Since people now live in Slack, the out-of-the-box email alerts sent by Marketo are outdated and notifications need to be sent to Slack for the most timely follow up from Sales and Marketing teams. In this post I will walk through the Marketo Slack integration where webhooks from Marketo are sent to Slack containing the message to be shared in a direct message or a channel.
If you want to learn how to set up webhooks in Marketo, see different use cases, and how to troubleshoot issues then check out the Webhook Guide with Examples.
Slack has become the dominant internal communication tool within may companies with email falling into the shadows, inboxes going monitored, and unread email count growing. We want to make follow-up from our Sales and Marketing team as convenient as possible a) so that they actually do it and b) they can follow up on these notifications as soon as possible.
Therefore, instead of sending Marketo email alerts that will go unread or not be looked at in time, it is much better to integrate Marketo and Slack so that you can send messages directly to individuals or channels in Slack, where people can be tagged for follow-up or communication continued in the thread.
The first step needed to integrate Slack with Marketo is to create an App for Marketo (don’t worry this is not as intimidating as it sounds!) in Slack following these steps:
You will need this “Webhook URL” later on in Marketo when setting up the destination for the webhook.
Follow these steps below to create a webhook to integrate with Slack:
What is included in the “Template” field will depend on what information you are trying to send to Slack. I have included an example template below where lead and company tokens are used to populate the message body based on information submitted to a contact sales form (see how you can send notifications from Marketo to Slack for form submissions in the “Trigger Sending from Marketo to Slack” section below).
N.B. If you are looking for a general introduction to tokens and how they can save you time when building your emails, webhooks, and smart campaigns then check out the Great Use Cases for Tokens post.
You can also use trigger tokens within the payload of the webhook to provide context about the trigger that caused the smart campaign to run (especially useful if the smart campaign has multiple triggers). If you want an example of how to do this and a refresher on trigger tokens then check out the Trigger Tokens Example Usage post.
One cool addition to this template are the “Lead Link MKTO” and the “Lead Link SFDC” links that use lead tokens to pull in a person’s Marketo and SFDC ID into URL paths so that links to the person’s Marketo and SFDC records can be opened right from the message in Slack.
Pretty neat right!
N.B. If the person is created by a form fill in Marketo and has not yet synced to SFDC then the SFDC ID will be empty and the link will not work.
Once you know what event you want to send notifications to Slack for and what information is available via lead, company, or trigger tokens after the event, then you can insert similar tokens into your webhook template using the “Insert Token” buttons when creating or editing the webhook.
If you want to make your message look real fancy like then you can use the advanced formatting features that Slack offers.
{
"text": "\n\nContact Sales Form Fill\n\n
Name: {{Lead.First Name}} {{Lead.Last Name}}\n
Email: {{Lead.Email Address}}\n
Phone: {{Lead.Phone Number}} \n
Company Website: {{company.Website}}\n\n
Reason for Contact: {{lead.Reason for Contact}}\n
Budget: {{lead.Form - Budget}} \n
Use Case: {{lead.Form - Use Case}} \n
Additional Information: {{lead.Form - Additional Information}}\n\n
Person Status: {{lead.SFDC Type}}\n
Account Status: {{company.SFDC Type}}\n
Lead Owner: {{lead.Lead Owner First Name}} {{lead.Lead Owner Last Name}}\n
Lead SDR: {{lead.SDR Name (Formula) (C)}}\n
Account Owner: {{company.Account Owner First Name}} {{company.Account Owner Last Name}}\n
Account SDR: {{company.SDR Name (Formula)}}\n\n
Lead Source: {{lead.Lead Source}}\n
Lead Source Detail: {{lead.Lead Source Detail}}\n
Querystring: {{lead.Querystring}}\n
UTM Source: {{lead.utm_source}}\n
UTM Medium: {{lead.utm_medium}}\nUTM Campaign: {{lead.utm_campaign}}\n\n
Lead Link MKTO: https://app-ab20.marketo.com/leadDatabase/loadLeadDetail?leadId={{Lead.Id}}\n
Lead Link SFDC: https://telnyx.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Lead/{{lead.SFDC Id}}/view"
}
Now that you have your webhook and message crafted it is finally time to complete the Marketo Slack integration by calling this webhook from a trigger based smart campaign.
The smart campaign shown in the images below will trigger whenever the contact sales form is filled out and then it is as easy as calling the webhook we previously created within the flow of the smart campaign.
Now that you have completed the Marketo Slack integration and have gotten a taste for what webhooks can do, see how you can expand your webhook toolbox even further by checking out the Webhook Guide with Examples post to see how to:
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