Marketing Rockstar's Guide to Marketo

DKIM, SPF, and CNAME Setup for Marketo

December 12, 2012 By Josh Hill

I’d like to help all the new Marketo customers with a critical step during the implementation phase: DKIM, SPF, and CNAME setup. It’s simple to do – if you know what it is you need to do.

Contact your IT, Web Team, or Network Admin to do these steps!

Email Reputation and Authentication: Why you need DKIM and SPF

As explained in the Email Reputation Chapter, DKIM and SPF are two DNS authentication methods used by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and hosts of other email providers as a first check for spam or spoofed email senders. Emails which fail SPF or DKIM checks are more likely to end up in the Spam box.

Why?

All DKIM and SPF records do is tell the internet (and the target email server) that you said it is ok for Marketo to send email on your behalf. It’s like a proxy on your Outlook Calendar. If this permission is missing from an email Marketo sends on your behalf, other servers will be skeptical it’s really from you.

CNAME and SubDomains Also Help Trust

When you first discussed marketing automation, you probably found out you could host your own landing pages on the new system. Your demo probably included a landing page demo where you saw “http://go.mydemo.com/page.html” and said “Wow, let’s have our own URL like that!”

And you can. In the instructions below, I go through how to select a sub-domain for your business as well as how to choose a Tracking Sub-Domain so your email links don’t look sketchy.

Detailed Instructions on Setup of DKIM, SPF, and CNAME for Marketers

What can you do right now? Take a look at these instructions to do it yourself or pass these to the IT guys to take care of it for you. It’s fast, easy, and builds trust with your audience.

Sub-Domain and Email DNS Setup in Marketo

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Marketing Automation Checklists for Marketo

December 6, 2012 By Josh Hill

No matter how awesome we think we are, we all make mistakes. Something gets overlooked during a rush or maybe you think you’ve checked the entire email when you’ve just scanned it. Perhaps you sent 100,000 emails out with the {{lead.Lead Owner}} slug instead of {{lead.Full Name}} slug.

Been there.

After that terrible sinking feeling, you probably said, “I should use a checklist,” but never did much about it. Here’s your chance for redemption since I’ve done most of the work for you.

I created a few handy checklists to help people new to Marketo be more process oriented when running campaigns, setting up webinars, or importing a list. In fact, the Import Checklist has saved me and my colleagues from terrible data disasters. Here are my favorite checklists as part of the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo project.

Marketing Automation Setup Checklist
Campaigns Checklist
Email Creation Checklist
Landing Page Checklist
Webinar Checklist
Live Event Checklist
Whitepaper Download Checklist
Importing a List Checklist

See them all in Appendix III: Checklists .

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Image Credit: Flickr xtremeexhibits

How to Use Data.com with Marketo

December 3, 2012 By Josh Hill

In this new section of the Marketing Rockstar’s Guide to Marketo, I show you how to use Data.com to automatically update leads. The Enrich with Data.com flow action is designed to help you construct a lead profile more quickly for your hungry lead qualification reps.

There are some limitations, however. First, the flow action will update the entire Lead no matter what you want it to update. Second, Data.com may be unable to find a good match.

Here’s the short version:

Get a Jigsaw.com account.
Add this account to Marketo: Admin > Data.com
Create a new campaign.
Use the smart list to pull leads who are missing key contact info.
Add Flow Step: Enrich with Data.com = True
Run Once.

If you want to setup an automatic campaign, you can, but read the Guide chapter to learn how to do this the right way, so your precious data isn’t overwritten.

Using the Data.com Enhancer .

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How to Build a Lead Scoring System in Marketo

November 27, 2012 By Josh Hill

Lead scoring is one of the first systems new marketing automation users want to build in Marketo. Building a great lead scoring system is easy once you take the time to do these four main steps:

Find out what demographics and behaviors matter to Sales.
Translate those preferences into relative ranks.
Translate those ranks into scores.
Use Marketo to build relevant Smart Lists and Workflows.

But wait, it isn’t that simple, is it? No, building a lead scoring system is not done in 4 steps. Lead scoring systems are one of the first things people do with marketing automation because it is a clear action to move forward. Watch this Marketo webinar on Scoring Leads and Using Lead Tokens.

Here’s how you can put lead scoring theory into practice in your own Marketo instance. This is a major win for anyone moving to inbound marketing with Marketo. You’ll show Sales and your manager that progress toward Sales-Marketing Alignment is happening and you’ll learn a ton about Marketo too.

Resources

Reinventing Lead Scoring: How to use Data Science to Market Better [Adobe Marketo Session / Video + Slides]
Taking Lead Scoring to the Next Level [Blog]
How to Set up Marketo Behavior Lead Scoring Batch Campaigns
Demographic Gating: How to Score and Quality Leads More Efficiently [Video + Blog]
How to Build a Lead Scoring System in Marketo [2012, Slideshare]
How to Build a Lead Scoring System in Marketo [2012, PDF/Note: links in the pdf are not working right now.]

Explaining Lead Scores to Sales

November 23, 2012 By Josh Hill

When you have launched your scoring system, you should have a meeting or two with the sales team to review the scores and the process for handing off leads. You will accomplish two things with these meetings:

Acknowledge Sales’ role, input, and help to improving the lead process. They will clearly see how your survey took in their ideas to improve marketing qualified leads (MQL).
Sales will understand better what the data means for them, which should mean they can decide better how to prioritize leads and when MQL should be Sales Accepted (SAL).

Remember that sales people want leads they can close. They want to ignore other people as much as possible. The more they understand how you are helping, the more likely it is they will see your system helping them find the leads they want. It is a first step in many to building the sales-marketing trust required for revenue generation.

I wrote a short guide which you can modify to help sales people understand why and how you are doing things. Clearly your process will differ from my experience, so edit this as needed.

The Sales Guide to Lead Scoring [PDF]