5 Favorite Features of Marketo
In the market for a new marketing automation platform (MAP) or looking to learn more about the one you have? Each of the marketing automation platforms on the market have their pluses and minuses. The key is to find the one that has the most tools and features that will help your digital marketing and lead conversion be its most successful. Today we’ll focus on what I think are the top five features of Adobe Marketo Engage that are unique to itself.
My 5 Favorite Features of Marketo
Forms
Forms are a common tool across map systems. Marketo approaches forms in a way that makes them sustainable over time and flexible to use across multiple programs. Do you need to update person data, gate high value content, capture webinar registrations, and/or pass leads along to sales for follow-up? In Marketo, the same form can be used for all of these functions lowering the number of assets needed to be built, maintained, and reported on. The form back-end functionality (what you need to happen to the person once they submit the form) is controlled by individual Marketo Smart Campaigns so you have the flexibility to use the data that comes from the form or even the landing page it is hosted on, to determine next steps for that lead.
Forms can be built as a local asset to a Marketo program, meaning they are unique and only used there, or in Design Builder where they can be used across multiple programs. Think of that as a global form strategy.
Marketo forms have easy embed code available within the UI that your web team can use to place your Marketo form on a non-Marketo landing page like your company website or a partner website. It has both lightbox and standard embed code functionality which will lessen development time making for a happy web team!
A unique feature of Marketo forms are visibility rules. Form fields and fieldsets can be dynamically hidden or shown based on the value of another field. The even better part of this feature is that the logic doesn’t have to be exact, with options that include ‘starts with’ and ‘contains’. One example of using visibility rules is for showing the state/province field depending on the country that has been selected. If you only want the ‘state/province’ field to appear for the user when they select United States or Canada from the country field, you can set that rule.
Another use case would be when using a form for multiple business units. You can show/hide different comment fields that are mapped to each business’ ‘sales notes’ person field.
While Marketo forms do not have the same form field flexibility as other MAPs, as they require you to use existing person fields (ie. first name, email address, company name), they do include special fields called Program Member custom fields (PMCFs) that give you some extra wiggle room to include non-lead fields in your form that can be used for reporting, webinar registration, etc.
TIP: In order to use PMCFs in your form, the form will need to be used as a local asset
in the program where the fields will be referenced. Learn more about how they’re used
below.
Program member custom fields
Talking about Program Member custom fields, or PMCFs, they are feature #2 on my list. Program Member custom fields allow you to collect program-specific data for each person present in the program (program member). These fields can be used in forms, Smart List filters and triggers, and Smart Campaign flow actions. The data collected is then viewable in the program’s Members tab (Adobe Experience League, 2023).
Here are the details on these fields:
- You are allowed up to 20 and they can be used across all of your programs with net new values per program.
- The field types that support PMCFs are boolean, date, datetime, float, integer, string, and URL.
- They are available in local assets only. Like in the form example above, the form wouldn’t be able to be created in Design Studio since Marketo wouldn’t understand which program to assign the values to.
Many of my clients utilize PMCFs to capture webinar registration data where person fields are not available. This becomes especially useful in multi-session webinars for triggering registration for each event program and reporting when leads can potentially register for more than one session or event.
Even though PMCFs can’t be used in the ‘Change Data Type’ flow step, their tokenized version can be, helping to use that data to populate person fields like Lead Source or Sales Notes so reps can understand what this lead has done specific to the program.
Important to remember – if you remove a program member their PMCF data will be deleted along with them. Even if they become a member of that program again, the data will refresh with that new entry, so be strategic with member removal and also with exporting your data!
Webinar app integrations
I’ve talked alot about generating webinar registrations with Marketo forms and capturing data with PMCFs. Now let’s focus on the actual integrations with webinar platforms! Marketo has a very easy integration setup process for many of the big players like On24, Zoom, Webex, Adobe Connect, and GoToWebinar. For all of these services the Marketo admin will simply need to access the LaunchPoint area of Marketo, click ‘add service’, and log into the respective platform with the admin users credentials (a license is needed for each of these services in order to integrate with Marketo). Detailed instructions are available through the links above.
The On24 integration is a slightly different process because it requires the Marketo API web service to connect. An On24 only API User will need to be created and then following the same LaunchPoint process, add the service and copy the API client ID to complete the Web Service setup.
Once the integration with the service is complete, creating a webinar program is pretty seamless by using the event program type in Marketo. Within your event program, you will be able to connect to the webinar platform and pass data back and forth between the platforms. For example, in your registration smart campaign, once the member is captured from submitting the form, the Marketo Smart Campaign flow step will update their program status to registered which is then sent to the associated webinar service. The webinar service would then send any attendee data back to the Marketo program after the event has concluded giving marketers a closed loop on the campaign and the ability to report in Marketo and send leads to CRM as needed. Much easier than downloading and uploading lists!! Learn more about Marketo event programs here.
Tokens
I mentioned tokens previously in the ‘PMCF’ section. Tokens are variables used for personalization and updating person data across smart campaign flow steps, emails, landing pages, snippets, and more. Tokens can be used to dynamically merge in data from person, company, and campaign fields where available. There are also system, trigger, and program level tokens. System tokens are often used to insert ‘view as webpage’ and ‘forward to a friend’ links in your emails helping to make headers and footers consistent and up-to-date.
Snippets are one of Marketo’s personalization tools. They are often used for email footers so that one piece of content can be used across multiple email assets. Tokens can be used in those snippets for something as simple as the copyright date, saving time and having to remember to swap out the date each year, and the recipient’s email address to be CAN-SPAM compliant.
A great use of a program token is to generate a calendar link in an event confirmation email. The tokens are updated in the program itself and when placed in the email, the data will merge in automatically with each send.
As was noted earlier, tokens can be used in smart campaign flow steps to update person fields from data in PMCFs or from another person field. System tokens can also be used to insert a date/time stamp into a person field or description when sending a lead over to CRM.
Tokens are a powerful feature in Marketo and their uses are extensive. Learn more about personalizing with Tokens.
Workspaces
Workspaces are a unique feature to Marketo that creates completely separate areas of the tool that house their own marketing assets and programs. Users have to be given access rights to each workspace and will only have the ability to view the assets in the workspaces they are assigned to. A user can have access to more than one workspace.
Workspaces will often work in tandem with people partitions that work as separate databases, each with their own people that do not mix with other partitions. It is possible to have duplicates across workspaces, but it’s important to identify the business need before heading down that path as it can create potential duplicates in CRM where not intended.
A widely used use case for workspaces and people partitions are to separate business units and region based security. If you only want your users to be able to access people in the APAC region, you would create an APAC partition that those users would have access to. This helps to avoid breaking region based email compliance laws. Another use case would be for patient data where only a select few users would be able to view and access the patients’ personally identifiable information for communications like appointment reminders. As a reminder, partitions and workspaces do not encrypt data, so if needed, you would need to have a HIPAA-ready deployment of Marketo.
These are just a few of the many features of Marketo. To learn more or to find out about Relationship One’s Marketo services, reach out!
