Hi Alexis Shamsi Hughes​ - in 2014 the company I was at evaluated Pardot and Marketo as we migrated off of Eloqua. At that time, Marketo had Pardot beat hands-down in nurturing and personalization capabilities. However, the marketing team was not very sophisticated and we frankly didn't need much of the superior Marketo functionality. Pardot's price was significantly better, as we were packaging it with a Salesforce purchase at the same time. Marketo had my vote, but we went with Pardot. Ironically, the Pardot/SFDC sync was a constant source of problems. Pardot's usability was good - end-user training was quick and successful. Quicker than Marketo training, much Marketo training is longer because it is so much more powerful.  I've heard that Pardot has greatly improved their nurturing capabilities - if that's true, it could be viable alternative to Marketo for a marketing team of medium-level sophistication. I know you also asked about support - from my experience managing both platforms I'd say Pardot is on-par (PUN!) with Marketo. Let me know if you have any other questions. ... View more

Hi Ravi, When I was an in-house Marketo manager, our PR team used Marketo for to send out their press releases to their contacts. We set up a separate workspace for the PR team - we considered a full partition, but didn't need it as the PR team didn't mind (in fact encouraged) if their contacts received marketing messages.  Setting up good program and email templates for the PR team was necessary, but easy since their programs were incredibly simple. ... View more

Hi Niti Shah​, Many good suggestions in this thread. Two things I'd add: 1. Customize your training to your audience. End-users such as specialists and managers need to know different functionality compared to directors and VPs. Sales definitely needs different training than marketing. 2. Training is never over. In a previous role, training was a continuous part of my job as Marketo admin. Marketo is such a massive platform that it doesn't make sense to cover all everything in session - or even a month. I'd be happy to chat more if you have other questions. Best of luck! ... View more

Hi Kate LeCornu​, If you embed the first email within a program (and put that program into the stream), you can use a Smart Campaign to make the leads members of the program before entering them into the stream. Leads that are already members of the program will skip the program and go to the next piece of content in the stream. More details: Engagement Program Content and Skipping Programs ... View more

Hi Casey Muller​ - I did an internal training presentation at my firm last year on this. Key points that I stressed to the marketers: Compatibility between 1.0 and 2.0 templates Content and Module navigators Mobile preview - so nice! If you'd like more, message me directly, I can send you the deck I used. ... View more

Hi Michelle Tang​, Take a look at a couple of different vendors. Good ones should give you a trial in which they'll append a small but representative sample of your customer data with the company info stripped out. See which vendor gives you the best matches. I've decided twice on ReachForce based on this process, but I'd also recommend you look at ZoomInfo. ... View more

Can't do it within Marketo. Good overview of how you could do it outside of Marketo in your own BI warehouse here: Exporting the Activity Log into an automated report ... View more

Hi Liz Krupka​ - dynamic functionality is based off of segmentation functionality, and by Marketo's definition, leads can only be in one segment of a segmentation. Thankfully, you can use the segmentation functionality to rank which one of your segments your want your lead to fall into first. Good documentation here: Understanding Dynamic Content - Marketo Docs - Product Docs ... View more

Hi Michael Collins​, I've had success using Marketo's Revenue Explorer functionality to answer precisely these kinds of questions. However, these aren't questions that you're going to be able to answer immediately. I've found it best to get a baseline level of familiarity with what types of metrics are available and how long it'll take the marketing ops team to start getting these metrics. Then, sit down with your Finance and leadership stakeholders to agree to the metrics. Without prior agreement they might say 'Oooh, nice metrics - but we want these other ones instead.' Learn from my previous mistakes! As for documentation - this is a good start: Revenue Explorer - Marketo Docs - Product Docs ... View more

Hi Michael Patterson​, At my last in-house role we built a new Marketo instance from the ground up and it included RCE. I highly recommend RCE, but can understand a hesitancy to spend more money with Marketo. As you make your decision, consider what metrics are important to your team, and how easy or difficult it is to pull the metrics now. For us, we were running Eloqua, and were only able to pull single (last) touch attribution, and the process took our business analyst days at the end of each month. After getting RCE up and running, I was able to get reports that anyone could run in seconds - and we had multi-touch attribution, pipeline velocity, all sorts of additional metrics we didn't have before. The time savings of our analyst alone paid for the system in the first six months. On the downside, the UI is hilariously dated. Shoot me a note if you'd like more details. ... View more

Hi Lucy Randall​, You can only have 1 email address in the reply to field. To get around this, you can set up aliases that have the appropriate salesperson included. ... View more

Got it! To get exactly what you're looking for, you're going to need to export the activity log to an outside database and perform the analysis there. This thread might get you started in the right direction: Activity Log API Connector​. But, I think you can get a sense of what you're looking for by running some experiments in Marketo. It seems as though your hypothesis (or at least one of them) is that 'the volume of emails, not the content, is lowering engagement'. Run some experiments where you have a cohort that receives your the standard of cadence of emails, and one several that receive decreases cadence. Compare the engagement across the cohorts. Hope this helps, and good luck! ... View more

Thanks for the info Dan! ... View more

Chris Saporito​ - isn't the Marketo Email Delivery Power Pack powered by Litmus? I think I remember hearing that. Either way, I'll provide another recommendation for the Marketo tool. ... View more

Hi Ashley White​, You can simply have a monthly subscription to an Email Performance Report that shows all of the emails that were sent in the previous month. In this report be sure to include the 'Unsubscribed' column. That's going to show you the emails that your database unsubscribed from that month. You can also set up similar reports with subscriptions to show you hard bounces during the month to see additional ways your database is decaying. Finally, all of these reports can be filtered on additional criteria if you are comparing separate lists. The ability to add Smart List filters to reports is powerful! ... View more

Hi Jeffrey Fishwick​, Good luck with you migration. I've used both systems and much prefer Marketo! It has been years since I did a Pardot to Marketo migration, but we had a similar situation. What we ended up doing was loading some of the key Pardot lead activity into Marketo as Interesting Moments. Sales leadership helped us define the scope of the Pardot activity that we imported in as Interesting Moments. The process: we first created a custom field that the Pardot activity was imported into, then used a Smart Campaign and a token for the custom field to create the Interesting Moment. The one part that I can't remember is how the information got out of Pardot, but I'm sure you're on top of that! ... View more

Hi Nikhil Sharma​, Be careful about the specifics - if a person has unsubscribed, you legally need to honor that preference. What you're describing sounds like you want to mark a person as 'marketing suspended' for a time period. Helpful Marketo documentation around unsubscribed vs. marketing suspended: Understanding Unsubscribe - Marketo Docs - Product Docs ... View more

Hi Leanne Persang​ - good luck with training! RCE is powerful! I'll echo what Samantha McCollough​ said - the most important KPIs are going to vary business to business. I was in a similar situation last year, where my company was just launching Revenue Explorer and all of a sudden we had new metrics available. We (the MA team) sat down with marketing leadership, ran through an overview of the reporting setup, and agreed that MT Pipeline Generated and MT Pipeline Influenced would be the first metrics we would focus on. The two metrics - for us - got at the heart of marketing's contributing to the sales pipeline. As we matured as an organization we paid more attention to other metrics (velocity metrics in particular), but every org's journey will be different. ... View more