I somehow ended up on the Israeli MUG LinkedIn group the other day and saw Itay ask about whether people used a program per collateral/asset. I told him I'd share with him how we're doing it at Planon via email, but I figure if I spend the time to help one person I should help everyone. So I moved it here instead.
When I first started we had 500 landing pages after 3 months using Marketo. So I worked with Eric H to create a javascript to dynamically serve assets by URL parameter. First this is really complicated for non-techie people to understand, even using a URL-builder & a snippet to hold the code, it proved to be a bit illusive for my colleagues to grasp. We happily used the system for nearly 2 years. Then people were concerned that users could put in fake email addresses, and the only real way to get their true address is to send them an email with their asset. That and for SEO purposes, having a single landing page wasn't helping out page ranking.
Over the past 4 months we have been building out this solution. We market in '6 languages' (2 english, 2 french, dutch & german).
First we created a channel per type of asset. This was mainly important for scoring that we could score product literature differently than an article or a case study. They all have the same statuses, Pre-Visit, Introduced, Visited, Downloaded & Shared.
The program itself a bit mirrors the statuses. Here's an example from the UK so people don't get confused by dutch.
Two Landing pages + an email along with 4 campaigns & a list. Here's the registration page & the email that comes once you register.
But of course to build on the true strengths of Programs, everything starts in the tokens section. The Landing pages & the email are nearly all tokens.
So here we have the link to the asset, the description of the asset, the link to the registration page, related assets (we'll get to this later), the title of the asset, the name used in tracking utm_campaign for google analytics, and the person sending the email.
Pro-Tip: As I said earlier we have 6 languages for each piece of collateral. We have between 50-300 pieces per language. If there's an asset campaign for each piece and then the Marketing Manager leaves. Someone has to go into every single program and update the name of the person sending out the email. No WAY! That would take a week! So instead we have the last two tokens, Sender-Email & Sender-Name. Then at the very very top level of each language's main folder we have these tokens as well. That way every sub-program below has the exact same Sender-Email & Sender-Name. If someone leaves the company we can then go in once at the very top folder and put in the new person's name & email. Then the hundreds or thousands of emails below all get updated at once. If you have a one-off program that's send from someone different it can be overwritten at the individual program level.
Even the main block of text in both the email & the registration page is contained in a token so it doesn't have to be replaced twice per asset.
On the registration page there are all tokens and a small piece of standard texts that we use on all ASLP.
In other languages we've already implemented the Sender-Name/Sender-Email tokens for the confirmation page as well. Just after the standard "check your spam" message there's a ... If you don't receive it please contact the marketing manager message using those two standard tokens. As a just-in-case backup, I'd rather over than under serve our prospects.
Here's the first place you see Related Assets. We'll come back to this at the end.
Here in our email, you see our Sender-Name & Email tokens along with the Title of the asset acting as the From Name/Email & Subject Line. The download button is linked by the token {{my.Asset-Link}} along with a line below it.
Not many people will share a piece of content before they view it. So now that they've had the opportunity to actually see the collateral, I want to give them the chance to socially share it again, which just links back to the Registration page. Finally you'll see the related assets here again.
(Just to ensure this saves properly, I'll stop here and pickup with the campaigns in a second)