Product Documents

We’ve reached peak ABM hype. You’ve seen countless variations of the same presentation about how to get started with ABM, how to sell ABM internally, the ideal ABM tech stack, and on and on. And I agree that it’s time to start getting down to business and actually design ABM plays that can drive your business more revenue. But my ABM pitch is going to be a little different from the ones you’ve been hearing over and over. It also doesn’t involve having to buy the hottest, newest toy on the market. My example of an ABM campaign will be based out of Marketo. But the same setups/flows/logic should be broadly applicable to most marketing automation platforms, or even your favorite sales acceleration/cadence tools. So fire them up and follow along with this post. Step 1 — Build your target account list Earlier this year at LeanData, we identified a leaky spot in our pipeline. The timeframe between the 1st demo and what should have been the 2nd demo was a place where prospects were going dark on us. Under the guidance of Adam New-Waterson, now the vice president of demand generation at RevJet, our marketing and sales team sat down together and compiled a list of target accounts that we believed could be brought back to life. The next step was to push all the leads and contacts associated with those target accounts into our ABM campaign. We used our own product to tag all the leads and contacts associated with those target accounts with the value of “2nd demo” in a segmentation field. This step could be done a number of ways depending on the specific tools you’re working with, but the ultimate goal is to end up with some way of separating out the leads and contacts for your target accounts. In this case, we used a smartlist in Marketo filtering on the “2nd demo” value to push the list into our campaign. Step 2 — Segment the relevant stakeholders CEB research has shown that 5.4 buyers typically are involved in a typical B2B deal. Getting all of those stakeholders involved is crucial to making an ABM strategy successful. So to begin tailoring our message to those various people, the next step in our DIY ABM play was to separate out who was important and who was not important to the conversation. For us, we used Marketo’s Engagement Programs to create different streams of content/interactions for each of the five buyer personas we believe are relevant to our business. Step 3 — Set up the play Now for the fun stuff. We didn’t want to just have same boring old stream of emails with slightly varying messages to each buyer. That’s not real personalization. We always strive to create a combination of different touches across different channels, with different players from our team. Our play for the sales operations buyer persona went like this: Standard marketing email featuring a datasheet An alert to our in-house Sales Ops pro to personally reach out, along with a suggested template email Personal invitation from our VP of Sales to invite them to an event we’re hosting An alert to our social media writer to engage the prospect on Twitter Closing out with another marketing email featuring a second product datasheet. This was our playbook. But the sky’s the limit when it comes to the series of touches you can implement. It really comes down to tailoring the messages to your organization and your buyers. Here are some other ideas to get you thinking: Direct mail piece Surveys Webinars Podcasts Interactive content Results Since piloting this campaign with a small group of target accounts, we’ve seen approximately 20 percent of the targets reach back out to schedule another demo with us. An interesting, and somewhat unexpected, development was that most of the responses we received were from someone other than our initial point-of-contact. It just goes to show the importance of a true ABM strategy. You must reach out across a target account and engage with the multiple stakeholders who might be involved in a deal on their own terms. And this is the kind of play that can really lead to closed deals.

Email performance analytics sits at the heart of every digital marketer, you want to be aware of how the performance has been and need the ability to report on the same using various dimensions relative to your marketing. More often than not, all marketing automation systems have a performance issue when it comes to providing analytics quickly with the parameters that you would like. Marketo has also been lacking in this area for quite some time since RCA is sold as a separate product and that also had performance issue till last year or so, when the UI was changed but still performance is not up to the mark and Marketo analytics is not that powerful a feature to suffice the digital needs of today. As a resolution to the same, Marketo has introduced Email insights to provide lightning quick reporting on Email performance with a plethora of dimensions/parameters to filter your report. It works real fast and allows you to report on performance which not only includes batch campaigns but can also include trigger campaigns and operation emails (You can choose to exclude them as well). There are options of choosing performance relative to one/multiple workspaces, you can add parameters such as segmentations, channels and program tags and include them as dimensions and report on them. There’s an option to filter the report on Audience (country and state parameters), Content (email, program, smart campaigns, theme) and Platform (Device OS and Device type). You can generate charts to assess the performance during selected period based on Time (Day, Week and Month) and filter on various parameters. On the right hand side you can also select metrics such as opens, clicks and unsubscribes to check on the performance by parameters of audience, content and platform. You also have the ability to save these reports as quick charts for periodic performance review, you can save up to 20 quick charts. Although it’s a fresh new option for analytics there’s a lot of scope for improvement, for example. The ability to export data/reports/charts is not available so if you want to share the data with anyone outside Marketo you can’t, which is a huge disappointment. There’s no option to report on custom parameters such as conversions, program successes etc.  There are only 10 custom dimensions that can be added which makes the set up limited. The ability to report on custom lead filters using smart lists as available in Email performance reports is not there. There’s no email link performance analysis. Overall a fresh new interface and a much needed option for Email performance reporting but still has a lot of scope for improvement. Here’s the Summary: Pros: Lightning quick reporting capabilities. Dimensions and work-space options for reporting. New filter options such as Audience, Content and Device. Ability to create quick charts. Cons: Inability to export reports Only 10 custom dimensions No custom lead filters and custom parameters No Email link performance analysis Here’s an example of how to use Email insights for your reporting purposes, it includes the steps you need to follow to leverage the various capabilities available for reporting. Log into Marketo and click on the tab on the top left hand side to go to Email Insights: This is how Email Insights home screen looks like: It provides you a lot of options of choosing to report on, you can select the Workspaces on which you want to see the performance: In this example, I want to check the performance in Europe, so I’ll choose Europe as the work-space. You can select the dates for which you want to check the email performance: There’s an option of comparing periods as well. You can click on sends on the top left corner to check the various email sends during the period and choose from it the one that you are interested in: If the desired email communication doesn’t show up here, then it could be because it is an operational email, the general settings of Email insights excludes the operational and trigger campaigns, you can change the same in the personal settings: There are a lot of parameters on which Email insights allows you to filter, one of them is Audience. You can filter the audience from country/state and check the email performance for them, for example: If you want to report on email performance during the last month in California etc. You can also filter on specific content, which can be either email sends: Select the email send you want to check the performance. You can also filter on Smart campaigns and the same would reflect in the report: Similarly program filters are also available: A new and fresh addition would be the ability to report device and OS performance, although this option is available as a constraint in Marketo Analytics, this is much better and faster, as it provides you comparative performance views on devices, which is nor the case with Analytics: You can select the Operating systems as a filter as well: There are filters available on your left and right side and you can select either to modify the report/chart: Here’s an example of filtering using parameters on the left side: On your right hand side you have options of choosing filters as well, by default all filter options will show: You can click on Audience, content and device to filter on and analyze the performance further: You have an option of viewing the performance by time as well in the selected time frame, you can select from day, week and month and the report will be modified accordingly: You can also add custom dimensions to these reports which can be used as a filter. To do so, click on the settings option: You can go to System settings to add dimensions, you can add segmentation, channels as dimensions and report the performance on them. Program tags can also be added as a dimension, a maximum of 10 dimensions are allowed with Email insights: Once you are done creating your report/chart based on all the filters and parameters, you can save it as a quick chart for periodic performance review: Name the chart and save it: You can it on the quick charts option on the right hand side, a maximum of 20 charts can be saved: Hope this was informative and helps you in leveraging Email insights for your organization. Your feedback matters a lot to me so if you have any suggestions/comments/queries relative to this, please comment below.

Creating an A/B Test program in Marketo Create a new Program in Marketo:                2. Choose the Campaign folder, provide the program name and choose the program type and the channel: Channel should be Email blast 3. Create a new asset within the program: 4. Choose Email program as the asset: The idea of creating Email program as an asset within a program is to have the ability to track progression statuses in a better way with the original program being the one tracking statuses.        5. Give a Program name and choose the type and channel:     6. Create an email within the email program and approve the email:        7. Go to the Email program created: 8. Choose the email created and approved in the steps above: 9. Add the A/B Test to your email:    10. A/B Testing can be done based on Subject Line, Whole emails, from address and date time: 11. For this example let’s choose subject line: 12. Define the subject lines for the email on which we are trying to test and choose the sample size of the test: In the above example, we chose 20% as the sample size and we have 4 subject lines to test. So 5% of the audience list will each receive email with a particular subject line and the winner will be send to the remaining 80%. 13. Define the Winner criteria based on which the email would be treated as a winner and you can also declare winner manually after viewing the test results: 14. Schedule the test and the winner, choose the email address you want to send notification to: 15. Click on Finish: 16.Verify the details and click on close: 17. Define the smartlist(audience) for this email send: 18. Define the filters for the smart list:    19. The audience details will be reflected in the program now: 20.  Approve the program:    21. Once the test is run successfully, the results can be seen as shown below:   

In light of the Summer Olympics in Rio, we invite you to participate in this week’s 'Marketo Games' in Purple Select & Community.  This will be a fun way for you, our advocates, to engage with each other and learn Marketo, as well as have some fun with Olympic themed challenges like our Olympic Trivia. For participating you will be entered into a daily raffle to win a $25 Amazon gift card. Already a Purple Select Member? Participate Now! ​ OR Join Purple Select ​​​

Author: Pawan Deshpande Content marketers have a big challenge: continuously filling their content pipeline with fresh, insightful, and relevant information. Your target audience expects it and turns to trusted sources when they need to search for answers and seek insights. Whether or not that’s your brand depends on the quality of your content. Moreover, brand managers and product marketers depend on continuing information streams. After all, content marketing is the principal method for connecting with buyers to reinforce brand messages and build awareness in the digital age. But more than that, content marketing helps you build relationships. Good content marketing establishes trust with your audience by offering them informative and entertaining content without asking for much in return. Psychologically, we’re all much more willing to engage and buy from someone we like and respect than someone we don’t. The Power of Curated Collections However, few content marketers have the wherewithal to develop all the content their organization needs on their own. According to Curata’s research study conducted on over 500 marketers, leading content marketers are developing 65% of the assets in their program, curating 25%, and syndicating the remaining 10%. With content curation, marketers can find, organize, annotate, and share the most relevant and highest quality digital content on a specific topic, produced by third parties yet relevant for their target audience. Not to mention, your buyers consume content from multiple sources for different points-of-view, so content curation provides them with unique perspectives. Unearthing great content from a variety of sources—even your competitors on occasion—can also be a highly effective way to build your credibility and trust as an unbiased thought leader. Moreover, with content curation, marketers can overcome some of the top content marketing challenges, as reported by the Content Marketing Institute. Here’s how content curation can help you overcome the top five content marketing challenges: 1. Producing Engaging Content Curating relevant collections adds additional assets to your content mix such as videos, podcasts, cheatsheets, worksheets, and infographics. These can help enhance engagement with your target audience, particularly when it’s deployed on different channels. For example, we’ve seen that infographics work well on Facebook, where they are a great prompt for comments. It’s also extremely easy for people to share, retweet, and otherwise promote your curated content on social channels, which they are more likely to do if you curate something entertaining or insightful and easy to digest. 2. Producing Content Consistently Content curation helps fill up your editorial calendar without the same investment needed to create original content. It’s usually a lot faster and easier to find and annotate content than it is to research and write it—particularly if you use content curation software, which automatically crawls the internet for relevant content and brings it to you. To produce content on a consistent basis, consider curating content at least once a week. Even if you send a weekly rather than daily newsletter, it’s good practice to curate on a regular basis to break up your workload and ensure that your site is refreshed with new content. 3. Producing a Variety of Content Curated content expands the mix by collecting and organizing content from diverse sources and in multiple formats. It allows you to offer a wider variety of perspectives than only tapping in-house resources. Even industry giants benefit from adding content curation to their marketing mix. It helps establish them as industry insiders and thought leaders, complements their social media marketing, and also attracts influencers who may contribute to the site. 4. Being Budget and/or Resource Constrained Content curation is not as time or expertise intensive as developing original content, so fewer resources need to be allocated to enjoy its benefits. A data center company based in Iceland, Verne Global, used content curation software to create their content hub Green Data Center News. This site enabled their small team to save over $100,000 in expenses for outbound marketing staff and website development, connect with prospects on a daily basis, and easily get global press coverage. 5. Filling Gaps in the Knowledge and Skills of Your Internal Team Content curation augments your existing expertise by referencing external sources, reducing the need for investing in new content development. For instance, perhaps you’ve hired a journalist for your team who is an excellent writer and editor, but not (yet) a subject matter expert for your industry. Once they read the top publications and blogs in your industry, a smart journalist will know enough to recognize and curate great articles by others with more expertise—saving you the expense of hiring a subject matter expert. Curating content can increase the consistency of a production schedule, requires fewer resources than developing original content, makes it easier to offer more engaging content, expands the expertise pool available, and opens up the variety of content—and perspectives—available for publishing. It’s one of the most effective tools available for dealing with many of today’s content marketing challenges. Have you started curating content for your organization? Share your tips and tricks below.

Author: Hally Pinaud As a kid, I watched a lot of cartoons. Ninja Turtles. My Little Pony. Carebears. But one of my favorites was actually a syndicated oldie-but-goodie that my parents grew up with called Underdog, where a “humble, lovable shoeshine boy” (who was a dog, but still) transforms into a caped crusader and somehow always foils the bad guy. I’m not alone–we all love a good underdog story, don’t we? But these days, being an underdog among enterprises sort of makes you a superhero, too. In fact, according to Gartner’s report, “Predicts 2014: Seizing the Digital Business Advantage,” 20% of all market leaders will lose their dominant position to a company founded after the year 2000. To be clear, it’s not about the year the company was founded. It’s because these nimble emerging enterprises seize adigital business advantage. That advantage is crystal-clear when it comes to building a growth-oriented marketing strategy around existing customers. Enterprises should be laser-focused on customer base marketing because: Customer retention is key to market share Happy customers are the shortcut to trust Repeat customers spend more Passionate customers are the best kind of marketing Here are three ways to seize the digital business advantage by leveraging a complete marketing automation platform to do customer base marketing: 1. Nurture Existing Customers To grow market share, you have to retain your existing customers. (And if I were a superhero myself, I would be Captain Obvious.) Retention rates above industry standard, therefore, are an absolute must if you’re an emerging enterprise. You can’t grow if two steps forward come with three steps back. Also, here’s something that’s less obvious: new customer acquisition is much more expensive than retention. Keep the customers you’ve got by continuing to provide them with value, long after their first purchase. Many companies save nurture for prospects, but don’t be one of them! If you want to maximize your relationship with current customers (and accordingly, retention and loyalty), stage and interest-based nurture are a must—well past the point of purchase. Ask yourself: what do these individuals need? And proactively answer their questions. With a marketing automation platform, you can listen to your customers’ actions and behavior and respond with relevant communication tailored to their interests. 2. Look for Moments of Cross-Sell and Upsell Intent The 80-20 rule is alive and well. According to the old business adage (another oldie-but-goodie), 20% of your customers account for 80% of your sales. This makes sense: it takes a lot less to run effective cross-sell and upsell campaigns for people who already know and trust you. So if you want to grow your enterprise, start with the people who love you already. Behaviors like viewing product information or visiting specific content might indicate that a customer is interested in doing more. With automated campaigns like trigger-based nurture, web personalization, and retargeting, you can give your customers more of the content they need to keep your brand top of mind and help them evaluate options. Meanwhile, customer scoring and sales intelligence will guide your customer account team toward timely outreach. 3. Help Your Advocates Advocate Ever heard the old adage: “No one ever got fired for buying…(insert industry behemoth here)?” If you aren’t the known quantity, you’re the risk. One of the most fantastic things about a legion of happy customers is that they give you powerful credibility as the up-and-comer. If you’re doing a great job with customer engagement, it’s time to hand your most passionate customers the megaphone. “Great,” you’re thinking, “but we sell a subscription service for socks, not software. No one’s going to get fired for what I do.” I won’t get into the obvious risks associated with sub-par socks. Instead, I’ll point out something that resonates with every marketer: 92% of consumers trust personal recommendations over all forms of advertising, according to Nielsen. Happy customers create a virtuous cycle that’s necessary for amplifying the effect of your marketing campaigns. Marketers savvy about engagement marketing recognize that the nurturing process is critical to creating and maintaining customer advocates. Pay ongoing personalized attention to customers you hope to develop into brand advocates and use referral marketing to share offers, incentives, and campaigns that entice your brand advocates to spread the word about you—an approach that emerging enterprises like Dropbox have mastered for major growth. In short, the right engagement marketing solution can help you cultivate your own advantage. Look and act like a huge enterprise customer marketing team by becoming more proactive, efficient, and helpful. Want to learn how else your enterprise can use digital marketing to get an advantage? Check out our ebook 5 Ways Marketing Automation Can Help Your Enterprise Grow.

By: Nick Westergaard Posted: August 1, 2016 | Digital Marketing Digital marketing isn’t going anywhere. However, new technologies bring about constant shifts, making it hard to keep up without the right strategy. Recently, I hosted a webinar with Marketo on how to create a smarter digital marketing strategy that allows you to optimize your campaigns, even with a tight budget or resource constraints. In this blog, I’ll answer the top seven questions that I received from our attendees: 1. What does it mean to be scrappy? Scrappy means a lot of things to different people, but to me, scrappy comes down to doing more with less. It’s an alternative to checklist marketing, which consists of just checking things off a list instead of doing what makes the most sense. Scrappy marketing means: Putting brains before budget Being both efficient and effective Seeing ideas everywhere When I was talking to the team at Schwinn Bicycles about the scrappy concept, marketing manager Samantha Hersil said, “You know what, we could all use a few people and a few dollars more.” That’s the bottom line. No one has unlimited resources these days. As marketing continues to change, we have to come up with smarter systems for getting the work done. 2. How do the scrappy strategies apply to B2B marketers with longer sales cycle? For all marketers, strategy is a critical first step. But the longer the sales cycle, the more you have to do with less to continue to keep your buyers engaged over time. Marketers with longer sales cycle, which include B2B marketers and consumer marketers selling considered purchase products, need to focus their scrappy strategy on what they’re trying to do, who they’re trying to reach, and when they’re trying to reach them. Strategy first. Always. 3. For a company that markets to both businesses and consumers, how do you differentiate between multiple audiences? Once again, differentiate with strategy. Sketch out a scrappy strategy that answers the following questions for each audience: Why are we doing this? What are we doing? When does this happen? Where does this happen? Who does this involve? How do we get it done? You may find areas of overlap, but you also might find areas where you can focus your efforts even further. 4. How do you recommend looking at other brands in your industry to see what’s working best? Seeing ideas everywhere is one of the key concepts in the scrappy mindset that I outline in my book. In this day and age, we rely a little too heavily on case studies. We wait to see what a company like ours, with a CEO the same height as ours, is doing. Instead, we need to get better at looking at other marketers in other industries. What’s working for them? Could you drop that into your industry? 5. Using people power requires a change in the work culture. How do you go about getting management’s buy-in to change the culture? Too often, we spend too much time talking about people problems and not people power. People are one of your biggest assets, and culture is one of the single most important factors in marketing success. To change your work culture, you have to start with buy-in from the top and work your way through management and finally to individual team members. It’s important to remind management and HR that talent isn’t about finding “unicorns.” Especially for social media, engagement and people skills are sometimes more important than technical skills, which can easily be taught. Getting buy-in isn’t easy, but the impact can be potent. Back to strategy—make sure you start this process by sharing your strategy both up and down your org chart. Your people can only help you if they know what it is you’re trying to do. 6. For a lean team or smaller company, what should be the top priorities to get started in digital marketing? Think about business objectives that you can ground in your strategy with (e.g. branding, community building, public relations, market research, customer services, leads and sales). I know I sound like a broken record here, but a small team has to focus on strategy. You can’t afford to do anything that you don’t have the resources for. Who are you trying to reach? What action do you want them to take? Work on answering these simple questions and you’ll be on your way to creating scrappy marketing. 7. What are your best social media tips, specifically for Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest? For all social media platforms, remember that whether you’re marketing to consumers or businesses, they are still people. They can still be reached with emotional appeals. Take advantage of the visual platforms of Instagram and Pinterest. For consumer marketers, they are valuable platforms for them to connect with their audience on. However, these sites are just as critical for B2B marketers, who may struggle with trying to market rather technical subjects. Images and videos allow your audience to easily digest your content. Facebook is the 800-lb gorilla in the social media marketing conversation. Both B2B and consumer marketers need a robust plan for all aspects of this platform—both organic and increasingly paid, due to Facebook’s constantly changing algorithms. We have to look for ways to focus what we’re doing and simplify our marketing for the long haul. Were these tips helpful? Check out the on-demand webinar Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small if you’re interested in learning more. And if you have any other questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below!

By: Mike Stocker Posted: July 29, 2016 | Digital Marketing Facebook’s recent announcement of their new Offline Conversions API generated a lot of buzz and excitement among marketers and for good reason. The new API provides stores and retailers with a way to see how many people made offline purchases after seeing a Facebook campaign—connecting offline conversions to digital campaigns. They can then use these offline activities to optimize their ad campaigns and ad spend. As a Facebook marketing partner, Marketo was excited to be a part of their launch announcement. Even more exciting is that our integration enables an expansion of this offline conversion concept to a much broader set of use cases that apply to all marketers, B2B marketers included. Before I get into the details of how you can use the new Offline Conversions API with Marketo, let’s start with some basics. What is an offline conversion event? In this case, an “offline” conversion event happens when a contact in your database performs a desired action on a channel not measured by Facebook. When Facebook made their announcement, most business publications (Forbes, AdWeek, etc.) focused on the retail use case. While that is certainly a huge use case for an offline conversion event, I’d argue there are a lot more potential “offline” conversion events that impact marketers. In fact, offline conversion events can give marketers a complete omni-channel view of all the sales and conversions attributable to Facebook, regardless of location, channel, or campaign. Here are a few examples of offline conversion events that come to mind: MQL (marketing qualified lead) SQL (sales qualified lead) Event attendance Target account Onsite sales consultation Automotive test drive Sports game attendance Demo given Content downloaded Score threshold met Call occurred Call duration Postal mail/package received More specifically, here are four unique ways to use offline conversion events to improve your marketing campaigns: 1. Increase MQLs Let’s say that you’re a B2B marketer on the demand generation team for a SaaS company. If your team buys Facebook Lead Ads to drive top-of-funnel growth, you shouldn’t just optimize your campaign based on form submissions. Instead, tie it to a metric that’s measured internally: the number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads) it drives. All leads are scored within Marketo based on pre-defined criteria to determine if they are ready to be passed to the sales team, and they are considered MQLs only if they meet the right qualifications. This is an important metric to track, since MQLs that are further qualified by sales become SQLS (sales qualified leads), which can ultimately translate into new opportunities and revenue. In the image below, an example revenue model, you can see how leads come in at the top-of-the-funnel as names, then progress further into the funnel as they continue to engage with your company. By optimizing your Facebook campaign for MQLs and not form submissions, you can increase the number of conversions that drive more qualified leads down the funnel. 2. Optimize Your Scoring Model For B2B marketers, and even some consumer marketers, it’s likely that you have (or would) set up a scoring model within Marketo to qualify incoming leads or contacts. Scoring models attach values to various online and offline engagement events between your brand and the buyer. With the integration of Facebook’s Offline Conversions API and Marketo, you can optimize your scoring model so that when a lead has reached a specific lead score as the result of a combination of different interactions, it’s defined as a conversion event. This way, a lead doesn’t need to, for example, download content or attend an event for it to be considered a conversion. The example below shows how a revenue cycle might be modeled within your marketing automation platform, governed by how each buyer interacts with your brand—their behavior across channels, their engagement with your campaigns, their lead score, and even data changes in your CRM system. By tracking when a lead hits a specific score that signals a conversion event, you can optimize your campaigns to tailor your ads to them appropriately. For example, for existing customers who have a score much higher than a MQL, you’re still able to identify scoring thresholds that signals they’re ready for cross-sell. 3. Boost In-Home Appointments If your company sells products that require in-home consultations, such as window treatments, you may want to optimize your Facebook Ads towards the number of in-home appointments it generates, rather than the number of online appointment requests. It’s likely that there’s a discrepancy between the number of online appointments booked and the physical appointments completed, but previously, this type of data was hard to track and made it hard to follow up on. Now, because of this integration, your sales consultant can log physical in-home appointments into Marketo and that data will be sent as an offline conversion event to Facebook. Then, your paid media team can re-evaluate their campaigns to understand how to optimize their ad spend to drive more completed in-home appointments. 4. Track Follow-Throughs For a digital marketer at a car dealership, one of your initiatives probably include increasing the number of visits to your show room and test drives by prospective customers. Previously, you might’ve used Facebook Ads to encourage prospective customers to fill out their info in forms online, but it was tough to tie those initial interest requests to actual test drives. Now, with Facebook’s Offline Conversion tied to Marketo, you can capture how Facebook Ads results in in-person interest and test drives—connecting your Facebook ad spend directly to a test drive of a car so you can better optimize to ultimately improve sales. As you can see, Facebook’s new Offline Conversion API can be used for a whole variety of broader use cases for ALL marketers, not just retail and physical purchases. In conjunction with Marketo, you can drive alignment between your paid media campaigns and other campaigns to improve results and ROI and offer a better customer experience. Have you set up Facebook Lead Ads within Marketo yet? I’d love to hear your use cases in the comments below!

by Sanjay Dholakia If your company doesn’t yet have a digital hub, it won’t be long before your CEO demands to know why not. What is a digital hub, you ask? That’s an excellent question. A digital hub is the central nervous system behind all of a company’s marketing activities. But it doesn’t just stop with marketing; a true digital hub will communicate and integrate with other systems, too, from sales to content management and beyond. The old model is changing. Organizations have historically existed with single-process systems like the ones I just mentioned that each had their limitations. But now, businesses can equip themselves with more sophisticated single data repositories that orchestrate how they talk to their customers, prospects, partners — even their employees. Digital hubs already have many CEOs and CMOs jumping for joy, and the ones who haven’t adopted this technology should be scrambling to get on board. This is because we’ve reached a critical point at which a central digital marketing platform is a must-have piece of infrastructure. These hubs essentially function as digital brains, analyzing and communicating with customers across online and offline channels and touch points to present a comprehensive view of customer experiences. It’s not that that creative doesn’t matter anymore, but as a recent Economist Intelligence Unit study (registration required) sponsored by Marketo (my employer) found, marketing has to supplement its traditional creative background with more technical skills. Capturing all of the new information available and turning raw data into actionable intelligence is where the digital hub becomes the game-changer. The neck bone’s connected to the head bone … So, how’s it all connected? The essentials start with a single database of record, one that can track all of your company’s customer interactions. There’s a reason why Gartner describes digital hubs as foundational. Marketers need to know when someone has visited their company website or when a potential customer opened — or didn’t open — an email. These simple metrics are the building blocks of informed marketing decisions in the new era of customer engagement. A disconnected view of the customer is now a relic from the boom-box era; you can’t make sense of different streams of data if you’re supporting dozens of separate databases that don’t communicate. Therefore, it’s essential for a digital hub to be part of a digital ecosystem with extensible technology that allows for integration with other applications. It needs to communicate across any of the various channels where your customers might want to interact with the company — digital, social, mobile. And, in this nascent age of the Internet of Things, when literally billions of devices are getting connected to the internet, interoperability will allow you to collate signals from everywhere — literally! Worlds collide: adtech and martech You may be thinking, “But I’m already doing things like spending money on Google AdWords and programmatic to make sure I’m getting in front of people who will care about my messages.” Too many of us can’t shake old habits and often just replicate what we used to do before the invention of the internet, when millions of dollars got spent on television and print advertisements. Back then, it was called “spraying and praying.” Nowadays too many marketers are still flying blind. They may use hip jargon like “programmatic,” but it’s just more inefficient spraying and praying. A digital hub puts an end to that charade by helping to identify instantly what is and isn’t working with your digital spend, from Google to adtech and beyond. Marketers can use the full power of digital tools to find out what their customers care about, whether that’s information gleaned from emails, websites, or through ads on social media. At that point, you can calibrate and focus on one-to-one interactions, rather than default to a blunderbuss spending approach. Otherwise, you’re just flushing money down the toilet. Analytics and attribution The other big plus of a digital hub is the analytical insights it offers. For the first time, marketers can knit together relevant data from multiple channels into a coherent and actionable portrait of the consumer. Marketers not only can see all their touchpoints with customers and prospects — from initial awareness through loyalty and advocacy — but also now have a way to attribute value from those interactions to outcomes. That helps to solve one of marketers’ biggest challenges: trying to prove the value of what they’re doing. This is where data science augments the art of marketing. With digital hubs parsing the data, CMOs can use marketing analytics to predict and better forecast. For the first time, marketers can essentially see into the future and plan how to interact with people, rather than always being forced into reacting. The clock is ticking With no shortage of suitors vying for customers’ time and attention, it’s up to CEOs and their CMOs to figure this out soon. Digital hubs are going to become standard pieces of marketing infrastructure at companies hoping to compete in this era of digital engagement. And if you’re still on the fence about whether this makes sense for your company, consider this: For every CEO or CMO who doesn’t have a digital hub helping their organization engage with their customers, rest assured that another rival does. This post originally appeared on Marketing Land on July 22, 2016.

ABM campaigns are about making one-on-one human connections despite the impersonal barriers of big business. If you want to cut through the noise, reach your champion and sway a whole organization you need to act outside of the inbox. Direct mail works and we’ll show you how it integrates with digital channels to make your ABM campaign connect. This guide shares best practices on why and how marketers should incorporate direct mail into their ABM strategies. It includes example campaigns and tips on when to send mail, how to personalize it and how to measure its effectiveness as part of a multi-channel ABM program.

MARKETO IN THE NEWS U.S. Marketers: Stop, drop and build a digital hub Marketing Land What's a digital hub, and what can it do for your organization? Sanjay Dholakia explains why having a central nervous system for marketing is a no-brainer. 5 things need to know about account-based marketing CIO From a reporter who attended Summit, the article leads with a mention of Summit and Phil’s keynote. DemandBase and Engagio are also quoted. Marketo and 250ok Partner Destination CRM 250ok strengthens partner integration with Marketo with addition of Email Informant and Reputation Powerpack. ·       Press release: 250ok and Marketo Breathe New Life Into Email Cozad Asset Management joins the Marketo marketing nation Finextra Investment advisory firm Cozad to grow market awareness with Marketo's engagement marketing platform. ·       Press release: Cozad Asset Management, Inc., Joins the Marketo Marketing Nation® Marketo Inspires Student Success Through Second Annual Global Volunteer Month My Social Good News Pick-up of our Global Volunteer Month release. To Increase Sales, Get Customers to Commit a Little at a Time Harvard Business Review Buyers work their way through parallel streams (rather than a funnel) as they explore, evaluate, and engage in purchase decisions via web sites, white papers, social media, and contact with other buyers through sites like Marketo, and so on. Facebook and Google Are Marching Directly Into the Physical World. Carriers Hold the Key to Breaking the Duopoly Mobile Marketing Watch Contributed post by the CEO of Placecast mentions Marketo and Facebook's Offline Conversion API. EMEA A 2020 Vision of Marketing AdWorld (Ireland) Additional coverage from our EIU report. Why it can’t be the CDO Alone (translated) LEAD Digital (Germany) Byline article on the CDO by Thomas Weyand. ·       Additional Pick-Up: Werben & Verkaufen Content, data and personalization: is marketing up to the task? (translated) INfluencia (France) In this piece, the reporter writes about customer experience and compares the findings of a few studies recently led by some marketing key players - Marketo, but also eMarketer or Forbes Inisghts. Benjamin also mentions and quotes Adobe. ANZ The Three Trends Driving Ad And Martech Together (& What It Means For Adland) B&T (Australia) Marketo’s Phil Fernandez argues that adtech as a sector will shrink to just a handful of participants by 2020. ·       Additional Pick-up: Which-50 JAPAN ·       Bita JP: Event Recap CUSTOMERS & PARTNERS IN THE NEWS Customers Uber Inks Software Deal With Concur to Ease Business Trips Bloomberg Expanding on a two-year-old partnership, Uber will integrate its technology within Bellevue, Washington-based Concur’s platform, making it easier for clients to use the ride-hailing service, especially large corporate customers with a lot of travel expenses, according to a blog post by Uber Monday. Workday buys Silicon Valley Big Data startup that raised $95M Silicon Valley Business Journal Workday on Thursday said it has agreed to buy Platfora, a San Mateo Big Data discovery startup that had raised about $95 million since it launched five years ago. GE's energy startup has a new marketing chief Boston Business Journal Current, powered by GE, announced this week that Bruce Stewart will be its CMO and his responsibilities will include increasing the demand for Current's products while also helping to generate revenue. CMO of Steward Health Care to retire The Lowell Sun Chief Medical Officer of the Steward Health Care System, Dr. Justine Carr, recently announced her retirement. She is said to leave a legacy of improvements in patient care across area community hospitals, including Nashoba Valley Medical Center. Startup Terminus to add 100 jobs in HQ expansion Atlanta Business Chronicle Marketing software firm Terminus will invest $1.5 million in an expansion that will create more than 100 jobs over the next few years. Terminus helps marketers target, engage and grow the marketing and sales pipeline. Spectra by Comcast Spectacor Extends Partnership With the University of California, Irvine Press release UC Irvine adds Marketing Automation and Salesforce CRM, Continues to Utilize Ticketing, Fundraising and Marketing Services to Engage Fans and Donors, Enhance Customer Service and Drive Revenue PubMatic Expands Video Business via Partnership with Media 122 Press release Media 122 Recognizes 47 Percent Increase in Programmatic Revenue throughPubMatic partnership. Workflows Improve with Agile Marketing eMarketer Project management software provider Wrike surveyed US marketers about their adoption of Agile marketing approaches in February 2016 and found most respondents used at least some of these methods. Inspirational Woman: Katy Keim | CMO, Lithium We Are the City Katy Keim is the Chief Marketing Officer and GM of Lithium Reach and Response, Katy is responsible for all strategic marketing activities for the company including branding, positioning, communications, go-to-market strategy and customer acquisition programs. She also leads Lithium’s overall product marketing group and product strategy for Lithium’s Reach and Response business. Kymm (Pollack) Martinez Named St. Thomas University’s Chief Marketing Officer Press release St. Thomas University appoints first-ever CMO. F5 Networks beats its own quarterly goals, sets CEO search and hires CMO Geekwire F5 Networks, the Seattle-based network infrastructure and security technology company, reported revenue of $496.5 million for the third quarter of its fiscal 2016 ended June 30 —up 3 percent from the year-ago period. If I Knew Then: Graham Weston, CO-FOUNDER AND CHAIRMAN, RACKSPACE Crain's Silicon Valley Interview with co-founder and chair of Rackspace. Smartphones Overtake Computers as Top E-Commerce Traffic Source Bloomberg Technology Smartphones accounted for 45.1 percent of web-shopping traffic in the first quarter of this year, edging out computers at 45 percent, according to a study fromDemandware, an e-commerce software provider. The firm, which was acquired bySalesforce.com Inc. this month, projects that number will continue to increase, with phones accounting for 60 percent of e-commerce visits by the end of next year. CMO Today: Verizon Confirms $4.8 Billion Acquisition of Yahoo Wall Street Journal Yahoo is snagged by Verizon. Customers/Partners Wal-Mart’s Venkat Achanta Joins Neustar as Chief Data and Analytics Officer Wall Street Journal Mr. Achanta is taking on a newly created role at data and analytics companyNeustar. Rocket Fuel Names Advertising and Digital Media Veteran Rick Song as Chief Revenue Officer Press release Song joins Rocket Fuel to oversee sales and build out its go-to-market plans in an effort to drive further awareness and adoption of its industry-leading technology. How to tap into data with predictive analytics Marketing Dive Software company New Relic used predictive analytics to boost its top lead conversion rate by almost 10x. Interview with Adam Berke, President and CMO, AdRoll MarTech Ad Roll is a big believer in interoperability. It goes to show in our partnerships with platforms like Facebook, Marketo, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, and others. Huh, Really? Accenture Claims Its Digital Services Unit Is Worth About $7 Billion Adexchanger Accenture’s digital services group Accenture Interactive “never set out to disrupt the agency relationship,” said Bob Barr, its managing director and global B2B commerce lead, but that’s pretty much what’s happening. FunnelWise Integrates with Marketo to Provide Full Funnel Visibility Press release FunnelWise enables marketing and sales professionals to gain real-time visibility into their organization's revenue funnels. Today the company announced its software is fully integrated with Marketo New Report Highlights the Creative and Programmatic Ad Gap Turn A new survey from Turn finds there’s a gap in the flow of information – creatives aren’t getting what they need, and as a result, brands are suffering. Facebook Messenger now has one billion active users Recode Messenger is the third Facebook app to hit that benchmark. Scribe Software Named a Leader in Independent Research Firm's iPaaS Report Press release The Forrester Wave™ iPaaS for Dynamic Integration, Q3 2016 evaluated the eight "most significant" vendors offering an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) based on 32 criteria, including the strength of its current offering, product strategy, cost, management functions and revenue growth. Google Uses AI to Lure New Cloud Customers Wall Street Journal Google offering clients software to analyze customer reviews, social-media posts or customer-service calls Study: Understanding martech is critically important to marketing success Marketing Dive Recent research by programmatic marketing and analytics platform DataXu found that 78% of U.S. marketers believe that understanding martech is critically important to success. 37% of U.S. marketers said they believes their greatest marketing challenge is "creating the most efficient marketing mix possible across channels to drive results." Marketing Startup Sprinklr Now Valued at $1.8 Billion Fortune Marketing software startup Sprinklr, which last year declared it had topped $100 million in revenue, has raised another $105 million to fuel international growth and, if the occasion arises, to make more acquisitions. Google Mobilizes With AMP Ads And Programmatic Native AdExchanger Google wants to improve the mobile ad experience, which is too slow and reliant on desktop ad formats. Its solution? AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) ads and the expansion of programmatic native, both of which Google VP Paul Muret introduced Tuesday at the company’s DoubleClick Leadership Summit. Google Japan CMO explains her approach to humanising tech Campaign Asia Google's Miki Iwamura talks experience, evaluation, and why low-tech branding still has a place. Facebook launches new app install ad format that targets users likely to take action Marketing Dive Facebook has launched a new ad format, App Event Optimization, that helps advertisers target users who are likely to take specific actions within apps, according to a Facebook blog post. The format allows advertisers to bid more for app install ads to target users that are likely to take specific actions, such as buying a product or rating the app. Facebook: 80% of holiday shopping season posts are on mobile Marketing Dive People share more on Facebook during the holiday season, and most of that sharing comes on mobile, according to new research using Facebook and Instagram data from the 2015 holiday season. Performance Horizon and LiveRamp Integrate to Help Brands Connect Online Partnership Initiatives to Offline Sales Press release Integration provides first platform for brands to measure, optimize, and reward digital marketing partners that drive offline sales Contently Launches Document Analytics For Tracking Downloadable Content MediaPost Contently’s available metrics include page-by-page engagement analytics and heat maps displaying where readers click, hover or share content. Additional product features include version control, A/B testing and pre-populated text for sharing on social media. Deloitte promotes Redhill from Australian CMO to global consulting marketing chief CMO Magazine (Australia) Well-respected marketing leader tells CMO how he plans to lead the Deloitte global consulting business as CMO and why culture is so important Frost & Sullivan Applauds Vidyard for a Rich Customer Experience Made Possible by its Innovative, Complete Video Analytics Solution Press release Vidyard's solution helps pack sales and marketing tools into clients' videos for better customer engagement and ROI Hootsuite adds integration for Dropbox, OneDrive CMO Innovation Social media manager Hootsuite this week announced that it has integratedDropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, Google Drive into its publishing platform. Partners Is Video the Next Big Thing For LinkedIn? Social Media Today LinkedIn now has its very own seat at the "big kids" table when it comes to social media networks and tech companies. Leading Social Business Software Tracx Hires Prominent DC-Based CMO, Jenifer Kern Press release    Tracx, a leading social media management platform, has announced that Jenifer Kern will join the company as its new Chief Marketing Officer. What Can Ad Agencies Learn From The Software Industry? AdExchanger Byline from the SVP of Experience Design at DigitasLBi. Is Twitter's turnaround working? Marketing Dive Study predicts Twitter's user base to grow 11% in 2016. Twitter CMO reveals 'See What's Happening' campaign to cement the social network as home of breaking news The Drum Twitter's chief marketing officer Leslie Berland has unveiled the social network's latest advertising push, saying the company wants to clear up misconceptions around what it is actually used for.

By: Ashika Balani Posted: July 25, 2016 | Mobile Marketing With rapidly evolving digital marketing and the proliferation of devices, marketers are faced with the challenge of staying ahead, or simply keeping up, when it comes to capturing and keeping their audience’s attention. How can they do it? Take a page from Hollywood, which understands that they need to be on top of the latest trends in order to create compelling content that captivates their audience. Looking at the pictures below from popular films and television shows over the past decades, what do they all have in common? You go it—the use of a mobile device. Over the decades, the telephone has evolved from car phone to cellphone to smartphone, and as consumers adapt to these changes, marketers should too. In fact, in the U.S. alone, 75% of citizens over the age of 13 have a smartphone, and there are more mobile devices in the world (7.8 billion) than people (7.1 billion), due largely in part to our voracious appetite for “new.” That’s a huge audience you’re missing out on if you don’t have a mobile marketing strategy in place. Mobile phones have progressed from being used as a way to communicate with our friends and families and coordinate destinations, to a comprehensive tool for messaging, emailing, web browsing, time management, and everything in between. They’ve changed the way we live and communicate, not to mention they have reinvented our language (emojis, anyone?). Mobile devices are now the key entry point to the digital world and it’s up to marketers to understand how to stay ahead of the game to keep their buyers engaged. As you’re building, or improving, your mobile marketing strategy, here are three things to keep in mind: 1. Think About the Big Picture As you’re planning your mobile marketing strategy, consider how it fits in with your initiatives on other channels and how each channel will inform the other. Identifying this information will inform how you should adapt your message to each channel and individual. Mobile devices give you access to billions of users on their most personal device, and with that comes billions of different data points from their interactions. Because of this, it’s critical to integrate mobile interactions within a unified, single view that spans the channels where your audience engages. Even mobile-only companies, like Uber, can benefit from a multi-channel strategy. For example, Uber uses app engagement to inform their email communications, sending disengaged users new offers to reactive them. For your own strategy, consider how a buyer’s actions on your website or email can be used to trigger a relevant response on their mobile device, and vice versa. After all, as modern marketers, we’re increasingly the stewards of the customer journey and therefore responsible for meeting users’ expectations of a personalized and seamless experience—wherever they are. 2. Acquire the Right Users It’s expensive to acquire new users in a highly competitive mobile atmosphere—the number of new users has gone up more than 84% over the last year, according to research from Fiksu. So, it’s important to have a plan in place to ensure your acquisition efforts are not wasted on users who will not remain loyal or engaged. To avoid wasting your effort, dollars, and resources, conduct research upfront to build a solid profile of the right user. Understand what makes your current users loyal and profile their unique demographics and interests. This insight allows you to more quickly and effectively target the right people—those likely engage with your app and stay loyal over time—bringing in higher levels of engagement, lower cost per install, stronger reviews and referrals, and new user growth. Once you’ve identified the right audience, leverage your different channels to drive acquisition. You can run an install campaign to your existing marketable email database to drive awareness of your mobile app among contacts that haven’t downloaded it yet. You can even offer exclusive information or a particular motivation to download. Another option is to detect users coming to your website from mobile devices and encourage them to download your app. For example, while Bank of America’s website is mobile optimized, a CTA appears to download the app, with the incentive to be able to connect directly to a customer service rep by downloading and using it. 3. Focus on Long-Term Growth A growth mindset goes beyond a narrow focus on acquisition. A solid mobile marketing strategy engages users from the second they’re aware of your brand to long after they’ve converted into users or customers. For example, in the case of mobile app marketing, this would entail the key mobile customer lifecycle stages of acquisition, engagement, retention, and reactivation (for those who stray). By understanding where a user is in the mobile app lifecycle, it provides you with the opportunity to automate and trigger relevant activities to encourage lasting user engagement. You can do this by tapping into mobile signals and insights to deliver relevant responses, which include: Timing: Deliver messages at the moment a user interacts with your brand, whether that’s in a mobile browser or your app or on your mobile site Behavior: Present content and messaging based on a user’s actions or inactions on a device Proximity and location: Leverage technologies like GPS, iBeacon, and geo-fencing to deliver relevant messages or offers Stage/sequence: Track specific actions to deliver messages that are meant to accelerate conversion or drive a specific behavior Even if mobile is not the primary way your brand interacts with your buyers, it’s a key component within a holistic customer journey, one that each of your buyers will go through. An effective mobile marketing strategy boils down to understanding how it fits into your overall marketing strategy, understanding who your target audience is, and engaging them long after acquiring them. Ready to take your mobile marketing to the next level? Download our ebook on Best Practices for Mobile Marketing: How to Acquire, Engage, and Retain Users.

By: Kevin George Posted: July 22, 2016 | Email Marketing As an email marketer, subscriber engagement is undeniably one of the most critical factors that makes or breaks your efforts in converting your subscribers into lifetime customers. Considering that 54% of US and Canadian consumers consider ending their brand loyalty if they are sent irrelevant content and offers, according to CMO Council, what’s the way forward? Repeated surveys have proven that transactional emails are more effective at engaging subscribers and result in greater ROI than bulk emails. In fact, Experian reports that the average revenue per transactional email is two to five times greater than standard bulk emails and that they have almost eight times the open and click rates. Yet, out of all marketers, only 40% are using transactional emails. The Components of a Transactional Email A transactional email, otherwise known as an operational email, is essentially a personalized email that’s system-triggered by a subscriber’s unique behavior during an online transaction (registration, form-fill, purchase, etc.). Here are a few best practices to consider as you’re developing your transactional email campaign: Send it from a recognized ‘From’ address. No one likes seeing emails from do-not-reply@xyzdomain.com. Use a subject line that clearly summarizes the purpose of the email. Avoid adding promotional language in the subject line or your email could be flagged as spam. Write copy that acknowledges and thanks the subscriber for their activity and conveys excellent customer service. While the CAN-SPAM act allows a transactional email to be used for promotions, the message of the email should primarily be transactional in nature. Include a recognizable and clickable brand logo and incorporate your brand colors to boost brand recognition. Use links that serve a specific purpose. Be friendly, informative, and timely. If you aspire to join the 40% marketers who are sending transactional emails and seeing serious results, then sending friendly, timely, and informative emails is a must. Here are six types of transactional emails you can send your subscribers based on their behavior: 1. Email Address Confirmation/Registration Emails If a buyer subscribes to your newsletter, fills out a form, or registers for an event or webinar on your website, send them an email to confirm their action. This enhances the customer experience and sets the tone for building a trusting relationship. You can also use these emails as a double opt-in for subscribers to confirm their email address. Some businesses do this to confirm that subscribers enter valid email addressed, which is a great way to keep your database clean. Email address confirmation and registration emails are also a great way to provide your subscribers with additional information they may need like your contact email, phone number, or social media profiles, and it opens the door for them to connect with you in different ways. For example, Best Buy’s welcome email contains various calls-to-action (CTAs) to help subscribers learn more about their different services. 2. Password Resets If your website has a portal for visitors to log into, make sure that when your subscribers request a password change, they receive timely, personalized, and clear instructions regarding the password reset procedure. Moreover, with the prevalence of phishing activities, adding a link or email where they can report unauthorized password requests strengthens your credibility. This email from Treehouse has clear instructions on how to perform a password reset, an alternate link, and a contact email for any issues that come up. 3. Order Confirmation Emails and Purchase Receipts After subscribers make a purchase or register for a conference, follow up with an email that confirms their order and includes their shipping information and tracking links when applicable. Buyers are often eager to view their order confirmation because it provides reassurance that their purchase was processed and gives them information on when they’ll receive their order. This order confirmation email from Fitbit includes a receipt and link to check the order status in real-time. Take advantage of your subscriber’s high level of engagement by showcasing customer testimonials or cross-selling relevant products, services, or events. In fact, Experian reports that transactional emails that include cross-sell items have 20% higher transaction rates than those without.asking for referrals within the email. You can also use order confirmation emails to ask your subscribers for referrals. For example, Skillshare includes a referral code at the bottom of their receipts to encourage their subscribers to refer their friends. 4. Feedback Emails There is always room for improvement, and one of the best ways to improve the customer experience is to understand how your buyers feel. Ask your subscribers for feedback directly based on the proper context (e.g. after they book a trip from your website or 3-months into their software subscription). Since their feedback can be extensive, you may want to provide a CTA to a landing page to collect it. For example, after a game, the Arkansas Razerbacks send attendees an email thanking them for attending, recapping the scorecard, and directing them to click a link to take a survey about their experience. 5. Reactivation Emails Reactivation emails are sent to subscribers who have previously interacted with brand, but haven’t continued to engage. This could include consumers who abandon their shopping cart before making a purchase, email subscribers who haven’t been opening your emails, or existing customers whose subscriptions are expiring soon. Target your offers based on each subscriber’s behavior and lifecycle stage (e.g. send more aggressive offers to subscribers with lower engagement or existing customers who are likely to churn). Reactivation emails are a great way to keep your brand top-of-mind and remind your subscribers about the value your brand provides. You can take a humorous approach like Bonobos or send a clear-cut email that gets to the point like Apple Music. 6. Website/App Extension Emails Increase engagement by bridging the divide between your different channels. By providing in-email functionality that connects to your website or app, subscribers have the freedom to interact with you on their preferred device. For example, LinkedIn sends a CTA email when you receive a new LinkedIn invitation that is personalized and prompts the user to confirm the invitation. No matter what industry you’re in, transactional emails can help you generate more revenue, build brand loyalty, and improve your email deliverability. Are you ready to take them on? Trigger away! Are you currently sending transactional emails in your campaigns? Share your tips and tricks below!

By: Graham Gallivan Posted: July 20, 2016 | Modern Marketing As a marketer, it’s important to have all the tools and resources you need to build, measure, and optimize your campaigns. But just as important, it can be a tall order for IT to keep your marketing team equipped with all of the tools you need to be successful. Traditionally, marketing and IT departments operated in silos, but these boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred in the digital marketplace. As Accenture Interactive reports, “The ripple effect of digital disruption is giving rise to a more integrated enterprise center on the customer experience.” Marketers who recognize the potential this presents will see the value in working with their IT colleagues to find technology solutions that allow them to seize the customer experience and benefit the entire business. Buyers are increasingly driving their own journeys, so the scope of the tools you need in order to reach and engage them is expanding. These days, 87% of people demand a meaningful brand experience, according to Edelman Consulting. Add this to the fact that as much as 90% of a buyer’s journey being self-directed, as reported in the Forrester Research report “Don’t Let Muddled Messaging Compromise Customer Experience,” published 2015, and the stakes have never been higher. To drive value across the organization, marketing and IT need to team up to adopt a marketing automation platform that’s a partner for growth—listening and responding, collecting data, and automating processes to make millions of customer connections measurable. To connect and build meaningful relationships with buyers, marketers need a way to get personal at scale, with a platform that delivers in these three key areas: 1. Ease of Use It’s critical, for both your marketing team and your organization, to work with IT to find a marketing solution that’s easy to use at implementation and beyond. Ease of use also results in no loss in productivity or system abandonment when key users leave. Look for a robust, complete solution, rather than a “good enough” solution, that offers a high level of functionality without making things complicated. For example, most solutions in the market support basic workflows, like creating email campaigns and landing pages. But after you’ve built a flow once or twice, you’ll soon wish you could do more—and more easily, with a comprehensive platform. Complete solutions will support marketers in a number of ways, helping them build out different parts of programs and processes at different times, clone forms across multiple campaigns (and still track separate conversions), trigger workflows based on just about any criteria, and listen and immediately react to key buyer interactions. 2. Low Burden to IT With many solutions out there, IT may be needed to build or adapt campaigns, monitor and troubleshoot integrations, oversee maintenance issues, and provide technical support. But this isn’t scalable, is it? In an ideal partnership, marketing and IT will team up to evaluate technologies and oversee the integration together, both on the front-end and back-end. But from that point forward, IT’s involvement should be minimal, freeing them to focus on strategy, not support. Your marketing automation platform will also provide the foundation for other marketing technology integrations (companies’ MarTech stacks continue to grow in size, with the landscape of solutions currently estimated at 3,874 and growing), so it’s important to find a solid platform that will support multiple integrations, without the need for heavy IT involvement. 3. Vision Partner with IT to choose a superior marketing platform with a long-term marketing vision and a deeply integrated partner cloud, bringing you peace of mind that your future needs will be met in a reliable and scalable, yet timely way by building on the current solution. It’s incumbent on marketers to share their current and projected needs with IT to identify a solution that will grow with the organization, so there’s no need to rip and replace over the years. In an ideal partnership, marketing will invest time in establishing a vision and collaborate with IT to bring it to life. Want to learn more about how IT and Marketing can partner to find a solution that will scale to meet the needs of the organization? Tune into our webinar with our resident scalability expert, Chris Pooley, Principal Solutions Architect at Marketo, to learn the ins and outs of Selecting a Marketing Automation Solution that Scales.

Inga and Jason are leaders of the New York and Silicon Valley Marketo User Groups for a hip-hop themed look at how you can use Marketo to grow your expertise, influence and ultimately your career. We’ll put the East Coast-West Coast rap feud to bed and share three tangible ways you can immediately step up your game. You'll learn: How to quickly deepen your Marketo experience - “(I) Get Around” (2Pac) How to easily get plugged into the Marketo Community - “Get Involved” (Q-Tip) How to simply understand your worth in the market and maximize it “Get Money” (Biggie) You can find the video recording here  The Essentials of Account-Based Marketing