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.