Thursday, April 26, 2012

Decoding the Marketo Template (Abridged)


When it comes to designing landing pages using the Marketo template, the common complaint is that it's difficult to customize the template. The typical scenario is that the template should match the website standards and so marketing folks will send the template to a designer, webmaster, or design agency that hasn't seen this before. The template comes back with some of the raw html used for the website or uploaded directly into Marketo.  When the template is previewed, it looks fine. However, when it comes time to edit or add content to it, it breaks or the editor keeps spinning and nothing comes up. Then the whole notion that the editor or the template sucks.

What happened?

The trick to all of this is to pay attention to the way the template is structured. There are some specific div tags in the template which starts off with "div#mkt..." which the Marketo editor looks for. This tells the editor which area on the template it is modifying. There are also some places in the code where it says "DO NOT EDIT". Heed the warning unless you know what you are doing. For the most part, there are three "divs" to worry about. I tried to highlight them in the image. Get those right and the template is pretty easy to manipulate.

A buddy of mine asked if I could reverse engineer the template that Marketo uses for the referral program. My template is on the right and I'm pretty proud of it. It does the trick.

 

 While it's not exact it took me an hour or so to recreate this template. To save you some time, I've included the bones for it here. You'll have to replace all the places where the images point to our image library and it should look just like yours and take half the time. If you have a good web person, they can add all the snazzy navigation to match your site in no time.

Enjoy,
Ryan

Friday, April 13, 2012

My First Marketo Program Part 1


It's nice to see how all the elements of my first Marketo program is running. However, looking back it was an intense process. Honestly, it didn't have to be that way. I've been using Marketo for a little over 4 years and admittedly ignored that last release regarding programs. I was so comfortable building campaigns using the folder structure that all this talk about the advantages of using programs just escaped me. Well not escape, but completely ignored because I had gotten so good with the old structure. But, it was time...a chance to dump what I thought I knew and get on with the "program". 

This time the challenge was different. Rather than using marketing activities siloed from our application, Marketo was integral to the signup process and required a series of hooks into our application. It will hand out activation codes to our users so its critical that it functions seamlessly. To get my head around all the pieces and touch points, I started off diagramming the flow to answer some basic questions.

What happens at signup?
Which application does what?
What is the path for the user?
How does Marketo handle the user's path?

This was starting to look more like a small nurture stream. Looking at it from a 3K foot level, when someone signs up, I look to see if the activation email bounced. If so, the lead doesn't make it into SFDC. In addition, users have the ability to request being contacted instead of signing up using the same form. This would bypass the activation email and following steps to get routed into SFDC and to the right rep.

For trial sign ups, we start what I call a "pretrial" process which means you've signed up, but haven't activated your account in order to actually begin the trial. The system waits a day and starts sending out reminders to activate and does so each day for 3 days and then adds the user into an inactive static list. If activated, the user goes into a "trial" nurture stream which will have a few emails associated to encourage usage. 

All of these are managed through progression steps tracking leads as they move through all of these phases. Essentially one big program working in unison. 

Here's a link to the signup form. https://boundary.com/signup/

I'll share some of the program components in the next post.