Tip of the YEAR!

[Anonymous]

Share one thing you learned to do in Marketo that was a game changer. Something that rocked your marketing world perhaps or saved you time and headaches...The Marketing Nation Community wants to hear from you!  Spread your wealth of knowledge.

[Kristy_Murphy]

Great tip!

[Amy_Goldfine]

Universal Tokens! It was something I meant to do at my old company but never did. When I started this job in June, we developed new email templates (they were still on Email Editor 1.0 for some reason). At the same time, we created Universal Tokens for the footer and put them in the email templates. When I got to work today, I just updated the date in the Universal Token—no template editing or mass re-approving of emails!

Universal Tokens in Marketo – Are you using them? | Grazitti Interactive

Marketo-Fu - Episode 26: Universal Tokens - YouTube

[Fernando_Garci1]

Amy, you could create a script token with the following code and it'll do the trick. Danny Petrucci's is overall better though as it addresses timezones for those companies sending out emails near midnight.

Script Token:

$date.get('yyyy')

[Anonymous]

Can script this out so there's no manual work moving forward.

#set($timeZoneObject = $date.getCalendar().getTimeZone())

$date.format("yyyy", $date.getDate(), $date.getLocale(), $timeZoneObject.getTimeZone("EST"))

[Kevin_McMahon1]

We made the move to a dedicated IP. It was a lot of work and a long process, but we've been seeing the benefits in our email deliverability rates since.

[Loren_Posendek]

So reassuring to read this, Kevin. We're moving to a dedicated IP address next week and hoping all goes well!

[Chris_Saporito]

We have about a year under our belt using our dedicated IP. With some preparation the launch went smooth and we saw an immediate improvement for us. Good luck, hope you guys see the same benefits!

[Loren_Posendek]

Also great to hear, thanks Chris!

[Eunice_Leung]

We started using Marketo a year ago. While a lot of capabilities are new to me, I ran into the challenge of tracking Google paid ad performance precisely rather than relying on the hit or miss gclid value. The posts on the community related to how to track Google ads really helped save the day. From there, I set up the related hidden fields on all forms to capture UTM parameter values from ads, and placed java script on our website. I am now able to tell which lead is generated from which Google Ad. And we utilize this set up to track led gen from third-party websites.

[Anonymous]

Love this thread, thank you for starting! My favorite discovery this year was the ability to add smart lists as columns in Lead Performance reports.

[Anonymous]

I started using Snippets and Tokens in my Nurture emails to indicate the email sender as the lead's sales rep, and then when one sales rep quit, replacing the "From" name and email signature on alllllll those emails was a snap!

[Chelsea_Kiko]

For my old organization, it was setting up and utilizing MSI to its full potential - we had way too many one off email blasts that were going out on behalf of a sales member, rather than educating on MSI. So, meeting with sales over and over to present and educate how to use MSI and promoting to use MSI with every big campaign/event promotion really cut down on my team's work. Sales was excited to use the tool and see insights from their leads/contacts.

[Chris_Saporito]

Stop emailing to inactive prospects in your database! By removing or no longer marketing to inactive people in your database, you will improve your sender reputation and ultimately help to increase your delivery rates. The people no longer engaging with emails could end up becoming spam traps and hurting delivery rates and sender reputation.

[Nicholas_Hajdin]

On this note, I would recommend running a Decay program that captures all inactive users and then pushes them through a re-activation program to try and re-engage your audience, while also directing to a preference center. This will allow for a final opportunity to "win back" your audience before completely halting comms. If the subscriber does not engage with the campaign, you can choose to:

1. Pause communications and save for a future reactivation campaign
2. Purge from your system, effectively keeping your database clean, while also keeping your contact volume down (saving you money on your Marketo contract!).

[Emily_Allison]

Thanks for the tip! We are working on a big database cleanup project and this would be a great way to clean out inactive users in our Marketo database. Have you had success running this program? What was the preference center you pushed the audience to or was it more of an opt-out of communications Y/N preference?

[Nicholas_Hajdin]

It depends on what you consider "success". For data cleanup and getting rid of inactive subscribers, we've had success. There is the strong possibility that you will lose significant volume - but these are people who are not engaging and should be suppressed anyway. As long as you value quality leads and engagement over volume, I would consider this type of program to be successful.

As for the preference center, you can direct to a page that allows the subscriber to select what types of communications they want to receive, which is dependent on the types of communications you offer. For example, specific products, industry, areas of interest, etc. This will require more sophisticated segmentation for your campaigns but improves the UX. You can also give the subscriber options to select the frequency of communication, in the event that they are receiving too many emails from you. The preference center is an effort to keep your subscribers engaged rather than having them opt out - but you should definitely give the clear option to unsubscribe if that is their preference.

[Daniel_Ferenc]

Leveraging velocity scripting in order to display data from custom objects is really important, as this is the only way to show that data to the users.

[Anonymous]

Daniel Ferenc​, would you mind sharing examples? We have a lot of important data on related (Salesforce) objects. I can target on those objects, but I we can't see the specific values within Marketo. Our struggle has been that those are all 1:many relationships (lead can have many related cases and we have to reference a couple values, such as type and status to know which case has values we care about). I'm wondering if you're talking about Salesforce objects or Marketo custom objects and if this could work in a 1:many scenario. Also wondering where exactly you're showing that data. I've heard of velocity scripting for merging values into emails for example but I'm curious what you mean by 'show that data to the users'. Thanks in advance!

[Dave_Cunningham]

I'd be curious to learn more about this as well. We have a bunch of CRM custom objects (Microsoft Dynamics) that we use velocity script with for our emails, but what Marketo end users can see / report on in the UI is very limited. We're basically only able to trigger/filter on the custom objects' (and their fields) GUIDs.

[Jasmine_Kyles]

Created several email template variations using email 2.0 templates!

[Eric_Woll]

Cloning programs to make things easier and quicker to set up!