Saturday, February 25, 2012

Cleaning Up with SOAP


I'm seeing more websites these days utilize the Marketo SOAP API's on forms than the standard form/landing page combo and it's a good sign. For the marketers out there, there are a few ways that leads can get added into Marketo and much more clean in terms of how it's done as well as having full control of the design of the web pages.

  1. Standard. Use the standard form and landing page pair by creating a form and adding it to a landing page. This works well if you don't have too many form variations since you build the form as a single object with all the fields you want and then drag and drop into a landing page. However, it doesn't work as well if you want to use one form but with just some additional fields. Also, it's a bit tricky to get the right form styles to pass a good designer's eye.
  2. Web to Lead. Use a form similar to the Salesforce web to lead form by creating a form and cutting and pasting the code onto your own non-Marketo landing page. You get to control the look and feel but have it go directly into Marketo.
  3. API - There's the Munchkin API and SOAP API. Munchkin uses the same javascript cookie that tracks leads to insert them. However, for some of the more nifty things, the documentation says to go with the SOAP API. 
Again, for marketers, I would pass along the documentation and samples for the SOAP API to your web developer. They eat this stuff for breakfast and the PHP and JAVA samples should give enough info to go on. Key takeaway is that there is much more flexibility to control what you can do with the lead information. You have full control of the design elements, but added benefit of being able to look up lead records, append/upsert information to the record as necessary. 

Personally, I've used it (with lots of help) on separate occasions with great success. One for an account management function where a user can manage his/her profile as well as sign in credentials to get access to files, support (on a different system), and website materials without having to resubmit this information. The other is to signup for a demo environment (hosted on our servers) and using the API to pass along the lead information to Marketo. 



On the Marketo side, all you have to do is create a trigger for the API and a value such as lead source that you are using to differentiate the call. 



Saturday, February 11, 2012

"Use the Source"


Of all lead fields, the lead source value gets the most amount of attention. As marketers we are trained to look to the lead source as the source of truth for ROI. However, this often gets overly complicated and at times philosophical. After all, leads are often associated to several campaigns prior to conversion and depending on who was involved in the campaigns, each party is looking to claim the credit for the converting source.
  
Depending on the final analysis, telling the full story isn't always so clear. I remember a marketing manager vehemently defending that most leads that converted were because of demos since converted leads had campaigns with the word demo showed up most often. Hmm...we do know that interested buyers tend to go to a demo as the last step before they are converted into an opportunity. Does that mean we should spend all our money on demos and that this is the source of all leads?

So here are my SFDC lead source values. Although it's only single source attribution, what I do give credit for is the originating source or the click from the place prior to the person being cookies on my site. Perhaps we will never truly know the origin of any source, however, it's a good start because it's the first time I've cookied this user. Even if this person leaves the site and comes back at a later point, the original referrer source does not change. For the form conversion, I use the campaign name. I've also tried multiple source fields (lead and web source), but the campaign seems to do the job for now.

If you are using SFGA (Salesforce for Google Adwords) there are a few lead sources that come with the package. The SFGA application will assign a majority of these values by cookie'ing the user on the initial visit to your website. It does a very good job in assigning the lead sources and you'll see these activities entered by the "License Manager" user. The only caveat is that it doesn't work in all cases. For instance, if you decide to send an email and use "Campaign" as a lead source, SFGA will look at referrer and select "Website Referral" as the source since the source was from your email blast source. This also happens for trade show lists. 

In Marketo, I add a rule to Change Data Value for the lead source in the flow preceded by a 5 minute wait step. This ensures license manager will give it the source, then the flow rule will come in after and change it vs. having it the other way around.