See Marketo email metrics in Salesforce reports

Anonymous
Not applicable

See Marketo email metrics in Salesforce reports

Hi Nation,

I need your help with this: is it possible to have email metrics from Marketo to show up in Salesforce, aside from viewing them on a lead basis in Sales Insight?

The requirement here would be to have a report (possibly based on Campaign Members) that shows at a glance if a lead/contact has opened and/or clicked an email.

We investigated the possibility to simply use the member statuses to track this, but since these campaigns are a cross-over between marketing and sales at some point those statuses will be updated by sales people to hgihlight the action they did on the lead (contacted, visited, etc.) and thus the "opened" and "clicked" statuses wouldn't be available as values to report on anymore.

Another thought we had was to add fields on the Campaign Member object in Salesforce, but I understand it has some limitations as those fields would only appear in Marketo as constraints for the "Member of SFDC Campaign" filter, so I don't know how much can this be of help.

Suggestions on how to tackle this issue?

Thank you,
Francesco

6 REPLIES 6
Geoff_Krajeski1
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: See Marketo email metrics in Salesforce reports

I have experience in syncing to SFDC campaigns.

When this is done, the email metrics (for the campaign/program) transfer over to the SFDC campaign.

When this is not done, the information is not transferred.

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10

Re: See Marketo email metrics in Salesforce reports

Hi Francesco,

As Geoffrey wrote, you could create some campaigns in SFDC for each email, with members statuses such as sent / delivered / opened / clicked/unsubscribed and use smart campaigns in Marketo to add leads / contacts to these campaigns and update the statuses.

But you will take the risk to really overload both your Marketo instance and your Marketo / SFDC sync, especially if you have a big database and a lot of email activities. Furthermore, the setup of a series of Marketo program (one for each email) will add significant work to you and/or your team.

So my question is: why do you need these reports in SFDC? who do you want to see them? email performance metrics are typically metrics that interest only marketing and are somehow dangerous for Marketing to Spread to the rest of the org, for various reasons:

  • There are hard to interpret. Is a 1% clicked/delivered rate good or bad? Is a 0.7% unsubscribe rate good?
  • They convey the idea that Marketing is not business driven

So bottom line is: I do not recommend you to do this.

-Greg

Jenn_DiMaria2
Level 10

Re: See Marketo email metrics in Salesforce reports

I agree with you that these statistics are typically only of interest to Marketing. They quite often support the idea of vanity metrics to anyone outside the department, in that there's nothing to compare them to and can often lead to unnecessary discussions about what we can do to improve open or click-thru rates when it's not really necessary (not that I know from personal experience or anything... )

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: See Marketo email metrics in Salesforce reports

Hi Grégoire,

I agree with you that it should be kept separate, but there are some processes that as of today need to have this data transferred over to SFDC, and I don't see it change any time soon. Consider that SFDC was in place and used long before Marketo, so for the moment Marketo should try to adapt to SFDC where possible.

This report in SFDC would be used by branch offices/salespeople to sort leads on specific campaigns by their status, i.e. give priority to those who clicked an email, then opened, then the rest. I know Sales Insight is a great tool for this but unfortunately it's not possible to report on it (as far as I know), and they would need to open each lead separately to see his/her activities which is not a solution given that the numbers are quite big.

A solution I thought about is to keep the "status" field used to sync Marketo programs with Salesforce campaigns only for marketing, and thus populate it with marketing-related statuses (opened email, clicked, unsubscribed, ...) and then have a separate field on the Campaign Member object in SFDC to handle all sales-related activities (called, visited, etc.). This way salespeople can have their own status field that won't overwrite the one from Marketo, and use the standard one to report on leads and see at a glance who opened, clicked or not.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Francesco

Grégoire_Miche2
Level 10

Re: See Marketo email metrics in Salesforce reports

Hi Francesco,

You surely do not want to use the lead status field for this, and any other lead field either. If you use lead fields, you will be enable to capture the email stats for more than one email...

The only solution I see is to create 1 SFDC campaign for each email, as written above. Then, in Marketo, you would have to create 1 series of smart campaign for each email you send (email is delivered, opens email, clicks link in email...) to add the leads to these campaigns and updates the statuses.

-Greg

Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: See Marketo email metrics in Salesforce reports

Hi Grégoire,

I didn't plan to use lead fields, but rather create a field on the Campaign Member object for salespeople/branches to use; that way I can keep the status field (standard) for marketing activities and the actions taken by sales (custom) on each lead for each campaign, being able to track them separately with a report in SFDC.

Consider that the campaigns I'm referring to are quite basic, consisting of one email + reminder for those who didn't open the first one, so creating statuses in Marketo shouldn't be a problem.

My only concern is that I'm maybe missing out on something...

Thanks for your help by the way!

Francesco