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Marketo Responsive Landing Pages

June 2, 2015 By Josh Hill

The other day Marketo finally released the long awaited responsive landing page tool. Called “Guided Pages” the new tool allows you to generate responsive pages in a nice wysiwyg interface.

In January, Marketo turned on Mobile Pages, enabling a quick fix for many Landing Pages to become “mobile”. Turns out this added an HTML5 DOC TYPE to the page to help non-desktops attempt the transition. I believe this worked well for most firms’ simple pages.

But it wasn’t a complete solution like HubSpot’s landing page editor.

Marketo’s solution allows you to define all the editable areas and elements as you might in an Email Template…and you can go beyond this because you can choose which editable areas are used at the Template and Page level. This is important because if one team doesn’t like using Element 2, they can just turn it off.

The catch here is that your LP Template must be built around Marketo’s design framework in order to make use of it. Regular Templates will not work here. Marketo has six examples you can download. A good html coder can build a custom one just for you.

Fortunately, several people who know page construction have already written great articles on this feature. Enjoy!

Responsive Template How To – Adam New-Waterson of LeanData. Adam uses his HTML designer background to show us how to think about a responsive page.
Guided Template Overview – Rachit Puri of Grazitti. Rachit’s overview of the Guided Page capabilities.
Guided Templates – A First Look – Pierce Ujjainwalla of Knak.io fame.
Marketo Guide Page Documentation – the official guide from the smart folks at Marketo.
Create Your Guided Landing Page Template
Getting Started with Guided Templates – by the amazing Jordan Lund of Marketo.
Editing Guided Templates Part 1 and Part 2 – also by Jordan

I did notice an error in the HTML validator that I’ve asked Marketo to look into. Let me know if you have other tutorials or gotchas here in the comments.

Why Aren’t You Using Permission Marketing Yet?

May 27, 2015 By Josh Hill

As a marketer and marketing consultant, I have come across some situations where the database was not 100% opted in. Sure, you could always opt-out, but the mentality of the marketers was batch and blast until they opted-out. While that may not have been technically illegal in certain jurisdictions, using a non-opted in list (opt out list), made me cringe. I cringed because this was not how I would treat my customers and I cringed because the client would invariably complain about CTR and Opens. And I would urge them to build an opted in house list instead.

But they wouldn’t always listen. Why?

In this day and age, why would a marketer use a list with questionable permissions?

In my experience, I have come across several arguments that lead people to use an opt-out or zero permission list.

Incentives – your bonus is tied to list growth, leading you to gradually ignore permissions to make that target. “It’ll be ok, this time, right?”
Leadership wants you to hit that number no matter what. “Lose my job now, or later?”
Permission? Who needs that? Batch and blast! The more we can get out at 1% response rate, the better off we are. “I just follow orders.”

First, read my other article about permission marketing and marketing automation – they work in tandem.

…Then, Resist These Arguments!

While we know permission marketing is always the best choice, regardless of regulations, there are other reasons to resist the bad situations above.

The Law: the laws in your jurisdiction likely enforce some sort of permission marketing – Opt Out or Opt In. Ignore this too long and you’ll find that one person who will complain to the authorities. Of course, you are already following the law, right?

Incentives: if your incentives and leadership put you in a situation where you feel you must (or are allowed to) ignore legal or ethical considerations toward your audience, then you should question why you work there!

And it’s no wonder this and the Leadership argument are so powerful. In HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2014 ebook, 25% of practitioners and 25% of leaders had “Increasing Number of Leads” as their top priority, with “Reaching the Relevant Audience” as number three, with 17% of Leaders and 19% of Practitioners.

Leadership: Let’s say you are under pressure to churn out campaigns and show growth in leads. You explain that there are limits to using old data or purchased lists, but the CMO doesn’t care how it is done – just hit that number. So if the leader gives you permission to skirt ethics and the law, you think, “Well, no one will check on this…and since my CMO okayed this, he’s got my back.”

Guess what! If just one of those leads complains to the US FTC and they audit you, your firm can be fined $16,000 for each email violation. Violations of Canada’s CASL law also lead to high penalties. Will the CMO protect you then?

LOL.

You will be fired for costing the company money and violating the law. Even if you document every interaction with the CMO, do not expect to retain your job. Do not participate in illegal behavior!

Remind the CMO of the costs and risk and how it alienates your audience. Show him the plan for building a list and getting more qualified leads out of a focused, permissioned list.

[Please remember to consult a lawyer who can advise you on marketing regulations in all regions where you operate.]

How can you convince management to do the right thing?

If reading the fines involved isn’t enough, then take the positive approach: permission marketing increases revenue and lowers costs. Nothing like a basic business argument, right?

Bad data Increases Costs

Your database degrades up to 25% per year with bad data, people moving around, etc. A 2011 Gartner study indicated that bad data lowers productivity 20%. A SiriusDecisions study in 2008 showed that the cost of a bad data might be $100 per record.

If a typical SMB B2B database has about 40,000 records, we can expect 10,000 to go bad over a year. If each bad record costs $100, that’s $1,000,000 of lost productivity and marketing budget to keep a list fresh. Perhaps you will not see that number leave the corporate treasury, but it sure will lead to days of frustration to clean the system. It will lead to more and more pressure to get new, qualified leads.

No wonder your CMO doesn’t care about permission!

Good data lowers Costs, and increases Revenue

If you focus on permission marketing with double opt-in list management and you actively cull inactive leads you can increase deliverability while lowering the record count in your expensive marketing automation system. Just check with your sales rep and you will see the cost savings.

When I do Marketo Audits, I find that the emailable database of people who are Active in the Past 90 days, opted in, and valid email is only 15-20% of the entire database. I have never seen this higher at any firm of any size or reputation. Your list is not special, so act like it is going to spoil, and hustle to make it a valuable asset. (And by hustle I mean use content marketing!)

Wait, how is this going to increase Revenue?

These are people who want to hear from you and are engaged on your site and with your communications, and who gave you permission to communicate. Focus on your engaged and opted-in database

In Permission Marketing, Seth Godin writes that once an audience provides permission, your content marketing materials are, and should be:

Anticipated – the lead is waiting for your email.
Relevant – the content is something the lead is interested in
Personal – the content is relevant to the lead.

Now, how does this lead to revenue?

In a 2011 study, Open and CTR were compared to opt-in lists vs. opt-out lists.

Opens in the opt-in lists were twice as high as the opt-out lists
Click Through Rates on opt in lists were also twice as high on average: 1.5% vs. 3.0+%.

If you run an ecommerce site, what would doubling your CTR do for your revenue?

If you run a B2B site, how would doubling your CTR to content improve your top of the funnel numbers? How about the rest of your funnel?

Build an Ethical Permission Marketing Culture

Permission marketing is about enticing prospects to enter into an agreement to receive future useful communications from you. Honor this agreement as if it were a contract (and technically your Privacy Policy is a contract). Part of that agreement is to send relevant, timely, and helpful content.

The next step is to ask “Is this how I would want to be treated by a vendor?” If not, cancel that campaign until it is both permissioned and treats people right.

If a mistake is made, be honest about it and make it right. The difference between a remarkable firm and an also-ran is how your human team handles mistakes.

Repeat this constantly to everyone involved until it sticks.

Improve Marketing Automation with One Rule

May 21, 2015 By Josh Hill

Do you need better marketing automation? Start by treating your customers the way you would want to be treated in the same situation.

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” – Bill Gates.

These days nearly every online process has some automated component. Automation increases speed of sales and delivers instant gratification. When it works well, I welcome it and expect to be treated that way in many situations. Automation is a great thing when done well, meaning the designer thought of how the human who interacts with the automation would want to be treated.

But automation is only as good as the human who built it. Exception handling causes the most difficulties for everyone from marketer to audience. In other words, you have a situation that was not anticipated by the system. The more rigidly you design your system to serve your own needs, the farther away your business moves from your customers’ needs.

In many situations, a human must intervene to fix the automation or error. How the human handles the resolution is what determines if a company is viewed as exceptional, clueless, or uncaring.

For consumers, Zappos built its entire business on helping people handle exceptions from website errors to choosing the right shoe color, and of course, returns.

The difference between a remarkable firm and an also-ran is how your human team handles mistakes.

If your human team is remarkable in helping your human customers to resolve questions which are not answered by your site (or automation) or in resolving automation exceptions (personal preferences, outright errors, or human fulfillment mistakes), that makes the difference between a remarkable firm and an also ran.

The Customer Centric person treats their customers the way they would want to be treated in the same situation.

A few firms truly understand that. How often have you seen poorly written email invitations to industry events? Or read critical blog posts about mail merge errors and automated “personal” emails? Or you receive a few too many reminders because some other marketer desperately needs you at their webinar?

Is this how you want to be treated? So why are you doing this to your prospects and customers?

Marketing Automation tip: ask “Is this how I would want to be treated by a vendor?” If not, design a better workflow.

Ask Customer Focused Questions to Improve Customer Focus

Here are tips for building automated workflows which treat others the way you want to be treated in the same situation.

Asking the right Customer Question at each stage of developing a campaign, nurture flow, or lead management workflow will connect you to your customers in a more meaningful, human way.

How do you keep a Customer frame of mind? Ask Customer Questions!

Ask the key Question: if I were to receive this email (or series of emails) is this how I would want to be treated? Is this email providing me with the information I need?
Nurturing flows: “Would I want to receive this series of emails in their position?”
Subscription Management: “If I wanted to change my preferences, is this how I would want to be treated?” What if I just wanted webinar invitations? Or live events?
Lead Management: if I were a student, or had a question, but wasn’t ready to buy, is this the way I would want to be treated? How will that affect future perceptions of the brand?
Sales Alerts: if I were a sales person, is this the information that would excite me to accept a lead, call that person, and be informed ahead of time?

There are plenty of opportunities to improve your workflows to save you time as well as make a good impression on people who contact your firm.

In case this framework sounded too familiar, it is: The Golden Rule.

Setup a Lead Lifecycle and Revenue Cycle Model

May 19, 2015 By Josh Hill

Do you want the ability to report on your sales funnel process? Do you want to show the management and board not only the number of leads at each State, but also the conversion percentages with 100% accuracy?

You can with marketing automation! The vision of each marketing automation vendor is to show you the revenue performance of your sales funnel. Sure, as every day marketers we can automate away much of the drudgery of routing leads, choosing content, and deduping. Yet, the vision we work toward is to impact revenue. And to know if we’re impacting revenue, we must have the ability to report on the complete revenue cycle.

Sales funnel reporting is the vision your Marketo salesperson gave you during the sales process. The tricky thing is building a system that gets you to that vision. In this post I help you understand the “button” to turn on amazing sales funnel reporting.

While this post is heavily focused on how to run a lead lifecycle in Marketo, the lessons can apply to any marketing automation platform.

Alignment with Sales and Executives

Hopefully you are already regularly meeting with your colleagues to discuss the sales and lead lifecycles. At this point, you want to focus on agreement on Stages and when a lead moves between stages. You should also ask hard questions about aligning your process to how Buyers actually think. Sales-marketing alignment is a key step before even implementing a marketing automation platform.

The easy (lazy way) is to go with whatever you have been doing in the past. If you do, be sure that this still makes sense for the way you market and sell today and over the next three years. Marketing automation and building an RCM is a catalyst for change – so take action now.

It is important to have a strong definition of each Stage and the Transitions between Stages. Edward Unthank wrote a great article that uses Sirius Decisions Waterfall Model, which can serve as a starting point

These definitions, like a Universal Lead Definition, are required before you continue. Hopefully you are already buddies with Sales and have these defined, but if you are not quite there yet, now is your time.

Knowing is Half the Battle – What Is Your Reporting Goal?

If you are anything like me, you might play with reporting tools to find the right report. This is a terrible way to setup reporting that will help decisions.

Instead, start with your end goal and questions. What questions do you need the answers to? Then, what should that report or chart look like?

Questions you might ask:

How fast do leads make it to MQL?
How fast do leads make it to Opportunity?
What proportion of leads created in July go from Known to Won?
What is our Cost to Acquire a Lead?
What is the Cost to Acquire a Won?
Is velocity of leads from Known to MQL decreasing or increasing in the past 12 months?
What is the average number of touches before someone reaches MQL? Won?

Now ask, “Do we have this data? If not, how do we collect it so it can be reported on?” This sort of question can lead to a massive conversation; so for the sake of this post, let’s focus on Sales Funnel Metrics.

Design Your Sales Funnel with Sales and Executives

Take the definitions of Stages and Triggers and map them out. Do this on a whiteboard, with Sales and your managers. Make it excruciatingly clear what will happen at each event.

Once you do, take that mobile photo and translate the whiteboard into a process chart using Visio, Draw.io or a similar tool. Again, have details beyond what you think you need.

Design the Revenue Cycle Model Draft

There are two steps to building this draft.

Step 1: Convert the flow chart into the RCM draft image.

This is fun and easy to do by going to Analytics > RCM> New Model Draft

Do whatever you want at this point. There are no consequences in Draft mode.

Step 2: Place the transitions and rules into a table like this, preparing for the campaigns you need to drive the Stage changes.

Campaign NameLink	Smart List	Flow Steps	Schedule	Notes
00 – New Lead to Known	Lead is CreatedRevenue Stage=AnonymousIs Anonymous=F	Change Data Value: Lifecycle Stage=KnownChange Revenue Stage to Known	Once	This is once because the lead can never go back to Anonymous.

Step 3: Build the Program and Campaigns to manage the Stages

Take the table of campaigns and set up a Program with the appropriate smart campaigns inside. This is an example of what it could look like, so do what makes sense for your organization.

In a post like this, or even a short presentation, it is not possible to show you everything you need to do to run the lifecycle system and RCM flows. For best practices on building key operational programs, such as Lifecycle Processing, Nate Smitha of Etumos wrote a great article to read. Also, a few things to keep in mind:

Map out scenarios involving existing SFDC Leads and SFDC Contacts.
Include the MQL fast tracks for free trials or Contact Us forms.
Include detours and other exceptions.
Make sure you add flow steps to stamp dates of stages.
Use the lead lifecycle to also manage your SFDC sync and other necessary data stamping during creation.

Test the System
Testing is a whole other blog post, but do take the time to test. In simpler models with a typical small business or tech startup, the data you have should be fairly simple. Enterprises with multiple objects and different Opportunity Types may find this the most challenging part of the setup. Be sure to get this right so your reports are accurate.

Quick testing tips:

Map out basic scenarios such as Known to Won, MQL to Recycle, etc.
Create a series of leads with unique email addresses and put them in a grid with the scenarios you plan to use along with the actions you must take in the ideal situation.
Make notes on whether the test leads achieved the desired result or if they failed.
Investigate failures.

Wait for the Data

Once you switch everything on, it takes about 2-3 months before you should rely on the data for decision-making. The reports will spike on day one when you push everyone into the stages. Then you might find you missed a scenario that has to be fixed. Thus, take your time to reach a level of data quality that is reliable for the CMO to present to the Board.

Start Reporting to Achieve the Vision

Once you have the data, you can report on it, achieving the vision you were sold so many months ago. Here are a few example reports and tips as you go beyond the vision.

Marketo’s Success Path Analyzer is one of the visionary lead funnel reports we all like to see. Keep in mind it is only looking at the green “success path” on the RCM. It does take some time for this data to even out.

Another type of report is one you extract yourself. Below is a report from data using Program Performance Report and Excel.

If you have RCE, you can do so much more, like this report, which is a Model Analysis Report (Lead) with Stage –To Stage attributes.

Other reports to consider will help answer questions we asked earlier:

Program Membership
Program Revenue Stages
Lead Analysis
Model Analysis –
- Duration
- Conversion to Stage % by Month/Qtr/Year
- New vs. Existing Leads

What do I do with all of this data?

Once you have this data, you can answer some of the questions we posed earlier. Another consideration is to make a decision based on benchmarks, usually from inside the firm, but sometimes outside. Once you have this rolling 12-month average, you can decide if your current month’s data compares favorably or poorly.

The next step is to take action. Early on, I caution you to take one action at a time to impact one aspect of the funnel. If you are interested in accelerating the time from Known to MQL, come up with nurturing programs to do just that. Avoid the temptation to pull the other levers all at once, lest you end up with a lot of activity and little to show for it. Perhaps one way to keep your team in check is to remind everyone that success will appear on your resume, while befuddled numbers will be obvious to the next hiring manager.

Marketo Architecture Best Practices

Discover other best practices we’ve developed while working on enterprise Marketo instances, from Lifecycle Processing and Lead Source to intelligently assigning leads to engagement programs with Traffic Director.

Preparing for the Marketo Certification Exam

April 7, 2015 By Josh Hill

The most common question I get here at Marketing Rockstar Guides is “How do I prepare for the Marketo Certification Exam (MCE)?”

Usually I tell people it is a combination of things:

Using the system on a daily work basis for 6 to 12 months.
Reading this blog. 🙂
Reading the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo (really useful for Admin and principles).
Spending time on the Marketo Community.
Getting a start with the Marketing Automation Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo (my course, paid)
Learning Marketo via the Help Articles and Courses. (Free and paid Marketo courses exist from Marketo and other firms)

Now there are a few new tools available from Marketo and the wider Community that can help you. If you register for the Exam, you can now go through a real life practice exam that is much closer to what you see on the test.

Marketo Practice Exam
MCE Exam Prep Kit
MCE Roadmap (has some practice questions and topics).
MCE Checklist
Steven Moody’s Preparation Checklist

However, if you are a regular user of Marketo for the past year and especially if you are an Admin, you shouldn’t sweat it. You will know the answers off the top of your head. That’s not to say you shouldn’t review all the materials. I do, because there are always one or two areas I don’t use frequently, so a quick brush up helps a lot.

[Update: April 16, 2015]

First, it turns out this is my 100th post on the site! Wow! Thanks for reading and subscribing.

Second, I took my third Exam this week at the rockin’ Marketo Summit. While I cannot tell you specific questions (nor can I recall 100 questions), I can tell you that you may encounter the newer features more often than in the past.

[Update: January 18, 2017]

I recently took the upcoming new MCE Beta Exam, which will test your abilities in different ways. I learned that those who take the test at home only need the regular laptop camera. The test instructions indicate the need for a separate webcam, when in fact this is not necessary. Simply press continue on the WebAssessor prompt. If this does not work, then please call the exam administrator to confirm the equipment needed.

Ready? Sign up for the exam.

If you are taking the MCE at this year’s Summit. Good luck!

[Updated: July 9, 2017: fixed broken links, added Marketo You Tube channel; added MRG Course ;)]