Integrating Clearbit with Marketo

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Connecting Clearbit to your Marketo instance will provide a powerful foundation for your lead-scoring mechanism by enriching your leads with person and company-level information. This blog post will show you everything you need to know to set up your Clearbit Marketo integration.

Creating Clearbit API User In Marketo

The first step when setting up your Clearbit Marketo integration is to create a new API user for Clearbit in Marketo. To do this:

1. Navigate to Admin > Users & Roles
2. Click “Invite New User”
3. Put in a value like “clearbit@yourcompanydomain” e.g. clearbit@theworkflowpro.com, since the value of the email address does not matter for API users
4. Set “First Name” to “Clearbit”
5. Set “Last Name” to “Integration”
6. Populate the “Reason” field if desired e.g. “Used for enriching leads with Clearbit information”
7. Leave the “Access Expires” as never
8. Click “Next”
9. Select the “API User” role you have within your instance
   • If you do not yet have an API user role set up in your instance then you can follow this guide
10. Select the “API Only” checkbox
11. Click “Next”
12. Click “Send”

Creating a Clearbit API user in Marketo

 

Clearbit Marketo API Credentials

Now that we have an API user set up for Clearbit within Marketo we need to create a LaunchPoint service in order to get the API credentials that we will later need in the Clearbit platform. To do this:

1. Navigate to Admin>LaunchPoint
2. Select the “New Service” option from the “New” dropdown
3. Put “Clearbit Integration” as the “Display Name”
4. Select “Custom” as the service
5. Put “Used for enriching leads with Clearbit information” in the “Description” field
6. Select the Clearbit API user that we created in the previous section in the “API Only User” dropdown

Creating a LaunchPoint Service for Clearbit in Marketo

Once the Clearbit service has been created click on the “View Details” link beside the service and copy the “Client Id” and “Client Secret” values that appear in the pop-up window.

Then head over to the enrichment section in the Clearbit platform, click “Configure” on the Marketo tile, and paste in the “Client Id” and “Client Secret”.

To get the “Endpoint URL” go back to Marketo and then:

1. Navigate to “Admin” > “Web Services”
2. Scroll down to the “REST API” section
3. Copy the “Endpoint” URL

That’s it! That is all you need to set up your Clearbit Marketo integration.

Connecting Marketo within the Clearbit platform

Mapping Clearbit Attributes to Marketo Fields

Once your Clearbit Marketo integration is set up the next step is to map Clearbit attributes to Marketo fields. You can map your Marketo fields to 4 different Clearbit entities:

• Clearbit attributes which contain information about the person and their company
• Page view information such as page view totals over different time periods
• System traits such as when the person was last updated by Clearbit
• Custom traits from Clearbit Reveal

You then have 2 options for the “Overwrite preference”:

1. “Conditionally overwrite” will overwrite the Marketo field if it is blank, contains [[unknown]], or the last value in this field was populated by Clearbit i.e. it will not overwrite this field if the value was updated by Marketo or the CRM you have connected to Marketo.
2. “Always overwrite”

N.B. With Boolean fields you will only have the “Always Overwrite” option since Boolean fields do not have a null/blank value.

Mapping Marketo fields to Clearbit attributes

You also have the option to create “Groups” where either all of the fields will be populated by Clearbit if Clearbit has values for all of the mapped attributes or none of them will be populated. A good example of where you might want to do this is for a company’s address fields i.e. Street, State, Postal Code, and Country.

Creating a field mapping group within Clearbit

Defining Your Selective Enrichment Criteria

The selective enrichment section is where you define which leads from your Marketo instance can be enriched by Clearbit. This is important because you do not want to waste credits enriching leads unnecessarily e.g. if they have been disqualified by your sales team, they have a freemail address etc. As shown in the image below you can use conditional “AND” and “OR” logic with your Marketo fields to define your enrichment criteria.

Selective enrichment criteria

Note that while Clearbit can sometimes associate freemail addresses with the company that the person works for this is a rare occurrence so it is up to you whether you want to spend credits enriching freemails.

Clearbit Marketo Live Enrichment

Once you enable “Lead Enrichment” all the leads entering your Marketo database from this point onward that meet your enrichment criteria will be enriched and any future data updates for these leads will be pushed by Clearbit in batches to Marketo at regular intervals.

If you want to have new leads enriched immediately upon creation in Marketo then you can send a webhook to Clearbit to let it know there is a new lead to be enriched (see the “Creating Your Clearbit Marketo Webhook” section below). If you do not need leads to be enriched immediately upon creation then there is no need to send a webhook to Clearbit, Clearbit will identify and update any new leads in batches at regular intervals.

Once your Clearbit enrichment is up and running you can use the “Enchiment logs” tab to search for any leads from your Marketo instance to see what information Clearbit found about them.

Enrichment logs in Clearbit

 

Clearbit Marketo Backfill Enrichment

Since turning on the “Lead Enrichment” feature will only enrich and update leads that entered your database after “Lead Enrichment” was turned on we need to use the “Backfill Enrichment” option to make Clearbit enrich historic records. Once leads have been through “Backfill Enrichment” Clearbit will continue to update these leads as fresh data becomes available.

Note that in the previous marketo.clearbit.com app, it was possible to select a static list from Marketo so that you could selectively enrich or only backfill the people in that list. Unfortunately, list enrichment is no longer possible with the new Clearbit Marketo integration. However, one way to only backfill certain leads and not interfere with your selective enrichment criteria (which govern both live enrichment and backfilling) is to:

1. Create a new Boolean field e.g. Clearbit Backfill
2. Create a smart campaign to take the people defined in the smart list of this campaign and turn the “Clearbit Backfill” field to “true”
3. Add an “OR Clearbit Backfill = true” condition to whatever logic is already in your selective enrichment criteria

Defining the audience for backfilling

Setting the “Clearbit Backfill” field to true

Adding the “Clearbit BackFill” condition to existing enrichment filters

Creating Your Clearbit Marketo Webhook

By turning on the toggle for live enrichment any net new leads created in Marketo will be enriched by Clearbit on its regular schedule. If you don’t want to wait for the scheduled enrichment and want leads to be enriched immediately upon creation then you can send a webhook to Clearbit to let it know there is a new lead to be enriched.

Navigating to the “Settings” tab of the Marketo connection will allow you to copy the “Webhook URL” and “Webhook Authorization Header Value” you will need for creating the webhook in Marketo.

Then go to your Marketo instance and:

1. Navigate to Admin > Webhooks
2. Click “New Webhook”
3. Fill out the “Webhook Name” and “Description”
4. Paste in the “Webhook URL” copied from the Clearbit platform
5. Set the “Request Type” to “Get”
6. Set the “Response Type” to “None”

N.B. If you need a refresher on webhooks and want to check out some other cool uses for webhooks then take a look at the Webhook Guide with Examples blog post.

Marketo webhook settings in Clearbit

Once the webhook has been created:

1. Click on Webhook Actions > Set Custom Header
2. Click the “Add” icon
3. Put “Authorization” in the “Header” column
4. Paste in the “Bearer xxx” value you copied over from the Clearbit platform

Now that the Clearbit webhook has been created we can use it in the flow of a Marketo smart campaign to let Clearbit know when new leads are created. We can add filters to the smart list as shown in the image below if we only want to enrich certain leads immediately.

Note that although the leads may qualify for the smart list and call the Clearbit webhook, they will not be enriched if they do not pass the selective enrichment criteria you defined in the Clearbit platform. Similarly leads who do not run through the flow of this smart campaign may still be enriched at a later time if they pass the selective enrichment criteria.

Smart list to define leads needing immediate enrichment

Calling the Clearbit webhook

 

What’s After Your Clearbit Marketo Integration?

Now that you are enriching your Marketo leads with Clearbit information there is no better time to check out the Lead Scoring Bible post to see how you can score leads based on the different values they have for person and company-level fields.