I bet one of the things you were looking forward to with Marketo (or any marketing automation platform (MAP)), is automating your blog newsletter. You built a huge list with near daily content updates and yet – it is entirely manual process. You hired a marketer to help manage this process, but it still takes her 4 hours to format the email, test it, process the list, and make sure everything is agency level perfect.

Now you can go from 4 hours to automatic with Digesto – the latest Launchpoint app for Marketo. This is a very new service launched at the Marketo Summit in April and is saving hundreds of hours of productivity across the marketing world. Before we go into how to setup your Digesto system, I will disclose that I work at Perkuto would love to see all Marketo users with RSS feeds buy this tool. That being said, I do not get a special bonus for this post.

Most marketing and social gurus suggest setting up a corporate blog and asking people to provide an email address to receive updates whenever the blog is updated. Building your house email list is a critical part of successful content marketing, especially B2B nurturing. When I work with clients, I always recommend using the blog email list as the foundation for a newsletter and for further nurturing.

Ultimately, automating your blog feed is part of your revenue marketing strategy because it keeps your list active and it saves you time for other activities.

How to Setup Digesto to Save Time and Money

Setting up your first Digesto feed could take as little as 30 minutes or as long as two hours, depending how much you need to test. For this small investment of time, you get a lifetime of hours back.

Here is a diagram of what happens in the system.

What You Need to Start:

• Digesto Account – get one here.

• RSS Feed URL

The RSS feed is simply a URL. Digesto supports standard RSS and Atom protocols, so I doubt you will encounter any issues.

If you do not know your RSS feed URL, hover over your RSS icon, Right Click, press Copy Link.

Marketing Rockstar Guides’ RSS feed is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarketingRockstarGuides

If you cannot find the RSS link or icon, ask your IT person or whoever runs the blog to look for you. They can help you turn it on.

In Digesto, a single RSS-to-Email system is known as a “Digest.” That is one RSS feed sent to a specific list of members at a specific schedule. You can have up to 5 Digests per account. If you need separate Digests by language, region, or time, you can do that too.

• Marketo SOAP API – how do you get this?

You will need to find the SOAP endpoint and encryption key. The Digesto tool has a video explaining how to find this, but I’ll just tell you:

Go to Admin > Integration > SOAP API

Note: do not share your Endpoint and Encryption Key in public!

If you have Marketo Spark, you do not have access to the API, so you will have to upgrade to use Digesto.

• Your Blog/Newsletter List

This can be a smart list, static, or whatever as long as you have one. You do have blog subscribers, right?

If not, start now by adding a simple Marketo Form with two fields:

Note that I disabled pre-fill on the hidden fields, lest my intention be overridden.

• Marketo Program

You will need one Program for each RSS feed you want to automate. Standard Digesto accounts allow up to 5 “Digests”.

• Email Template

I recommend using the most basic template you have, just 1 column with any standard header and footer you desire. If you have a special Newsletter/Blog Template, you can use that too.

Ok, let’s set this up.

Step 1: Program Setup

Digesto is driven by a combination of Program and Tokens. This program can be an Email Blast or an Email Send program, it is up to you.

Remember to add the items under Setup, especially Period Costs.

Step 2: Tokens

In the Program, go to My Tokens and create the following three tokens:

Rich Text:

{{my.DigestoEmailContent}}

= this brings in the body of your Post as HTML.

Rich Text: {{myDIgestoEmailContentText}} = this brings in the body of your Post as text for the Text version.

Text: {{my.DigestoEmailSubject}} = this places your Posts’s Title into the email’s subject line. You can control what appears here in your Digesto Account.

Each Token should simply say, “Default” in the editor.

I would avoid using Campaign Folder Tokens because these may conflict if you are using multiple RSS feeds (Digests).

Step 3: The Email

Of course, you need an email to be able to send anything. So create an email within the Program. I recommend keeping the Template choice simple, as there are limited formatting options with Digesto. A nice template with your logo, colors, footer, etc. is good. I recommend keeping it to one column if you can.

• You can modify the email’s CSS in line, but this needs testing.
• You cannot change the DIVs now

There’s not much else to do for the email. Remember to approve it after you tested the basic format. You will get a chance to Test the RSS feed later.

Step 4: The Send Campaign

At this point you will have something that looks a bit like this:

Remember, this is a Batch campaign. Set it to let Leads run through every time. Do not schedule it – it is not necessary.

Step 5: Digesto Account Setup

Login to your Digest account. You can do this with a free trial or with a paid account. Each Digesto account can handle up to 5 separate RSS feeds (you will need 5 separate Marketo Programs).

1. Login to Digesto

2. Click on an existing Digest or Press New

3. Program Name: enter the exact Program Name you created in Marketo.

4. Campaign Name: enter the exact name for the campaign you created to send the email.

5. Test Campaign Name: if you created a Test Campaign and List, enter it here. You can go back to Marketo anytime to add this.

6. Digest Name: what name do you want to see in Digesto?

7. RSS Feed: any RSS feed URL you want.

8. Max number of Posts: how many posts do you want to appear in each email? Normally I recommend 1 per email, but some firms prefer a newsletter approach with 3-5 per email. I only recommend that if you are sending once a week.

9. Schedule

10. Notification – do you want to receive an email each time the Digest goes out? (this will also notify you if a Digest runs without any new content – but it won’t send out an email).

A Word About Schedules

Displayed below is a schedule for a feed that will trigger an email whenever a new post hits your blog. The email can only go out Monday-Friday at any of the three times.

If you prefer to send this newsletter each week at 7:00AM, then change to Weekly and the day(s) you wish to send on.

For a schedule closer to real time, you can add up to 12 hourly sends on every day of the week. There is a great deal of flexibility in this scheduler, so try it out.

Step 6: Digesto Test System

What about testing the feed?

Digesto thought of that too! There is a test system. If you entered the Test Campaign Name in Step 5, you are ready to use the Test button.

In Marketo, clone your Send Campaign and add “TEST” to it so you know it is different.

Now this TEST list displayed should only be a list of internal staff or seeds, so it is a good idea to either use a Static List like I did here, or to use

Email Address = [List of Emails]

To ensure the test works, be sure to take the test campaign name and add it to the Digest as shown above.

Go back to Digesto and press Test:

Here are examples of what the emails could look like:

Step 7: Launch, go have a Strawberry Daiquiri

Once you have finalized your list and are happy with the test results, go into Digesto’s main screen.

Press ON.

Add content to your blog and watch the results fly in!

Here’s a completed system in Marketo:

And that’s it! Now you have automated your blog emails via Marketo. You have achieved end-to-end reporting on new Known Leads through to Opportunities. You can also see how blog emails are influencing Opportunities using smart lists and the Opportunity Analyzer.

Perkuto is offering free, 14-day trials. Let us know what you think in the comments below:

With the ever increasing array of marketing tools available through Marketo, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite tips and tricks. These are simple ways to work with Marketo that solve some small, but real situations for marketers.

Marketo Tip 1: Favicon on Marketo Landing Pages

The favicon is a cute and somewhat useless icon that have been around since the early web to differentiate bookmarks. Now they are used as the cute icon in your browser’s tab so you can visually see which site you might be on. The code to embed this icon on any web page is:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

You can do this in Marketo easily as well. (See Landing Page Tips and Tricks). Note that the ico file likes to be at the root of your web directory, although this is not necessary for Marketo. Simply direct your Landing Page Template to your usual favicon or upload it to Marketo – but use the entire URL.

The .ico file itself can be generated at a 16px square from Photoshop or at several sites. I like Favicon.cc if you don’t have a designer. From what I’ve read in the Community, it may take 1-2 days for the favicon to show up for everyone

Marketo Tip 2: Use a Blank Email Template

Before you spend a ton of time creating dozens of Email Templates, consider not doing this at all.

If each email you send is going to be wildly different and designed by a professional graphic artist and html designer, then it makes sense to use a Blank Template for all emails. This blank template has nothing in it at all, but allows you to create a new email, then to Replace HTML.

 

Step 1: Upload Images

Before you attempt this, be sure to upload your email’s images to a folder in Design Studio > Images & Files with appropriate names. An “appropriate name” is one without spaces or funny characters:

my-good-file.jpg

Step 2: Copy Image URLs back into your HTML Code

Failure to do this will result in one ugly email.

Step 3: Create an Email based on your blank template

Step 4: Replace HTML

You can ignore the warning about disconnecting the Templates. That’s what we’re here to do.

Notice my HTML replaced whatever was in there.

Step 5: Review Your Work

You may need to make some tweaks after using the Send Sample or Deliverability tools to review the rendering across email clients.

Why do this? Doesn’t this prevent you from taking advantage of Marketo’s template features? Yes…and no…The reality is that Templates are there to help non designers generate quality, on brand Emails fast. If your company has a team of designers, a retained agency, or rely on your graphic originality, then Templates will constrain your creativity.

Marketo Tip 3: Use a Blank Landing Page Template

As you probably know by now, there is no way to “Replace HTML” in a Landing Page Template. So if you want to be super creative with your landing pages, you have two choices:

• Create a blank landing page template.

What you do is create a New LP Template. Then remove the code in the BODY section so that the default gray bars disappear. You may also want to strip out the CSS, but be careful with this as it could affect Marketo Forms.

Now save the Template.

When you create a Landing Page based on this Template, you will use Custom HTML to drop in your design. This may not work super well if you have a fancy design, so try it out.

• Create custom pages on your site with an embedded Form.

This is the more tried and true method. You create appropriate pages on your main site and then embed a Form or use the API to create a customized form.

Marketo Tip 4: Time Zone Email Sends

The ability to time emails by the recipient’s time zone is a big request from Marketo users. Mailchimp has this already, but that doesn’t help in Marketo. In the meantime, you can do a few things to drop emails by time zones:

First, be aware of how Marketo uses Time Zone. In the Admin > System Settings, you set the System Time Zone. This is the real time all activities and sends happen.

Your personal time zone is set in Admin > Your Account (or go to your name at the upper right). All this time zone does is display dates and times in your time zone. Most of the time, you will see the activity in relation to your time zone. Occasionally, Marketo displays the System Time.

Ok, now let’s talk about two options for sending by time zone.

• Smart List or Segmentation by Region or Country. Then use Wait Steps or Batch Time to send out the email at the optimal time by region. Usually I do this by Americas, EMEA, APAC. The system says,

If Member of Smart List IN "EMEA", then Send Email 1

Wait 5 hours

If Member of Smart List IN "Americas", then Send Email 1

Wait 12 hours

If Member of Smart List IN "Asia", then Send Email 1

• Streams – it is possible to setup your Streams such that each Stream represents a Time Zone or Region. The Stream’s first send date and Cadence would be set to each region based on the System Time Zone. So if you are in US East Coast, then you will need to send, according to your system time:

UK: 3am

US EDT: 8am

US PDT: 11am

Singapore: 8pm

Marketo Tip 5: Blank User Role to Block Old Users

A quick tip here – if someone has left the organization, you normally delete his user account. That’s secure.

But if you do this, all of his modification history disappears from the system. Thus, I often recommend removing all Roles from that user. If he tries to login, he will be able to do nothing and see nothing in the system. As a bit of a security nut, I would only do this for about 30 days though, then delete his account.

Marketo Tip 6: Scratch Pads

Lately, I have been using a “scratch pad” Smart List to generate quick counts. This way I know this is a Smart List I can modify without affecting other parts of the system. All I do is create a Smart List “scratch pad” in my personal folder or in a Program. This name also warns people not to take this list seriously.

You can use this tool for lists and campaigns.

Marketo Tip 7: Comment History System

Many clients want to timestamp a comment and then keep a history of it. This is surprisingly easy to do in Marketo. You need two fields to do this.

Comments (or you can use Person Notes/Description) This field can be in Marketo only if you want.

Lead Comments History – this field should be created in your CRM first.

Step 1: Create a Smart Campaign

Step 2: Smart List Triggers

Trigger: Lead is Created

Trigger: Data Value Changes IS "Comments" New Value IS NOT EMPTY

Filter: Comments IS NOT EMPTY

Step 3: Workflow to Concatenate the Old and New Comments

The first step time stamps the lead if the history is empty and places Comments in the history.

Change Data Value: Choice 1: IF Lead Comments History IS EMPTY, then Lead Comments History = {{system.dateTime}} {{lead.Comments}}

The second step says if History is already being used, then just append the Comments. This works every time.

Otherwise: Lead Comments History = {{system.dateTime}} {{lead.Comments}} {{lead.Lead Comments History}}

Change Data Value: Comments IS NULL

<–this is important so you can reuse this field again and again on a Form. Otherwise it shows prefill data to the user.

Naturally this campaign is set to run every time. You can do something similar with just about any Text or String field.

Marketo Tip 8: Treasure Chest

The Treasure Chest is a place where Marketo let’s you test beta features out. If you are a Marketo Admin, I recommend checking it out once a month and activating some helpful features such as Landing Page Editor Comments and Undo. They may not be fully supported, but they are super helpful.

Learn more about marketing automation strategy at my first big webinar with RingLead on July 17 at 2pm EDT/11am PDT. Register now.

Segmentations are special database tools which allow you to define groups of your database for various purposes, including Dynamic Content. Segmentations are pre-set database divisions that run automatically in the background and are much faster than Smart Lists.

You must use Segmentations to take advantage of the Dynamic Content features of Marketo. Essentially, a Segmentation is a high-level category of your database, broken down into Segments which are the sub-categories. Marketo says “A Segmentation in Marketo refers to your target audience…Segments that define unique groups with that target audience.”

Possible Segmentations could include:

• Segmentation: Industry
  • Segment: Aerospace
• Segmentation: Region
  • Segment: Americas
• Segmentation: Function
  • Segment: Default (or “other”)
• Segmentation: Buyer Persona
  • Segment: Mary Marketing Manager (Influencer)

Segmentations apply to all Leads. A Segment will apply to only some Leads based on the criteria chosen. If a Lead does not match any of the defined Segments, it is placed in the Default Segment for that Segmentation. Thus, you may see that Default is the largest Segment in your Segmentation – this is perfectly normal. (It also might mean you need to do some data appending).

Since Segmentations apply to all Leads, whenever a Lead qualifies for a Segmentation’s Segment, it will join it automatically…but only for the first Segment it qualifies for. (I believe Marketo runs this batch nightly, however).

Why use Segmentations instead of Smart Lists? Segmentations are much faster than Smart List counts. Even with a Cached Smart List, a Segmentation is much faster. It’s more like a “dynamic” Static List. You can also check Segment changes or use the Segmentation in Flows with faster results. And finally, Segmentations enable Dynamic Content generation, which speeds up your ability to send out the right message at the right time to the right person.

Things to Know Before You Begin a Segmentation

The best practice for Segmentations is for major database divisions like Region, Product Interest, or Function. Use Smart Lists or Static Lists for more granular divisions.

Limits: 20 Segmentations with 100 Segments each. That is 20 Segmentations for all Workspaces.

Rules: Segments use Smart Lists to create hard-coded groupings for dynamic content. Give careful attention to the hierarchy of your segments. If a person qualifies for more than 1 segment, he/she will only be a member of 1 segment: the one that is highest in priority.

Priority Order Determines Segment Membership:

• Leads in the database belong to ALL Segmentations, but will only qualify for 1 segment in each Segmentation.
• The FIRST segment the lead qualifies for (based on priority order) is the one that it belongs to. The Lead can no longer join other segments.
• If a Lead does not qualify, it joins the Default Segment.

Warning: a Lead can only belong to 1 Segment in each Segmentation. The first Segment it qualifies for or the Default Segment.

How to Create a Segmentation

To create a Segmentation, follow these steps. In this example, I will create a Region Segmentation to group Leads by Americas, EMEA, and Asia.

Step 1:   Go to the Lead Database

Step 2:   New > New Segmentation

Step 3:   Add Segments

Press Add Segment and name each segment as shown.

Step 4:   Adjust Segment Priority Order

Remember, this is key to ensuring the right leads end up in the right places. If it is possible for a lead to end up in several Segments, then you absolutely need to prioritize the order. This is more likely when creating Buyer Personas or Product Interest segmentations.

Make sure you have the priority correct. The Default Segment has the lowest priority at all times; it is the catchall. The Priority order is less important for geographic adjustments, however, for a Segmentation like Employee Ranges or Business Type, you might have to use a waterfall approach to ensure borderline Leads are in the preferred spot.

Step 5:   Press Create.

Now the Segmentation is available to edit. Your Segmentation is not yet operational!

Step 6:   Define Each Segment

Now you need to tell Marketo which leads to put in which Segments.

Select the Segment, then use the familiar smart list filters to define each Segment. For Americas, we will use the filter Country, then copy in the countries in the Americas. You can use my handy ISO Country List for a premade list of countries for Marketo.

Each Segment looks very similar to a Smart List, except that it will become a permanent fixture of your database.

Important – certain filters are not available for use here:

• Segmentation
• Member of Smart List (?? seriously)
• Timeframes

Step 7:   Approve the Segmentation

Once each Segment’s Rules are defined, you can go to Segmentation Actions > Approve to make this available across the system.

Approval activates a process to move each Lead into one of the three Segments, or the Default Segment. This can take some time before it is complete. Marketo will notify you or you can watch the little icons change to the green check marks.

More Resources

• Dynamic Content & Segmentations: Implement a Best Practice Model
• Six Ways to Implement Dynamic Content>

Today’s quick tip is SEO for Marketo Landing Pages. This is one of my pet peeves since Marketo doesn’t make it super easy to do.

While you may think many of your landing pages don’t require SEO, you should rethink this because all Marketo pages default to “index” so that Google and Bing will pick them up. That’s very good for you – you want traffic!

The bad news is, unless you are paying attention, you probably have bad SEO practices on your Marketo page. How can you fix this quickly?

 Best Practice SEO for a New Landing Page

The default system for Marketo is to copy the Page Name into the Page URL. As the image shows, when you do this with a “natural name,” Marketo makes the URL slug with caps and no spaces or dashes. It’s perfectly fine for the Marketo Page Name, since Google doesn’t see that, but this is BAD for the URL.

Instead, set a naming practice that uses dashes in the Page Name so that the URL automatically takes in the correct URL. Alternatively, just go in and replace the slug with something that puts your keywords at the front. Remember, Google and your audience can see the URL, so avoid complicated codes that don’t matter to the rest of the world.

[Update: 6/11/14: Marketo has made this the default behavior now]

Here’s what Google and your audience would see:

To learn more about URL best practices, visit Moz or KISSMetrics.

How to Build the Right Marketo Page Meta Tags

In Marketo, each page has a set of Meta tags that help search engines and the audience understand what they should click on. Getting this right is the key to SEO. In Marketo, you can help your team do this right using the following steps.

1. Landing Page Templates Should Have Default Metas

Your templates should include the following meta tags with defaults. These defaults can be My Tokens that you know will be used in a Program. They could also be standard SEO your main site uses. This is a minimum and doesn’t release you from doing the next two steps.

• Meta Title.
• Meta Description.
• Publisher Rel – learn more about this since it involves Google+.
• Author Rel – ensures blog post authors viewed. Create a default profile.
• Facebook OG tags if needed.

Remember you can tokenize the above tags. It’s up to you.

2. Program Templates Should Have My Tokens with These Values.

In Programs, you can create Program Templates with standard My Tokens. I recommend doing this even for Meta values assuming you run a lot of events or programs that you want exposed to the rest of the world. You should do this for PPC campaigns too because your SEO affects your Quality Score and thus your CTR. My tokens would look like this, using Text tokens.

• {{my.Meta Description}}
• {{my.Author Rel Link}}
• {{my.Page Title}}

Why use tokens here? They allow you to edit the metas without using the next step. Saving time and getting your SEO right are big win-wins. Of course, tokens may not solve your Metas every single time, but it’s a best practice for Events and PPC.

3. Adjust all pages manually using Edit Page Meta Tags 

When you edit a page, you can also do a few cool things, including fixing the HEAD area. First, edit page meta tags:

Then you can modify what Google sees and displays to the rest of the world. Note you can use Tokens here, including in the LP Template itself.

If you did this right, Google will display the Title, URL, and Description in the SERPs. If you also added Publisher and Author Rel tags to Custom HEAD HTML, your picture will appear.

Remember to do these steps to ensure you maximize your Organic traffic on any campaign.

And remember to sign up for more help from Marketing Rockstar Guides. And stay tuned for a big announcement about the Marketo Guide.