Everything you need to know about the Marketo-Qualtrics Integration

[Natalie_Kremer]

The Marketo-Qualtrics Integration provides a great framework for sending your survey invites out of Marketo, tracking the results as custom activities in Marketo, and triggering Marketo campaigns off those responses.

SET THE GROUNDWORK

Before you get started there’s some key components that need to be set-up in Marketo and Qualtrics. Follow the steps in the Marketo Integration Basic Overview to set-up the integration, create a new API user, and more.

SEND YOUR SURVEY INVITES

Once the integration is set-up, you can start Sending Invites Through Marketo. By sending your survey invitations through Marketo you ensure the email observes your communication limits and all opt-out regulations are followed.

As a part of this process you can set-up personal links for your survey. This allows you to embed certain Marketo fields as Embedded Data within the personalized URL and send it behind the scenes to the Qualtrics survey. This means you no longer need to waste precious survey fields on information you already have like:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Company Name
• Email Address

SET UP CUSTOM ACTIVITIES

In addition to sending your survey with Marketo, you are also able to set-up Custom Activities in Marketo to store your survey results in Marketo. This allows for your complete survey results to get pushed into Marketo and you can trigger additional actions off the completion of the survey or a specific answer.

TRIGGERING CAMPAIGNS BASED ON RESULTS

Think about how you can use your survey results to provide the customer with a better experience:

• Is there something you can alert Sales or the survey owner of?
• Is there additional information you can provide the customer?
• Are there other ways you want to provide sales feedback based off the results?
• How can you use the information for future campaigns?

There are three filters you can use in your Smart List:

Here are some ways you might use your survey data in Marketo:

Send Alert

Send an automated alert to Sales or the survey owner to let them know of an account that may need attention or an answer that may need specific follow-up.

Send the Customer Additional Information

Based on a customer’s response, you can send them an additional email with more information or enter them into a specific marketing campaign catered to their needs.

Add Information to Salesforce

If a customer’s response doesn’t require action, you can add an Interesting Moment to SFDC or push them to a specific Salesforce Campaign, which will allow the rep to see that someone completed the survey as a part of their activity with your campaigns.

Segment for Future Campaigns

You can use the information on the customer’s survey for future campaigns. This could be as simple as sending anyone who completed a survey a specific email or capturing the answer to a specific question to build a list of customers based on that interest.

[Michelle_Tang3]

We are evaluating this tool! Good to know it can integrate with Marketo.

[Beth_Massura]

Super helpful to know! We had been using Qualtrics surveys quite a bit, and used a reusable custom field in Marketo to import PURLs generated by Qualtrics. And then to send reminders to those who hadn't taken the survey, we had to do a static list import for the contacts who did fill out the survey as an exclusion list. Sounds like this integration would save some of these steps and enable additional communications in Marketo based on the responses.

[PSS]

We're in conversation with Qualtrics as we've discovered the way their integration passes the unique survey url to the Marketo lead field - isn't best practice.  The issue is that links placed into emails by a token are not being tracked and do not show successful click activity in the lead/person record.

Current Issue

When Marketo sends emails, you can think of building the email in 2 steps:

1. Marketo searches the email code for "http" or "https" and wraps the tracking code around the URL
2. Marketo inserts the values of {{tokens}} into the email.

If the {{token}} value is http://www.myssurveylink.com, that would be expected to not track because of the above 2 steps. After the {{token}} value is inserted, Marketo does not go back to wrap tracking code around http/https. The {{token}} doesn't look like a URL when the system applies the tracking code because the tokens don't pull the values in until the next step after.

The solution to tracking tokens is to place http:// or https:// on the outside of the token, like such:

http://{{token}}

That way, when Marketo builds the email, in step #1, the system recognizes the http and knows it's a URL. Then the tracking is wrapped around the http and the {{token}} as well. Then in step #2, the {{token}} value is inserted into an already-wrapped link.

Keep in mind is that if the {{token}} value contains http, but http is on the outside of the {{token}}, the link will break. Let's say the URL you want to insert is http://www.myssurveylink.com. You have to move the http:// out in front of the {{token}}, but you don't want to also have it inside the {{token}} as well or your link ends up being http://www.myssurveylink.com

To get around this, you'll need to remember to take the http:// out of the {{token}} value.

{{http://www.domain.com}}

would instead be

http://{{www.domain.com}}

Our (short term!) solution - Pprovided by Qualtrics until they start parsing the URL without http / https

Here is a simple Email Script that removes 'https://' from a link and then outputs it in such a way that it will be tracked. It is written in Velocity script, a Java-based templating language. Of course, Velocity allows for many different ways to accomplish this task, the example being only 1 of them.  

In built is a fallback URL in case splitting the string doesn't work. It assumes the field that contains the full link has the API name "surveyLink", so the user should edit this field name to match their own field. Also, they should edit the link text and the fallback URL. 

#set ($fullUrl = ${lead.surveyLink})
#set ($myArray = $fullUrl.split("://"))
#if( $myArray.size().equals(2) )
#set ($trackableUrl = $myArray[1])
<a href="https://${trackableUrl}">Fill Out Survey</a>
#else
<a href="https://www.example.com">Fill Out Survey</a>
#end

To add UTM parameters (optional), they can do something like this : 

#set ($utmParams = "&utm_source=Marketo")
#set ($fullUrl = "$trackableUrl$utmParams")

<a href="https://${fullUrl}">Fill Out Survey</a>  

[SanfordWhiteman]

That Velocity code isn’t following proper coding practices (it doesn’t understand valid URL structure). The proper approach is here:

Creating trackable links even when a token includes “http://” or “https://”

[Conner_Hatfield]

Thank you for sharing, Natalie.