Using Marketo to send Internal Newsletters - Pros & Cons?

[Anonymous]

We have a monthly internal newsletter that goes out to employees. We're considering sending this newsletter via Marketo, but want to be sure we're thinking about all the pros & cons associated with sending this out to our team before we do it. Our Marketo instance is integrated with Salesforce.

What are the potential pitfalls associated with doing this? What are the benefits?

Thanks for the insight!

[Olivia_Piper · Accepted solution]

Hi Christina,

I can't think of any real downsides to sending your internal newsletter through Marketo. The definite pros are that you can send in bulk, have a template so you just have to change out the content each time, you can schedule the send in advance (so you don't forget) and it's somewhere to store previous copies of the newsletter. Also It shouldn't affect anything in Salesforce either.

I hope this helps

[Colin_Mann]

I agree with Olivia that there are no real downsides. However, how does data get passed into SFDC for you i.e. is it happening automatically on the program level? Is it based on smart campaign triggers? Etc.

If you don't want these records to appear in SFDC because it's an internal newsletter then you will need to look at this. It's very simple to do and I concur there's no real reason not to use Marketo.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Olivia Piper​ & Colin Mann​!

We have our Marketo instance synced with Salesforce. We'll build mechanisms to combat sending employees over to our Sales team and we'll avoid having them run through our scoring model. I've heard from people in the past that it's best practices to keep internal email addresses out of Marketo, so the database doesn't get junked up. I'm concerned about the integrity of our database, but maybe there are workarounds.

[Colin_Mann]

In our case we do have internal emails and Mitel email domains in Marketo but we hold them in a suppression smart list (along with existing partners and customers). We do this because sometimes staff do sometimes attend external webinars or download whitepapers on third party websites and it's easier to suppress them than to clean every list before we upload it.

This suppression means that any of those records are prevented from synchronising.

Generally I agree with keeping them out of Marketo but a suppression list is one possible option.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the insight, Colin Mann​!

What filters are you using to create these suppression lists?

[Colin_Mann]

We mainly filter using company name, email and whether a lead exists on one of our suppression lists (we have lists for employees, competitors, partners, blacklist and other similar lists). 

Using company name and email means that it's not 100% perfect because these need to match but it captures most of them.

We also suppress based on country e.g. Canada because of the spam laws.

These are captured in a master smart list and then we use that as a suppression list. I don't know whether this is best practice or not but it works for us because we do need staff and partners etc. in the lists so that we don't have to edit every spreadsheet of leads before we upload them and because we want some analysis on information such as how many staff vs new prospects attend external webinars etc.

The image below might be hard to see.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for sharing! This is helpful.

[Rachel_Egan]

We use Marketo for our internal Marketing communication, but let other teams use MailChimp for theirs. Mostly that's because we don't want to spend all the time with them revising content, design, etc. It seems like more trouble than it's worth to get those emails out if they are just internal.

The one downside I see to sending internal email comms via Marketo, though, is that your employees might hit comms limits. Just make sure that you set the program to ignore communication limits! That way your employees won't have any issues receiving all comms!