 10. For example, our first set of tokens go from "01 Title" to "10 Body Copy". The next set starts with "20 Speaker 1 Name". If we need to add another token with webinar logistics, we have space between 10 and 20.

 

Step 4: Update Your Program Template

 

Once you’ve worked out your token numbers, go back to your new Marketo program template and edit your token names to include the numbers.

Numbered Tokens - Tokens Screenshot.png

 

Step 5: Edit Your Assets

 

Carefully go through each email and landing page in your program template, and edit the tokens to match your new names. Don’t forget any tokens hidden behind hyperlinked text or buttons. Make sure to preview all your assets carefully to make sure that you haven’t missed any.

 

Numbered Tokens - Email.png

 

Once you’ve finished this template, review the rest of your templates and repeat the process to number any other token-heavy templates. May you never transpose start and end times again!

 

Many thanks to my coworker Matt Greenbaum for his work on our source of truth documents and template/token strategy.

 

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4 Comments
Chris_Willis1
Level 8 - Champion

Really helpful.  This is the ideal way to set up best practice program templates IMO

Vinay_Kumar
Level 9 - Community Advisor

Informative

David_Gallaghe2
Level 5

Important Call Out

It is implied above and I wanted to make sure to call out that tokens used for email links should never contain"http://" or "https://", they should only include the url portion that follows. If the HTTP/HTTPS is included in your token, your links will work but will not be tracked as the href did not start with "http".

 

For Secure Links:

<a href="https://{{my.06 URL}}">CTA</a>

For Standard Links:

<a href="http://{{my.06 URL}}">CTA</a>

 

I got hit with this early on and love using tokens in this manner. Just want to make sure no one makes the same "green" mistake I did all those years ago.

 

-David

David_Gallaghe2
Level 5

@Amy - This article is friggen great!!!

 

Here is Another iteration...

of @Amy's methodology which adds categories and the use a two-digit gapped numbering sequence vs an n+1 approach. This enables the addition of new tokens as necessary without disrupting the ordering of what is already there . ie: (n+10 approach) 10, 20, 30, 40 etc. Now you can add items in between ie 15, then another item between 10 and 15 as needed :D.

 

Using tokens in this manner can add complexity as pre-planning and testing is crucial. Once you uncover what can be tokenized and deploy, really any methodology - just make sure its based on your business case - you will gain huge speed advantages, enable draftless updates and for some of you, the ability to directly inject localizations... 

 

Do your discovery, figure out where things are repetitive and/or prone to change or error and map out your tokens accordingly. Note that Rich Text Tokens will not render in text only emails so you will need to create a text only token anytime you plan on using rich text tokens.

Example

For complex campaigns/webinars etc -  i've leveraged things like this in the past. These are for example only.

 

EM Detail 10 - Send From Name

EM Detail 12 - Send From Address

EM Detail 14 - Reply To Address

EM Detail 16 - Subject

EM Content 10 - Headline

EM Content 20 - CTA Text

EV Detail 10 - Name

EV Detail 20 - Date - Long

EV Detail 22- Time

EV Detail 24 - Date - Day

EV Detail 26 - ICS

LP Content 10 - Title

LP Content 20 - CTA Text

LP Detail 10 - Meta Title

LP Detail 12 - Meta Keywords

URL 10 - CTA - Reg LP

URL 12 - CTA - Reg Followup LP

URL 20 - CTA - Post Event LP

_CODE 10 - Head CSS

_CODE 15 - Head JS

_CODE 20 - Body Open JS

_CODE 90 - Body Close JS

 

PS: "_ " are used like "z" to kick certain items to the end... 😄