Best Practices - Marketo for Internal Emails

[Anonymous]

Hello,

Recently, there have been a couple requests to send out internal (to employees) newsletters through Marketo.  There is no problem actually implementing this - I was just curious to hear people's thoughts on whether this is a good idea/bad idea and why.  It seems odd to me that Marketo and the Marketing Ops team would be used for internal only emails, but perhaps this is only becasue I've never used it this way before?

Thanks in advance!

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

I can understand the appeal. If the Marketing people typically have another tool they use for mail blasts (or try to use Outlook or whatever) and they'd rather use the Marketo builder, it makes sense.

The drawbacks IMO are:

• Moden internal mail servers like Exchange are storage-efficient when sending duplicate messages within the system, that is, if I send to 200 people the server only stores one copy of the message.   If you send from Mkto it's 200 different messages that are usually not deduped when stored.
• You're using external Internet bandwidth that you would otherwise not -- but this is probably negligible.
• You may have delays that you would otherwise not -- but only in rare cases.
• You have to make sure that all these internal campaigns, including resulting clicks, are excluded from Mkto reports so you don't accidentally inflate Marketing effectiveness.
• If you're syncing activities to SFDC these emails might look a little annoying/fluffy, maybe write a trigger to dump them.

[Josh_Hill13]

Some firms, if they can, separate internal staff into a separate Workspace and lead partition for this purpose.

But otherwise you could add everyone as a static list and just block them from syncing to SFDC.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Josh true... but Marketing emails may be intentionally synced to SFDC for would-be "internal" users (we do this, in part because some people are also board members and therefore receive internal and external emails, and in part because the Marketing team feels better if they are on lists themselves).

[Bruce_Jeffers]

Not a bad idea, but I offer one caveat / suggestion.

The biggest downside we've discussed when thinking about sending internal emails through Marketo is the list management of company employees.

For example, if/when an employee leaves the company, you likely will need to go remove (or unsubscribe) their email address in Marketo, and/or perhaps delete the lead.

This could add extra manual work on your marketing team, for a task that would be typically handled by your HR.

What we do instead is generate one copy of an internal communication in Marketo, send it to a member of our marketing team, and then forward that to our company listserve rather than having each employee as a Marketo lead.

[SanfordWhiteman]

@Bruce J definitely a good point... offboarding employees doesn't need any more complexity!

Of course, we don't really know why the OP's company wants to use Marketo for internal emails -- could be just the HTML builder, or it could be click tracking and the ability to filter and segment.  Not all of these needs would be met by forwarding one message to the "real" mailing list address.

[Anonymous]

Thanks so much for the replies!  It's given me quite a bit to think about.  Marketo was originally suggested for these newsletters simply because of the HTML builder.  We've discovered, however, that if the email is sent directly to our All@CompanyName.com address, our Exchange server should handle the distribution to the current list of employees.  This saves the time and manual editing a list within Marketo would require.

[Beth_Massura]

Thought I'd resurrect this post... Some of our departments are using Marketo to create the email assets, sending themselves a "sample message", and then forwarding it to our internal (e.g. staff) listserves. The purpose is just to use our module-based templates and the WYSIWYG editor - they want the "pretty" layout, but do not have HTML developer resources. Anyone else currently doing something like this?

My understanding is that having distribution email addresses such as listserves in our lead database was in violation of our contract with Marketo since it isn't following the spam laws to allow individual unsubscribes. Does it make a difference that it's internal contacts? On a few select internal mailings that are delivered via Marketo we mark them as operational, but that doesn't seem like a good idea on a large scale.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Beth,

better open a new post, it will drive more and faster answers than resurrecting an old one.

-Greg

[Beth_Massura]

Thanks for the recommendation, Greg!