Automatically generated email when content published on website

[Erica_Dipyatic]

Hello Community - Seeking guidance on the possibility to carry out an email execution via Marketo.

Question: Can Marketo automatically create an email and distribute the email based upon when something is published on our website if we set up some trigger, push (whatever the action and term maybe) in Marketo?

Situation:

Our Public Relations team currently has a process set up with an external organization to automatically distribute and email to a subscription list when this external organization published a press release for us. We want to bring this process in house. The key is that everything must happen automatically without the need for a member of the public relations team to initiate the email.

Current process

• Form code provided to us by external organization.(EO)
• When form filled out - EO collects data, Subscriptions can be for all releases or specific topics.
• When a press release is published by EO for us, an email of the press release - with the contents of the press release as the body copy of the email - is automatically distributed to subscribers.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how we could remove the EO from this process? We know how to set up the form and the subscription. The question is can Marketo automatically create the email and distribute based on an action, information pushed, from our website?  Again, it is key that no member of the PR team has to take action to distribute the press release email.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and ideas.

e

[SanfordWhiteman]

This would be a fit for an RSS-to-email solution. Marketo-integrated products include Digesto (by Perkuto) and FeedOtter. I use them both (at different clients) and recommend you get a demo of each. Searching the Community for "RSS" is good prep.

[Keith_Nyberg2]

Agree with Sanford that RSS-email is a better method to accomplish this as there is nothing OOB in Marketo that will enable this. Also want to highlight the fact that I don't think Markjeto does a great job with seedlists. So if this email is supposed to be sent internally, not sure that Marketo is the right tool. I always get a little sketched out by automated external emails because once sent, cannot be changed. I always like seeing what will be sent before it is mailed to ensure there are no formatting issues, etc.... but that's just me.

[SanfordWhiteman]

I always get a little sketched out by automated external emails because once sent, cannot be changed. I always like seeing what will be sent before it is mailed to ensure there are no formatting issues, etc.... but that's just me.

I see your point and people do often want it both ways -- without human intervention to save time (= money = sanity) yet with human override, even though these are contradictory!

But at a certain point you've got to let your RSS-based emails fly, IMO.  There might be some learning curve as you figure out that some post excerpts aren't formatted correctly (this has happened to me), or the embedded HTML needs to be tweaked, but eventually you'll smooth it out. You can also have two different scheduled sends: one to yourself at, say, 12pm, and then the production one scheduled at 3pm. So when you get the first one, you can validate it and pause the real prod one if necessary.

Also, both RSS-to-email solutions above can create the email without scheduling it, though this cuts down on personalization options (I mean to the degree that the RSS app itself is personalizing content -- you can still personalize with Velocity and such no matter what.)

[Diederik_Marte4]

Hi Erica,

Most obvious solution is one of the 3rd-party apps that were suggested.

And also take into account that HTML in email is much structer than in webbrowsers. The probability of your blogpost looking good, and your email looking messed up in Outlook is very big!

Taking that into account, I'd rather have an email created with just title, desc, date, and hyperlink, instead of actually including (a part of) the content itself. With the REST API for assets you could create a weekly script that connects with your CMS API (or database directly) and just looks for the title, url, date and then creates an email: http://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/assets/emails/#create_and_update

Good luck!

Diederik

[SanfordWhiteman]

And also take into account that HTML in email is much structer than in webbrowsers. The probability of your blogpost looking good, and your email looking messed up in Outlook is very big!

Wouldn't worry much about this with press releases, though! Styles will be limited to font-weight and text-decoration, and releases have distinct sections per industry standards. It's an extremely machine-readable format.

Plus, the rich text editors in RSS-to-Email apps like Perkuto and FeedOtter can work with defanged (allowed tags only) elements of an RSS feed, inserting them into a well-tested email template, so content and block-level presentation are explicitly separated.

Overall, def'ly wouldn't trust corporate developers to be better than email and syndication specialists at creating cross-platform HTML emails from HTML5 source. I've heard senior CMS consultants claim no changes would be necessary to send published HTML5 + CSS3 pages as emails... that's how little they may understand the problem domain. While email designers do understand those issues, teaming designers, back-end integration engineers, and marketers on building an in-house system is... less than promising. Sometimes, and I say this as someone who builds custom integrations, just buy it.