Suggestions needed for personalized newsletters

[Robb_Barrett]

I have one small product line that has highly complex needs. 

Long story short, I need suggestions for tools to create personalized newsletters with content based on product, product version, region, etc. This is for one small product line out of a very large portfolio of products so I don't think I can solve with with segmentations. 

Right now the product representatives are fighting me because they want to be able to send 3+ emails per day and more than 5 per week to the same people because they don't know how to combine their messages and personalize the communication and Marketo is very primitive in terms of being able to store and manage content and build dynamic assets.

I want to use Marketo to send out the emails since all of the data is stored there and I don't want to support a separate MA tool with data feeds.

[SanfordWhiteman]

Within Marketo, the most powerful email personalization tool is Velocity. Used in combination with other technologies (like segmentation) there's little it can't do. 

But it's not for people who want drag-and-drop or even dropdowns for every little thing. It's for real content architects who have some degree of patience and technical skill.

[Robb_Barrett]

Sanford - agreed, but there's no good content management library in Marketo where a standard marketing person can enter in a blog post type article.  I need ways to be able to store content and access it from templates I can build utilizing Marketo.  I need a CMS that can tag content and prioritize it for placement.  Building something from scratch isn't an answer for this either.

[Justin_Norris1]

Hey Robb Barrett PRD​,

I think that level of content customization across multiple segmentations is impossible to do in any sane way within the Marketo interface but could be quite achievable via the API using a custom application.

What you are describing sounds very much like an overlap between Perkuto's Digesto product (which allows you to create automatically customized newsletters based on RSS feeds from your existing CMS) and another early-stage project I am working on with Sandy, which is a custom application that can define "meta-segments" (combining multiple Marketo segments) and allows the user to configure unique content for each to create highly customized messaging at scale.

I don't think you will find something off the shelf for your use case but it may be possible to build an application for your needs that leverages existing work so you aren't starting from scratch. I am happy to have a quick chat if you want to talk it through.

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Justin Norris | Perkuto​​

[Robb_Barrett]

I have a requirements meeting coming up soon and then let's have an informal chat about it.