Session Guide for Adobe-Marketo Summit 2019

The Founder of Etumos shares how he first got involved in the world of Marketing Operations and Marketing Automation (specifically Marketo), and the journey that led him to take over the reins of Marketing Rockstar Guides.

How did you get involved with Marketo?

I’d like to think that I’ve gotten into Marketo (and Marketing Operations) from the ground-up. My Marketo career started at a high-caliber marketing services company on the 4-person task force in charge of creating an Agency service line, where I helped establish the scalable foundations of the MOPs practice. During the day, I personally implemented, managed, and optimized Marketo for ourselves and all our clients. During the night, I would write the technical “how to” articles about Marketo that I wanted to read myself. I fell in love with Marketing Automation and inventing Marketing Operations from the ground-up.

Here’s the less glamorous and less buzzwordy version:

I studied statistics and economics in undergraduate and taught myself web development in my spare time for fun projects. I got into everything digital marketing as a generalist working for small local businesses, immersed myself in Web Development communities and philosophies, then I moved into running and managing Marketo. It took about 3 years of a career to find Marketo and throw everything I have into the tool and vocation.

I briefly considered software and web development for the “big bucks,” but I wanted a clearer career path to leadership. Hence, Marketo!

Why did you decide to become a consultant?

I jumped into the consulting world because how few people knew how to run Marketo well (5 years ago), and I wanted to be the one to figure out the answer and spread the answer.

I saw a massive talent gap in the emergence of Marketing Automation. I came into the world of Marketing with a background in statistics and web development, and I found pretty quickly that my perspective was unique compared to most marketers.

I saw significantly more value in the full, maximized usage of technology in Marketing. We’re in the midst of massive changes in the industry, and one of the things that we’re seeing is how technological maturity opens massive doors and provides huge competitive advantage. The speed of tech improvements and online growth is incredibly fast. The speed of Marketing adjusting to this is slower, and it is struggling to keep up. I look around at all of the technology, the capabilities of harnessing the internet, and I see massive opportunity to rethink how we’re doing Marketing through Marketing Technology. I became a consultant because that was the way I could turn this passion project and hobby into a company that could define and scale Marketing Operations.

What’s your approach to consulting and how is it different than others?

My company, Etumos is all about inventing best practices. The most exciting thing to me about this field is how brand new it is. We get to be the pioneers, carving out and creating best practices that we can spread through our practices and what we write. We have an internal motto of “Build a Better Wheel,” which represents a core belief that if we rethink Marketing in today’s world, we’ll reinvent the core foundational components to create a Marketing machine that runs holistically.

We hire people who are *really* passionate about making Marketing Automation (Marketo, specifically), the people who are fully immersed in the industry, because those are the people who are learning the fastest, inventing trends that resonate, and Etumos is the place where they can thrive.

Take all this with a handful of salt and do your own research, but in my opinion—Etumos is the big leagues. We work with the most advanced/impressive clients, we have the smartest people in the industry, the deepest technical knowledge, and the most authority in MOPS process, strategy, and tactics, and best practices. We find the A players, and we show them how deeply Etumos will invest in their growth and career.

What is a challenge you think most CMOs don’t understand well about MarTech?

MarTech in itself does very little. Marketing Operations (people running MarTech) is what creates value. I don’t care about shiny tools—I care about extracting every single drop of value from these tools.

If you have twenty MarTech tools and only one person to work on the tools, you only get the output of one person, not 20 MarTechs.

The realized value of MarTech is proportional to your company’s investment (hours and budget) in the running of MarTech. Honestly, I think the explosion of MarTech has meant that (in macro) some MarTech salespeople have promised low on-going investment while seeing the same results. It just isn’t true. You can do it in-house, you can hire others, but the fact of the matter is that MarTech needs people to run the systems, and neglecting the tool nearly guarantees a negative financial return on the MarTech.

We see MarTech fail when companies put all of their money getting the most-expensive tool they can, and because of that they don’t have any leftover budget for good people to run the system. They blame the MarTech because it’s too complicated, too expensive, and not providing value; a year later, they abandon the MarTech and move to something cheaper after having wasted a year of time and money. Don’t overbuy MarTech. If you don’t have smart people to run it, it will provide you very little value (at least nowhere near the massive tech price tags).

There’s a whole art and science being created here, a whole budding, specialized vocation of managing MarTech: Marketing Operations. CMOs need to be aware that, like it or not, this is a new role. If you train a generalist on how to use Marketing Automation and that person wants to go from a Marketing Manager (~$65k/year) to a MOPs Manager (~$95k/year), you are probably not going to retain that employee in the medium-run. What I’m seeing is this huge brain-drain movement in the job market, where MOPS employees would rather become consultants than work on Brand marketing in-house.

CMOs, think about this from the Individual Contributor (IC) employee’s perspective:

• Would you rather have authority in your interactions with employees on the day-to-day, or would you rather be treated like a customer service function working through a never-ending, monotonous to-do list?
• Would you rather work from home or forced to work in-office (aka, do you want to move somewhere where you can actually afford a house without a 2-hour commute)?
• Would you rather make more money for the same work?
• Would you rather be deeply immersed in one company’s business (Marketing and Sales), or exposed to many different businesses, needs, and priorities?

I’ll tell you now, if you want the most experience quickly, you don’t go in-house.

Thoughts on setting up full-funnel transparency?

There is no excuse not to do this. It is 100% possible, and we’ve done it. I don’t care how small you are, how “unique” your business model is, or anything else like that. Take your business-driving goal and come up with a consistent way to measure those in small, actionable milestones. B2C? There’s a conversion funnel. B2SMB? Yep. B2B? Duh. B2Wholesalers? You bet.

Don’t believe people who say it isn’t possible, find the people who can do it and have done it.

There’s a lot of odd mythology around “full funnels” which makes it scary and unapproachable to many Marketing companies. Some orgs, honestly, are afraid of rolling out a full funnel because they think it will decrease their job security. How? Pre-funnel Marketing companies care about different things, and they hire Marketers who can deliver on what they care about. Switching to a full funnel model of Marketing and Sales means new rules of the game, and new definitions of success. That’s scary, and I get it.

Let’s demystify— 

A funnel is a mathematical model representing Marketing and Sales holistically. It’s the ultimate set of KPIs. It takes a really hard and complex process (“make people like us and buy our stuff”) and chunks it into actionable subsets. It takes really hard goals (“increase revenue by 50%”) and breaks them down into achievable goals.

The foundation of a funnel is to say, “All else equal, if we increase the conversion rate from this stage to the next stage, we’ll create more Customers (and therefore increase revenue).”

A funnel creates the foundation of measurability. A funnel converts what you’re doing as a company into KPIs that have bubbled-up and provide a measurement of what is converting in real-time, and it gives the ability to measure the quality of Marketing ideas in objective (or at least, consistently subjective) ways.

The next step is grading your Marketing and Sales organization by this approach, and then Absolute Reliance upon that Data. Don’t discount metrics by calling them “directional;” embrace math in Marketing, because it’s the key to improving (and testing) all of the “Art” of Marketing.

What’s your advice for someone getting into martech today?

Get into Marketing Operations, don’t get into “MarTech.” MarTech is a trend, while Marketing Operations is the substance that will sustain through time.

The Great Spam Click Bot War

Over the past year, we’ve all seen erratic click activity on our emails, caused apparently by Email Security Servers like Barracuda clicking on one or more links. The link test is to verify that a link or visible URL, is in fact, safe to click for a human to prevent phishing scams.

This spam bot scanner protects many of us at home and work, so it’s not going away anytime soon. If anything, we should expect a bot to attempt to verify links are safe for people.

Except that for us marketers, we can no longer trust Open and Click data at all. One day it’s 3.5% and the next it’s .4%. How is a marketer to know if a real person engaged with our email or not? Click scoring is broken and we have a false sense that our emails are working.

There are methods to attempt to combat this, however, none of them are satisfactory to us. Here is our 5-Step Solution to solve this in Marketo:

Summary

1. Reducing Clicks Link Scoring: Change your scoring to once per hour or once per day.
2. The Stealth Bait Link: Embed a hidden “fake link” that if clicked, you’ll know it was the work of a bot.
3. Smart List Exclusions: Create a list to exclude the people who clicked on the fake link.
4. External Data Tool: Leverage a tool that can track the timing of the clicks – something that is not as easy to accomplish with a Smart List.
5. Reporting: Email Performance reports aren’t reliable, so you’ll need to add smart lists to filter out those bot clicks to evaluate your email metrics.

Identifying the Problem

Kiersti Esparaza of Marketo summarized how Spam Bots work. There are also a few threads you should review:

• Email Click without Visit Web page
• Bot Checks in Email

One of the issues MAP users have is that we want to wrap our links in trackable redirects. And so do phishers – they use bit.ly or other fake links to make you think it’s ok to click. What you’ll see in Marketo when you investigate lists of people who clicked on your Stealth Bait Link or have Opened+Delivered at the same time. But Marketo won’t let you use that header info and it’s not consistent enough.

Essentially what you see in Marketo and most MAPs is an Email Delivered+Opened (or Clicked) at the same time stamp in the log. You will also see bots click unusual links like “Legal” “TOS” or all social links. In some cases, the bot clicks every single link.

The challenge, however, is there isn’t a functional tool to say “Show me people who clicked every single link in this email, or recent emails.” You can try with Clicked Link in Email, but you will only capture a small portion of total spam bots.

And then what happens if the Spam Bot clicks on links, then passes the email to a Human, who does click it too? Combing through log entries is very time consuming!

5 Potential Solutions for False Click Links in Email

1. Reducing Clicks Link Scoring

If you haven’t already, I recommend reducing your Clicks Link in Email scoring flow to Once per Hour or Once per Day. This should prevent most spam bots from causing more than a few false MQLs. You can also add a Smart List (below) like “Exclude clicks on the Bait Link” to further reduce the problem.

This won’t be perfect. It’s a start.

2. The Stealth Bait Link

The most common solution is to embed a “fake link” that is hidden except to a bot that scans the HTML. If the link is clicked, then we know the subsequent clicks from that email address are fake today. There are a few caveats:

• Marketo installed this at the bottom of every email automatically. They say they exclude some clicks after this link is clicked, however, we haven’t seen much improvement with this alone.
• Text Emails – you can’t have this fake link in a text-only version because it will be weird to the person or placed poorly. We recommend removing it to avoid someone actually using it.
• Where does the link go to? We set up a special page and form in case a real person clicked. What we saw is that sometimes a bot will actually fill out the prefill form, so best to use not pre-fill. It’s rare, but it happens.
• The Hidden URL may be viewed as a Scam by some spam filters since that was a common way to fool spam scanners and then later show a malware link if the person downloaded the right colors. I personally haven’t seen this happen or affect deliverability. Certainly a risk.

3. Smart List Exclusions

It is challenging to do this without serious data tools that aren’t in any MAP. Some options:

• Exclude people who click on your Bait Link
• Exclude people who click on the Legal or Social Links (who does anyway?)
• Include only Clicks with Opens.
• Exclude Delivered+Opened (or Clicked) in the same minute. (This is a strong candidate but requires external tools).

Email Was Delivered + Visited Page

This one is questionable in our book. Here’s why it should work, but doesn’t:

Most spam bots will click the link, registering in Marketo. But they rarely create a Visited Web Page activity because they won’t load the page fully (or the Munchkin).

Except that I’ve seen a lot of bots fully load the page, creating such a Visited Web Page log entry.

Instead, we came up with a method where the Human visits that page and now has to Click a Download Button on the Page to cause a Clicked Link in Web Page and get the PDF. Of course, this creates a long click path, deterring many humans. So this isn’t an ideal path either.

4. External Data Tool: The Openprise Method

This is a variation on what Marketo should do on the backend – figure out click timing and common data points and exclude clicks that fit a pattern. Instead, we have to rely on data extraction methods with tools like Openprise to achieve this.

Essentially, you want to identify the situation where someone clicks on specific links, all the links, or clicks at the same time as Delivered. That’s not easy to do with a Smart List. It is easy for other types of data tools. Once identified, Openprise can pass back to Marketo a value such as “Known Spam Bot User” which you can then use to exclude those people from Reports.

The caveat here is that spam bots may not be active for an email box 100% of the time and may not always click in the same way. You may find as your reputation improves, spam bots don’t click as often. Thus, you should consider refreshing this data periodically.

5. Reporting

For lack of tools, your Email Performance reports are now not so trustworthy. You can add some of the smart lists above to filter out the CTR, however, it will never be 100% accurate again. Email Insights also lacks tools to filter out potential bot clicks. And if you exclude spam bots, you are also throwing off your other metrics like Delivered, Opened, and Unsubscribed since you aren’t including those people in the report.

Best Solution

The single best solution I can think of is to ask people to reply to the email for the whitepaper or registration. Instead of relying on a human, use a tool like Siftrock or Conversica to manage replies automatically and send requested content back automatically. The risk here is many people will not want to reply, lest they become enmeshed in a sales conversation before they are ready. But those that do–those are real people!

The Bot War Continues

The war against the bots is ongoing. Tackling takes time and money. If you are uncertain what is your best option. Etumos can help you determine what is the best fit and help with integration.

[Win the Bot War]