Decrypting Marketo’s Smart Campaigns and Programs

It can be daunting to learn a new marketing automation tool. As user-friendly as Marketo, Eloqua, and other technologies can be, there’s often deep and complex functionality under the hood. Terminology, best practices, and core concepts can be hard to grasp. Understanding the basics is essential before diving into more advanced features. This is especially true regarding core functionality around Marketo’s Smart Campaigns and Programs. 

Programs and Smart Campaigns are the powerhouses behind your email marketing initiatives, nurture campaigns, and workflow processes. Once you understand their capabilities it opens a world of possibilities, especially with your personalized outreach and reporting. There can often be confusion around what they are, how they are different, and how they can be used together. This post will cover the basics so you can build a strong foundation for success.

What are Programs?

New Marketo users can often be confused by the differences between Programs and Campaigns, especially when to use each.  Smart Campaigns are where the magic happens. It’s where you define the who, what, and when of your workflow. Programs are containers for your larger initiatives. Programs are crucial for reporting and organization. Programs typically contain Smart Campaigns along with all of the assets pertaining to the initiative (emails, landing pages, forms, Smart Lists, etc.)

There are four types of programs, each one offering unique capabilities that assist with workflow and reporting. These four types are email, event, engagement, and default.

Email Programs

Email programs are best suited for one-time email blasts or recurring newsletters. The email program makes it simple to send an email, allowing you to define the send with one interface. In the email program itself, you choose your audience, email, schedule, and approval. It’s that easy. The email program also makes it easy to create an A/B test. Out of all of the available programs, the email program has the most robust A/B testing functionality.

Event Programs

Event programs are best suited for your webinars, trade shows, and other online and in-person events. The event program allows you to integrate with a number of 3rd party webinar tools, making registration management easier. You can also integrate with Marketo’s Event Check-in app for your in-person events. When scheduled, the event program is visible in your program-level calendar.

Engagement Programs

Engagement programs are best suited for nurture campaigns. Using the engagement program can become quite intricate because of its in-depth capabilities. With engagement programs, you can move people through streams of content based on specific rules, adjusting their path based on their level of engagement and other factors. You can create a series of flows to serve up the best content at the best time. Engagement programs also provide an engagement dashboard that you can review in real-time.

Default Programs

Default programs are best suited for everything else. When a program does not meet the criteria for email, event, or engagement, you should use the default program. These initiatives are often web-based, operational, or non-digital. Things like data cleansing and management, social and online ad initiatives, direct mail programs, telemarking, sales processes, etc., would all qualify for default programs.

Programs can be simple or complex, depending on your needs. Many of them can be nested within other programs, and multiple Smart Campaigns can be included in one Program. Programs offer a lot of other functionality related to reporting, including the ability to apply channel tags (with progression statuses and success markers) and program tags (to enhance reporting by category, region, BU, product, etc.).

What are Smart Campaigns?

Now that you know about Programs, it’s important to understand Marketo’s Smart Campaigns and how they relate to the Programs already built. Smart Campaigns serve as the bedrock for your workflows within Marketo. Simply put, they are the who, what, and when of your communications and processes within the tool. Smart Campaign functionality can get complex quickly, allowing you to deeply target your audience, manage people, and perform database functions to augment your data. To understand the core concepts, let’s examine the who, what, and when.

Who (Smart Lists)

When you build your Smart Campaigns, you’ll need to define who you’re targeting. Regardless of the flow actions, you need to tell Marketo which people should enter the workflow. People are added through Smart Lists, which can be built using triggers or filters. 

Triggers (which appear in orange) listen for an action. Think of these as immediate entrants based on a real-time event. Actions can be form submissions, email clicks, lead score changes, segment changes, etc. As soon as someone acts, they enter your workflow.

Filters (which appear in green) are considered part of a batch. You can use traditional filter criteria to query person fields (database information) or past events, such as a lead being created or historical forms submitted, among others.

As you get more advanced with your Smart Lists, you can combine triggers and filters, effectively filtering which people get triggered into your campaign.

What (Flow)

Once you have created your Smart List (your who), you need to define the actions you want to happen. These steps are created in the “Flow” tab of your Smart Campaign. Here, you will see many options, including sending email communications, changing data values, adjusting program membership, creating CRM updates, and other workflow adjustments. Smart Campaign flows formulate the backbone of your nurtures and processes. They can be simple or complex, depending on your requirements, and as you get more advanced, you’ll be impressed with the capabilities they provide. 

It’s important to remember that people will flow through your steps in the order in which they are built. Keep that in mind when you’re crafting your workflow. It’s also good to know that you can set Choices within Flow steps to limit those impacted by that particular step. For example, if you only want people of a certain Country to flow through a step, you can set a Choice that limits entrants based on the Country field.

When (Schedule)

Now that you know who you are targeting and what will happen in your workflow, you need to define when you want to run your Smart Campaign. The Schedule tab is where you set this timeframe. Your options will vary depending on whether your Smart List is based on a trigger or filter. If you are using triggers, the Schedule tab is where you activate your Smart Campaign. If you are using filters, you can activate “now” or schedule your Smart Campaign to start in the future.

You will also want to define your settings for the Schedule. Here you can decide whether you want people to run through your Smart Campaign only once, each time they qualify, or on a set cadence – once an hour, week, day, or month. 

How to Get Started?

As you dive into Marketo’s Smart Campaigns and Programs, Experience League, Adobe’s Marketo Guide, is an excellent resource for detailed documentation. Marketing Nation also offers a strong community where you can find education materials, community blogs, and user groups. If you need help navigating Marketo and its rich functionality, Relationship One is here to help.