How to Make Your Marketo Emails Smarter

Marketers often make the mistake of not using targeted and customized content because it is a time-intensive task. But failing to create personalized content can reduce your conversion rate. These days, just a mere ‘Hi!’ in blast emails cannot create the bond with your customers that they expect. To understand what your potential customer wants and how to convert them into customers, you need to create customized content. You need to make your content relevant, impactful, and useful for all the recipients to make it serve its purpose.

In this competitive era, when every organization is trying to achieve all the evolving digital marketing technology, your content needs to stand out. One-size-fits-all emails sound very promotional and fail to portray your brand image.

Thus, it is important to personalize your emails and keep them user-friendly. Marketo has developed a very straightforward and easy-to-execute platform to make your Marketo emails smarter. Marketo’s dynamic content functionality has made personalization easy. It helps personalize your emails and landing pages by automating a lot of manual tasks by segmenting the email list.

Understanding the Importance of Smarter Marketo Emails

Smarter emails go beyond one-size-fits-all approaches. By tailoring your content to the specific needs and preferences of your audience, you can deliver value directly to their inboxes. This approach fosters a sense of personal connection and increases the likelihood of recipients taking desired actions.

Crafting Irresistible Subject Lines

The subject line is your email’s first impression. A compelling and relevant subject line can significantly impact open rates. Use clear language, create a sense of urgency, and consider using personalization tokens to grab the recipient’s attention.

How to apply dynamic content in Marketo and build your segmentation

Remember, the goal is to create a bonding that makes all your email receivers feel special. Therefore you need to curate relevant content. To create an experience that’s customized for the individual reader, you need to scan your data center and data warehouse for the most relevant content. This will ensure your segmentation based on campaign types and the range of your Marketo users. You just need to feed the identifiable information into Marketo to build a new Segment in Marketo’s Lead Database. Marketo uses several ways to customize your content by using out-of-the-box functionality and integrating dynamic content via Marketo’s APIs. Marketo has also added a ‘Default’ option, which will apply to any leads who don’t fall into my defined segments.

It is also important to prioritize orders for members who qualify for multiple segments. Marketo will assign the segment to the lead based on the highest priority segment. This will not only help create the most touching content but will also prevent any lead from getting several emails for the same objective.

To proceed in the right way, you need to build the rules that will qualify your database to be included in your segmentation. Once you approve your segmentation’s draft, the Marketo system will take 24 hours to calculate and qualify your database. You will see a green tick next to the segments that got qualified, which means you can begin personalizing your emails and landing pages via Marketo’s editors.

Select a static element of your email from the email editor and right-click to choose ‘Segment By’ and select your approved Segmentation. This will list the element under ‘Dynamic’ on the right-side menu of the editor. This will help you to personalize content for each segment, allowing you to smoothly run your email marketing campaigns. You can personalize multiple recipients with one email asset.

By navigating to the lead database, Marketo finds the Segmentations Folder. You have the option to generate a new segmentation, provide it with a name, and incorporate the segment to establish permanent smart list segments within that created segmentation. You can name your segments and pick the criteria and filters needed to complete the segment. Once your segments are prepared, it’s essential to arrange them in a specific order, as a lead will be placed within the initial segment that aligns with their qualification.

You can select Preview a Draft and check your content for each segment, as well as send sample emails. It is also a smart idea to create a new segment for email addresses that are used on a regular basis for easy access. You can also use the same to confirm the content is personalized and check other details before you approve your final email.

The Marketo instance strategically divides your leads to ensure that each lead resides simultaneously within a well-defined segment based on industry, company, and geography. Once the different segments get created, Marketo allows you to add dynamic content blocks to your landing page or email, enabling Marketo to detect a piece of content that needs to be different depending on which lead is reading it. Furthermore, to ensure the automatic updating of all your assets with the newly assigned lead segmentation, Marketo offers scalable snippets. It also allows the user to separate reports by segmentation to show the effectiveness of targeted campaigns.

Based on the criteria set in the smart list, Marketo segments individual leads under different segmentations to keep your data clean and robust. The practice of refining a specific criterion to construct a target audience is an effective method for enhancing customer experience and engagement. Furthermore, leveraging Marketo’s data enriched with quality, segmentation assists in tailoring your content for a particular audience. Marketo employs dynamic content and snippets to personalize material based on the recipient’s position in their customer journey.

To ensure your email deliverability, reinforce your domain branding, and increase trust among your recipients, select an email CNAME for branded tracking links (navigate Admin>Email>Edit). Set up DKIM and SPF in the Admin area to assure your recipients that your Marketo emails are not spam. Also, set up an MX record for your domain as it allows you to receive mail to the domain that you are sending email from to process replies and autoresponders. Then set up your email CNAME in Marketo.

Visual Appeal: Designing Emails for Engagement

A thoughtfully crafted email is visually attractive and user-friendly in terms of navigation. Use a responsive design that adapts to various devices and includes a balanced mix of images and text. Keep the layout clean and use whitespace effectively to avoid overwhelming the reader.

A/B Testing: Optimizing for Better Performance

A/B testing involves sending two variations of an email to different segments of your audience to see which performs better. Test different elements such as subject lines, CTAs, and visuals to continuously refine your email strategies.

Mobile Responsiveness: Reaching Your Audience on the Go

With a significant portion of emails being opened on mobile devices, it’s crucial to ensure your Marketo emails are mobile-responsive. Test how your emails appear on different devices and make adjustments to provide a seamless experience.

Deliverability Matters: Best Practices to Avoid the Spam Folder

Even the most compelling emails won’t be effective if they end up in the spam folder. Follow best practices to improve deliverability, such as using a reputable sender name, crafting relevant content, and avoiding spam trigger words.

Call to Action (CTA) Excellence: Driving Conversions

Your emails should have a clear and compelling call to action (CTA). Whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a webinar, or downloading a resource, the CTA should stand out and guide the recipient on the next steps.

Social Sharing Integration: Expanding Your Reach

Including social sharing buttons in your emails encourages recipients to share your content with their networks. This extends your email’s reach and introduces your brand to a wider audience.

Automated Workflows: Nurturing Leads Through Email Sequences

Automated workflows allow you to set up a series of emails that are triggered by specific actions or behaviors. Use these sequences to nurture leads, provide valuable content, and guide recipients through the buyer’s journey.

Analytics and Tracking: Measuring Success and Iterating

Marketo provides robust analytics tools that enable you to track the performance of your email campaigns. Monitor open rates, click-through rates, and conversion metrics to understand what’s working and make data-driven improvements.

Compliance and Privacy: Following Email Marketing Regulations

Stay compliant with email marketing regulations such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM by including clear unsubscribe links and respecting recipients’ privacy preferences. Building trust with your audience is paramount.

With digital transformation, customers are well aware of their competitors and make informed decisions. Therefore, to create a good customer experience, you need to create customized content instead of batch and blast content and make sure that it is relevant to each and every recipient.

If you are willing to get started on segmentation and dynamic content and need help with the planning or execution of Marketo Dynamic Segmentation, you can get in touch with our Marketo-certified experts at Marrina Decisions.

You can simply write to us via our Contact Us page, email us at info@marrinadecisions.com, or get in touch with us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.Also, you can check out our other awesome blogs over here.