[Coffee Break] 08/23/23, 8am PST: Dynamic Content, Featuring Marketo Engage Champions!

[Jon_Chen]

Our fifth Community Coffee Break on Dynamic Content is now OVER. Thank you all for your amazing questions and we hope to see you at a future Coffee Break!

Elevate your marketing game with Dynamic Content! Join our exciting Coffee Break designed exclusively for marketing practitioners and unlock the power of personalized content delivery. In this lively Community Q&A session, we’ve partnered with Dynamic Content experts @JimmySpencer_ and @Corey_Bayless to dive into how Dynamic Content enables you to create engaging experiences across various assets, including emails, landing pages, and snippets.

You’ll be able to ask Jimmy and Corey real-world questions on how to configure dynamic sections in your emails, landing pages, and snippets, allowing you to deliver personalized promotions, targeted offers, and captivating visuals.

This text-only event takes place here on the Marketing Nation Community. Post your burning questions, hot tips, key takeaways, and let’s chat about them! Our experts will be interacting live for that hour, but the conversation can continue! 

For some guidance, here are some sample topics you can ask these experts about:

• What are the real benefits to dynamic content?
• What are some use cases for utilizing dynamic content?
• What is the typical performance when utilizing dynamic content?
• How does dynamic content help the customer and the Marketo builder?
• What resources can I enable dynamic content in Marketo?
• What are my limitations on Segmentations and how a Marketo asset can be built? My organization wants to commit to personalizing our marketing efforts. Which skill sets should we be investing in for our current and future employees?
• We don't have many technical resources internal to the business. What's the best path forward so that we can benefit from dynamic content?
• We've had some difficulty reporting on our results with dynamic content. Do you have any suggestions?

Note: If you cannot make the live Q&A, you can still ask your questions NOW and it will be answered in the order that it was received.

Requirements to Participate

• Must be signed into the Community during the 1-hour period.
• Must post an Adobe Marketo Engage question or comment on Dynamic Content.
• Must tag either or both Champs in your question (@JimmySpencer_, @Corey_Bayless).
• THAT'S IT! *(think of this as the Marketing Nation Community equivalent of an AMA, (“Ask Me Anything”), and bring your best speed-typing game).
• Please note this is a TEXT-ONLY event, meaning that there will be no webinar, video call, or recording. All questions and answers will occur on this thread!
  • During the live session, be sure to REFRESH the page so that you can see the latest questions and responses.

[JimmySpencer_]

Hi @Zoe_Forman 

I'm not aware of WF being able to do this. What is the difficulty in the process of approval for you? Are the approvers going into marketo and having a hard time figuring out how to get to the version they need to approve? If yes, I wonder how they are being advised. Are you providing a static list they can easily leverage in preview mode?

For example, you can create a static list with a very user-friendly name, something like "Language Approvals" and then have a test record for each variation. Then in preview mode use the "View By List" option to cycle through the test records that match up to your segmentations.

If you're already doing this and they are still having trouble it may be an opportunity to do a hands-on training with them.

[Zoe_Forman]

Hi @JimmySpencer_ 

We are not currently using WF but have JIRA ticketing system in place, which has many spaces and not connected to Marketo.

It's more curiosity of how WF could hand an HTML email with dynamic content so for example, the German HTML version can be forwarded to one proofreader/approver, the French to another and so on.

I use language segmentation in dynamic emails - and wondered how WF would split the languages and forward for approval or if just the Default would be sent - I assume everyone would have to have Marketo access so they could select their own language in view?

[lillyfalcon]

@JimmySpencer_, @Corey_Bayless

Thank you for your time! We have a small team / budget so have been using dynamic content to reduce asset production time eg. 

• we segment leads and clients by jurisdiction, persona type, industry, lead pain points
• we then use these segmentations in snippets and email / landing page modules to display personalised content for these segments 

However, we've been struggling with: 

1. personalisation: finding further opportunities eg. due to segmentation limitations (cannot use custom objects in smart lists)
2. scaling: when snippets are used in over 500 assets they can no longer be approved - we've cloned our templates and snippets but this increases production time as we now have to make the same update multiple times (and approving assets in bulk is not always straightforward)
3.  as we ramp up asset volume we are trying to find efficiencies in the way we build programs eg. managing our webinars is taking up most of our team's production time at the moment. We use Gotowebinar to host webinars and send the following emails from Marketo:
   1. one to three emails to promote the event (we use email as opposed to event programs)
   2. one to three emails after the event to follow up with leads (we use default programs with advanced wait times, and tokens and snippets to reduce number of updates within marketo editor - very slow to load sometimes)

Any recommendations to help with the above 3 questions would be much appreciated! 😊

[Corey_Bayless]

1. personalisation: finding further opportunities eg. due to segmentation limitations (cannot use custom objects in smart lists)

That is correct, you can’t use member of smart list or custom objects but you can use a static list reference.  The solution is not all that great, but it is a batch campaign for adding members to the static list, then reference that static list in the segment.

1. scaling: when snippets are used in over 500 assets they can no longer be approved - we've cloned our templates and snippets but this increases production time as we now have to make the same update multiple times (and approving assets in bulk is not always straightforward)

CB Answer: I have used snippets across many thousands of resources, so 500 seems a little low to me.  I would check with Marketo support, there might be something broken on that snippet which can happen for overuse.  Do you know if this is a limitation of your platform? 

Approving assets in bulk can be difficult if you don’t have the API, especially with multiple templates and workspaces.  My recommendation is to use the API, specifically get_landing_pages, and use the approve landing pages end points. The UX doesn’t allow specific template targeting which is what makes this process difficult.

Your workflow for bulk approving landing pages by template would look like this:

1. Get all landing pages
2. Capture all landing pages ids tied to the target template ids that need the update
3. Capture the landing page ids
4. Run approve landing pages API, that would allow you to target the approval of the pages that need to be updated.

Automation is the best way to remove technical operation debt. Rule of thumb, if you find yourself doing tasks over and over again, that likely can be automated using the API and python or some other language of choice.

1.  as we ramp up asset volume we are trying to find efficiencies in the way we build programs eg. managing our webinars is taking up most of our team's production time at the moment. We use Gotowebinar to host webinars and send the following emails from Marketo:

1. one to three emails to promote the event (we use email as opposed to event programs)
2. one to three emails after the event to follow up with leads (we use default programs with advanced wait times, and tokens and snippets to reduce number of updates within marketo editor - very slow to load sometimes)

CB Answer: Efficiencies will come from having program templates pre-built with all your expected resources that are required to run your various program types.  Each template can be prebuilt which can remove as much of the operational setup time and create fast go to market.

[lillyfalcon]

Thank you @Corey_Bayless ! This is v helpful. Keen to look into using the API more - sounds so much more efficient! 

The 500 asset limitation was advised by Makerto support after a long time looking into the issue. 

We are using program templates that we clone - it helps a bit! 

[Zoe_Forman]

@lillyfalcon I will be joining as your questions cover some of my questions

[jaganathan]

@JimmySpencer_, @Corey_Bayless I have around 100 slots each slot is assigned to different customers.. Each slot contains Header, text, cta and an image, right now I am using json it takes lot of time to load all these, is there any simple way by using tokens we can achieve this?

[JimmySpencer_]

Hey Jaganathan!

Great question!

It sounds like you're currently using a robust segmentation to generate dynamic content, and would rather use some velocity tokens?

Yes this is possible (and many of us prefer this method!). 

Your foundational element would be to tokenize each element of your email you'd like to personalize, and then write your script tokens to execute based on your logic in alignment with the tokenized segments of your email.  There are some gotchas in terms of how it needs to be written for URL tracking. There's tons of good information on that in the community. 

[Zoe_Forman]

Looking forward to this session - use Dynamic content and segment a lot especially for languages, regions and sub-regions in EMEA.

I'm sure there is more I can do.