How to Build Marketo Programs Faster With Templates and Tokens
Someone once told me that Marketo is akin to a Swiss army knife, and marketing automation tools are like plastic sporks. You can do your best with a spork, but a Swiss army knife gives you options. With the Marketo program, you can choose and build up that campaign exclusively. Marketo uses four different program types; they are:
So, What Exactly are Marketo Programs?
Marketo has creative assets like landing pages or emails, senders, pretty pictures, and emails with subject lines. Keep a tab on capturing information and how people react, and fill out a landing page form so that afterward, you can adjust your campaigns and their journeys accordingly.
Each program in Marketo is a container for marketing initiatives. Every one of your campaigns lives in a separate program that houses everything you need. Programs are easily cloned and are pretty flexible; hence organizing all of these assets into programs saves time. They are capable of housing marketing automation tasks, and not just email sends. To update fields in your CRM, clean record data, or manage lead scores, you can easily set up operational programs. Based on the past or current membership in another program, you can have your programs feed into each other by building lists.
Marketo and its Program Types
Marketo offers four different program types. Keep in mind, once you’ve started building a campaign, you cannot change the program type. Hence it’s essential to plan ahead. The four program types are Event Programs, Default Programs, Engagement Programs, and Email Programs.
1) Event Programs
These programs are best when it comes to offering extra functionality for online and live events. It comes in handy while tracking event funnel stages, starting from invites to registrations and more. If you’re looking to integrate with external SaaS solutions, this program type is the right choice. Integrations are available with partners like GoToWebinar and WebEx for conducting webinars. You can have attendee lists automatically sync back to Marketo and also push registration data into those systems.
2) Default Programs
A mix of local assets like landing pages, emails, smart lists, reports, and smart campaigns are containers in default programs. They are incredibly flexible but don’t include some of the built-in options available in other types.
3) Engagement Programs
Engagement programs make ongoing drip nurture easy to manage. For example, if you have a series that you want to send weekly to people at a particular stage in the customer journey, so instead of manually sending that email, you may add them to the engagement program stream. You can set the stream cadence to weekly, daily, or time it according to your current needs. Adding people to Engagement Programs on an ongoing basis can be easily automated. Content streams provide great flexibility.
For example, add the holiday email at the top of the stream if you want everyone to receive it on a particular week, and everyone will get it on the set date and time. You can even add emails or pause, and adjust your stream as and when you move ahead. Housing multiple streams within the same program, moving people between streams, sending a daily email for the first week, or a weekly email for the next two months can be set up. Different streams for different stages can be used in the Buyer’s Journey.
4) Email Programs
Every Marketo program can send emails. But mostly, smart campaigns are used to manage your sends. Email Programs offer a convenient control panel that gives a cleaner interface for the same functionality. They offer dashboards for streamlined A/B testing functionality and email-level interaction data. To take full advantage of these features, you may decide to nest Email Programs within Default or Event Programs. While Email Programs cannot nest within Engagement Programs, you can A/B test emails in it using the Champion/Challenger functionality.
Common Problems With Using Templates and Tokens
To develop standardized tokens and templates, make sure you involve stakeholders at the beginning only; Gathering all the requirements before execution is a part of the Marketo implementation. Developing a template module that no one will ever use, or seldomly use would be a total waste of time. However, templates can be edited, but won’t push those updates to email assets that have already been created from it.
To define editable areas in Marketo-specific syntax, creating a template would involve HTML/CSS coding. Work with a developer who is familiar with all this for an outstanding experience.
Building Marketo Programs Faster With Templates and Tokens:
Program templates and tokens help us in getting more done in Marketo. Program templates are a great idea. It makes things faster and easier in the long run with utmost efficiency and accuracy. It ensures there is enough flexibility in the operational part that provides consistency in delivering results and sustaining it too.
Typically, programs like webinars, events, emails, blogs, and online advertising need to be built again. Hence they should have templates. Tokens can help you save time working inside your templates. To find the elements that you can transform into tokens, start with reviewing your emails, images, and landing pages from top to bottom. Don’t skip any assets in the program. To have a master list for your program, do put these elements into a consolidated list and start creating tokens inside your program.
Populate Your Program Assets
Populate your program assets after creating your tokens. Then open your emails and landing pages to insert the tokens wherever the images and custom text is displayed.
Save Program as a Template
You can save the program as a template in its folder. Clients are recommended to create a folder named Program Templates separately so that users know where all programs ought to be cloned from!
Marketo Program Templates
When a new program is required, go to a template, right-click and choose Clone. Open the My Tokens tab in the program, to populate your token and voila, you’re all set to build programs quickly in Marketo with the help of tokens and templates.
Benefits of Using Tokens and Templates
Tokens and templates provide consistency across communications, which is helpful from a brand standpoint. Standardized templates and snippets help the recipients in recognizing emails coming from a single organization. These features make it easier to manage changes. They also allow users to create emails with much ease and ensure that they will render well. It can be overwhelming in the beginning and would likely result in errors. But eventually, things will move ahead faster and easier.
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