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Transcript

Hello, everyone. We’re going to give folks a few minutes to log on. While you wait, please feel free to play a game of rock, paper, scissors and let us know in the chat where you’re joining us from.

All right, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I see a few people still logging on but I’m going to get us started because we have a very full agenda for you today.

Welcome everyone. Today our amazing group of presenters will be going through everything you need to know about auditing an inherited or current instance. We design our webinars to be interactive so we encourage you to ask questions in the question box throughout the presentation. Type them in there because we’ve designated the last 10 minutes or so for Q&A. I also want to mention a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. First of all, we are presenting in ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Connect today and we are live but don’t worry, the session is being recorded. It can be viewed on demand or shared with other members of your team at a later time. You’ll get that recording in an email from us tomorrow afternoon. Also, throughout the presentation on the right side of your screen, you’ll see a form to fill out to receive more information on a few upgrades to your Marketo instance directly from your company’s solution account manager. This is a great way to get in touch with someone who best understands your situation and an opportunity to ask questions on how each of these upgrades could benefit your particular workflow. Finally, as we’re closing out the webinar, we have a few survey questions that will be at the bottom of your screen. If you could just take a minute or so to answer those, we’d really appreciate it. With that, I’d love to introduce myself. I’m Jeff Umeguano. I’ve been a digital engagement strategist at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ for a little over two years now. I lead the production of our webinar series for all of our Experience Cloud products. Prior to my time at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ, I spent two years working in advertising for several global agencies in New York. If you have any questions or comments about today’s event or about your experience with ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Connect overall, please feel free to reach out. And with that, I’d like to hand it over to Carly to introduce themselves. Awesome. Thanks, Jeff. So hi, everyone. My name is Carly Gaver. I am a Marketo subject matter expert. I started here at ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ in 2021, initially joining as part of our consulting team and then I made the switch to business advisory in January of last year. Before I joined to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ, I spent the vast majority of my professional career in various digital marketing and marketing ops roles and was a Marketo customer myself for many years, like many of you all. I’m very excited to be here with you guys today and also be here with my colleague, Cynthia. So Cynthia, I’ll pass it over to you to introduce yourself.

Thank you, Carly. So hi, everyone. My name is Cynthia Chen. I’m very similar to Carly. We work on the same thing for ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s business advisory team. So I’ve been on this role for about two plus years. And before that, same as Carly, I was in our ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ consulting services, so working with a lot of Marketo customers on implementations and optimization projects. And before that, also same as Carly, I came from kind of a Marketo user or customer side. So I was the Marketo admin myself. So I definitely have kind of throughout my journey, I’ve seen a lot of both Carly and I actually have seen a lot of Marketo instances and we’ve kind of like inherited or like working different instances. And so happy to be here today to kind of share with you guys our experiences.

Awesome. Thank you both. And with that, I’ll jump right into the content. Yep, sounds good. Awesome. All right. So again, I’d like to welcome you all to today’s webinar. So Cynthia and I, like she mentioned, we’ve worked with lots of customers. And one of the topics that comes up all the time is auditing. So for some of our customers, you know, they may have recently joined a new team and therefore inherited a new to them Marketo instance with, you know, likely very little to no historical background for other customers. You know, maybe their company acquired another company and so they’re inheriting an additional Marketo instance. Or maybe you haven’t inherited an instance at all, but you’re still, you know, struggling to uncover all the details and the ins and outs of your instance. So in any of these scenarios, the first thing we always recommend is an instance audit. Ultimately, we want to uncover as much as possible about the Marketo instance so we can really begin to understand it and ultimately realign it if we need to, to better fit, you know, the use cases that we’re doing today and also what we want to do in the future in terms of our Marketo maturity.

So with that, let’s walk through the agenda for today. So we’re going to kick off today’s webinar with an overview of the key steps you should take when inheriting a new Marketo instance. So these are steps you can also take, you know, whether you’re a current Marketo user or if you’ve inherited a new instance. Then we’re going to discuss the auditing process. So this is going to be where we will spend the bulk of our time today. We’re going to talk through five specific areas that you should focus your audit efforts on, and then we’ll wrap things up and open up the floor for Q&A. So before we dig deeper into the audit process, we wanted to take a few minutes to discuss our recommended path when you inherit a new instance. So first things first, we need to make sure we’re up to speed on our Marketo enablement. So this applies, you know, whether you’re new to Marketo, maybe a bit rusty, we always encourage our customers to use resources like the Marketo Community, Experience League to freshen up your skills and also make sure that you’re up to speed on the newest features. You can also work with your SAM to align on, you know, any and all available enablement opportunities for your account. Also documentation. So documentation is super important for all Marketo users regardless of whether you’ve recently inherited an instance or not. If you’ve ever worked with me, I talk about documentation a lot. I am a big, big advocate for documentation. So if you did recently inherit an instance, you might try, you know, talking to your new team members or maybe even searching your corporate server to see what existing documentation there is. In terms of what you should document, I recommend starting with configuration details. So we’re going to talk about a lot of that today and then you can, you know, you can ultimately expand from there. There are some really great checklists that are available on Experience League. There is a webinar handout for those, for links to those specific checklists. We’ll talk about them a little bit later in the presentation as well. Next is internal alignment. So another key step in inheriting a new instance, but obviously also applies to anyone using Marketo is internal alignment. So meeting with internal stakeholders, meeting with your team to learn what you can about your Marketo instance. Getting as much information as possible is going to help you better understand your use cases, the goals, and how, you know, your current organization is using Marketo and what they’re hoping to accomplish. Then comes the audit. So obviously the purpose of an audit is to help you get a better understanding of the current state of the instance. So how is it configured? How is it being used? All of those things are going to help you get up to speed while also helping you see the bigger picture and determine a path forward. And then lastly, once we’ve gathered all of that data from the audit, we need to put a plan together and prioritize any cleanup efforts. So now that we have a good understanding of the steps that are required, let’s drill down into step four, which is the audit process.

So the purpose of an instance audit is to assess your instance, your Marketo instance, effectiveness, performance, and alignment with business objectives. So ultimately this process is going to help you pinpoint those specific areas that you want to improve or optimize the instance and then take that and create that plan of action. So for today’s presentation, we’re going to really cover these key five focus areas. This is not an exhaustive list. Obviously there is a lot to unpack when you’re looking at Marketo, but these are the five key areas that we’re going to focus on today. The first is key admin and tech setup. So this is ultimately auditing details of your instance configuration. We’re also going to talk about governance. So assessing how well governed your instance is. We’ll look at campaigns. So looking at what’s currently running in the instance. We’ll talk about data. So understanding and assessing the health of your data. And then we’ll also talk about email engagement. So that involves deliverability and then the overall email engagement. So we’re going to go through each of these focus areas and help you understand what to look for, talk about some best practices and also help get you on a good path forward.

All right I’m going to pass it over to Cynthia to kick us off.

All right thank you, Carly. So as Carly and I mentioned earlier both of us that throughout our career journey or as our current and our specificizers we often help Marketo customers with an instance audit. So we like to share kind of what areas we typically focus on and why we think it’s important.

The admin area is usually the focus during the initial implementation. So when viewing this area, we’re trying to understand the overall configuration and admin level settings for the instance and making sure that it’s still aligned with current business use cases and best practices. We’ll talk about the more general areas in admin for now, and we’ll dive into more specific admin settings in later sections as it relates So workspace and partitions.

So if your instance has workspace and partitions set up, you’ll find these feature management available in the Marketo admin. The most important thing when it comes to workspace and partition is to make sure you understand and identify which workspace is mapped to which partition. Sometimes one workspace may have access to just one partition, which is what we call kind of one-to-one mapping, but sometimes it’s one-to-many. So that means one workspace may have access to multiple data partitions. Or sometimes one partition is being shared across multiple workspaces. Either way, understanding the relationship will help you more efficiently manage your database.

As a best practice, we also highly recommend making sure you have at least one admin or default workspace with access to all data partitions. So you can run global data management or operational campaign that needs Smart campaign limit. If you didn’t already know, this is a feature in Marketo that serves as a system safety guard, if you will. The purpose to prevent users from accidentally blast emails to the entire database. It is general best practice to implement a smart campaign limit in your admin setting, especially if you have a large Marketo user group with mixed levels of training and experiences. We recommend setting a limit to about 25% of your database size or average email sent volume, whichever is greater. So unintended campaigns to large audience will be blocked, and you can always override a limit for intended email sent.

All right. Communication limit is another safety guard to prevent over communicating with your audience. You can set the maximum number of promotional emails a person can receive on a daily and weekly basis, and Marketo will automatically block the email sent when the limit is reached. Marketo will only block non-operational emails. So your operational email, such as alerts or autoresponder, will always go through and it’s not part of that limit.

Treasure chest, this is a fun place that allows you to access some interesting features in Marketo that our product team is kind of developing. I would say the most significant feature you should pay attention to would be to enable campaign inspector. This feature allows you to have access to an inventory of all smart campaigns running in the instance and ability to filter them based on whether they’re active, they are recurring, etc. This is a super handy feature, especially when it comes to auditing what’s running in your instance. We’ll definitely get into that a little bit later in more detail when we talk about campaigns in the instance.

All right. So this is the ability that Marketo offers to allow you to interact with a third-party system from Marketo. I’d like to review this part just to make sure or to understand a list of webhooks that are set up in the instance and which campaigns are using those webhooks. This will help you pin a bigger picture of your overall Marketo integration, basically what your Marketo instance might be talking to third-party integrations.

Oops, I’m having problems. I’m bouncing my slide. There we go. All right. Field management. So this is a central spot to get access to all your fields in Marketo. You can export field names to get an inventory of all the fields and their API names in Marketo. So this basically could be a good place to start if you’re trying to get a list of all your fields in Marketo or start a data dictionary. Each field will also show you the corresponding CRM field mapping if applicable. The fields are grouped into different folders based on kind of the information type. Most of the custom fields that you’re creating Marketo or that are creating Marketo would generally appear under the info folder, and you can also view the list of CRM custom fields that would appear under Salesforce custom fields or dynamic custom fields, depending on your integration. When I review the list of fields, I usually try to see if I can spot any naming convention being used in the instance. It is always a best practice to implement naming convention even when you’re creating new custom field names to help you group different field names together. An example could be pref underscore xyz to indicate fields for preferences or preference center use cases, just so the naming convention should help you kind of understand and group the fields together based on their use cases.

Finally, it’s absolutely a best practice to make sure you have some sort of data dictionary in place that will tell you the definition of the field, what it’s being used for, and which CRM field or field in other system that it is mapped to. A data dictionary project is always a great project opportunity. If you inherit the instance, don’t already have one or whatever your current instance you’re working in doesn’t have one, it’s a great project to start. Your team will definitely appreciate that. Moving on. So some other suggested areas to check. I would usually look at audit trail. This audit trail just give you a opportunity to kind of take a quick look at who are the active users in the instance. It will kind of show you who’s active, what are they working on, et cetera. Web service and launch point planner, this is another spot that show you what integrations are connected with your Marketo instance. You can also see the recent API activities. It definitely helps if each of integration use its own kind of dedicated API user ID so you can differentiate the different activities between different integrations. Marketo also has a native CAPTCHA integration to come back any bot activity on Marketo forms. If your instance has the integration enabling admin, you can leverage the CAPTCHA feature on a Marketo form. One important thing to know about CAPTCHA feature is that it’s simply a score to each form submission and you will need to make sure you create a CAPTCHA data management program to decide what to do with the form submission based on the CAPTCHA score. Otherwise, CAPTCHA by itself is not really doing anything besides just having a score in place. So if you do see CAPTCHA integration enabled in your instance, make sure you search or look for any CAPTCHA related data management program that is going to perform any decisions, whether it’s to remove or delete or ask people to quarantine based on the CAPTCHA score. If you have other add-on products available in your instance like interactive webinars, sales insights or target account management, you’ll also be able to kind of see and manage those features in admin.

All right, so what I have mentioned so far are just kind of examples of what we would typically check when we perform an instance audit. There is a very detailed documentation on where to start when you inherited an instance on Experience League. Even better, there’s a full admin Excel checklist that you can download to guide you through what areas to check and also document your findings and any change logs.

We will link the documentation to the Experience League in the webinar handout. I’m not sure if we’re able to see the handout. If not, on the screen right now, it will be part of the follow-up email that you guys will get tomorrow. So just make sure you check out the links that we included in the handout because we definitely try to include as many available resources as possible.

I’m probably going to work through the next focus area in our audit.

Awesome. Thank you, Cynthia. So we’re going to move now to governance, everyone’s favorite topic. So instance governance is all about platform oversight, right? What are the rules and procedures that everyone who has access to your Marketo instance should follow? So in addition to helping ensure a cleaner instance, governance is going to help preserve the integrity of your Marketo instance and also help ensure the system is set up for optimal marketing performance. So when we’re looking at governance, some of the questions that we’re looking to answer are things like who has access to Marketo and what can they access? So in other words, who are the users and what can they access? We also want to better understand how the instance itself is organized. So we mentioned, Cynthia mentioned naming conventions as it relates to fields, but we would look at naming conventions across the entire instance, programs, folders, assets, et cetera. And then we also would want to look at folder structure to just to understand how spaces like the design studio or marketing activities is organized.

Also asking the question, a little bit more difficult to unpack, but asking the question, what is the process for launching new programs? So one thing we’d look for here is program templates, right? Are program templates being used? Are best practices being applied? And also looking to identify any unique workflows.

So one of the first questions we want to answer is, who has access to Marketo and what kind of access do they have? So this can be easily answered by reviewing the users and tabs role within the admin panel. So users and roles is going to allow you to control the areas and functionality that each Marketo user has access to. So some things to look out for when reviewing users. So first you want to check the last log in date. So you can’t see it in this screenshot, but if you scroll all the way over to the right on that screen, you’ll see last log in date as the very last column. So you can check the recency with which someone has logged into Marketo.

You also want to confirm your core Marketo users have access and that they have the right permissions. You also want to identify if any users are no longer with your company. So I have been in this situation multiple times where I’ve inherited when I was on the customer side, inherited a Marketo instance, and there’s all of these users in there that aren’t even with the company anymore. So just a great opportunity for cleanup. And then ultimately you want to just review any remaining users and determine whether they need to still have access. And if they do, do their permissions need to change or can they stay with the same permissions that they have? When we start to look at the roles, you know, there I think most folks are familiar, but there are built in roles, right? We have those standard built in roles, but it’s also possible that there are custom roles in there as well. So lots of our customers create those custom roles. So you want to be very conscious of what’s in there and what those custom role permissions are. From a best practice perspective, just some things to…

So I think Carly, I don’t know if you can hear us, but I think you caught out.

Can everyone hear me? I think I’m back on. Okay. Yep. Just waiting for confirmation.

Yep. You sound good. Awesome. Okay. Sorry guys. I don’t know what happened there. Okay. So just best practices around users and roles.

I mentioned one role per user. So if you’ve inherited a new instance, it’s possible that some of your users already have multiple roles. So this might be something that you want to definitely go through an audit. But if you’re inviting new users, I would definitely recommend starting with just a single role that best reflects their primary function.

Creating custom user roles. So I mentioned before, there are several out of the box roles, but so many of our customers find a great benefit in creating those custom roles that are more specifically aligned to their specific job positions within the organization.

You also want to be aware of roles that overlap. So as part of the audit process, if there are users that have been assigned multiple roles that can sometimes result in overlapping permissions, then those permissions can conflict one another.

And then last but not least, ongoing maintenance. So it’s important that you’re regularly assessing the user roles and permissions just to make sure that they stay aligned with the current needs of your business.

Team structures can change, right? So just the general functionality of the team can change. So you just want to be conscious of that as you’re continuing to maintain this moving forward.

All right. Next, we want to better understand how the instance is organized. So taking a look at the folder structure and the naming conventions that are being used is really, really helpful. So the screenshots on the left are showing examples of rather clean instances where the folders are neatly labeled and organized by either fiscal year or region. The example on the right, however, is showing a much less organized folder structure where there’s duplicative folders, there isn’t a consistent naming convention. So generally speaking, if this is an instance that you’ve inherited, it’s going to be very challenging for you to figure out where things are. Another thing to check for when you’re looking at folder structure is whether programs are being archived. So you want to look for that archive folder. It may be hidden within another folder, so you may have to do some digging. You can always use the search functionality. But really digging into that and seeing if there are things being archived and maybe trying to unpack what that process or lack of process is for archiving.

So in addition to folders, it’s also important to look at the naming conventions that are being used for your programs. So this example on the left is showing you a very consistent naming convention. This is my demo account, which is why it’s a very clean naming convention. But this is just one example. You may have different acronyms. You may have slightly different formatting for the naming convention. But overall, what you’re really looking for is that there is a naming convention and that it’s being consistently used across the instance.

The example on the right is showing you a scenario where there is not a consistent naming convention for programs. So if you’ve recently inherited a Marketo instance that looks like the one on the right, we would definitely recommend instituting a naming convention of some sort. And then if your bandwidth allows, you can even go back and rename previous programs. Maybe you go back to the beginning of the year, even further if you can, or maybe you’re just going back this quarter or the previous quarter, but making sure that things are aligned to that new naming convention and also making sure that your teammates, if you’re not the only sole Marketo user, that all the folks on your team are aware of what that naming convention is.

And then lastly, we want to answer the question, what is the process for launching new initiatives? So this one is going to be a bit more difficult to unpack, right? Because it’s not just the process of launching the program in Marketo. There’s a lot more that goes into it. But from a Marketo perspective, the very first thing that I’m going to look for is program templates. So this is a core best practice for all Marketo instances. So this is going to probably be the best place for you to start. So you can go into marketing activities and search for the word templates to see if anything shows up. So ideally, we want to see a program template to represent each of our major marketing initiatives. So the hope is that you’d see something similar to what you see on the right. But if not, this is a great opportunity to either stand up or potentially clean up your program template strategy so you can ensure that consistency across the instance.

This is a great time to mention the Marketo program import library, which is a resource that’s available on Experience League. It contains a link.

It contains a collection of starter templates, and these are all aligned to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ Best Practice. So there will be a link to this resource in the webinar handout, which I believe you guys should be receiving as a piece of content in your follow up email. So keep an eye out for that. If you’ve ever worked with me, I talk about the program import library a lot. I’m a very big advocate for this. It’s a great resource. Not only can you import these into your instance, but you can also just look at the documentation and see what those best practices are for a program structure.

All right, next we’re going to dig into active campaigns. So it’s really important to get a handle on what’s currently running in the instance. So this would include both the marketing campaigns as well as the operational programs.

So what types of questions are we trying to answer as it relates to campaigns? So first, we’re trying to understand what programs or smart campaigns are currently running, right? We want to understand what’s live in the instance, specifically with trigger or recurring batch campaigns.

We also want to understand what the key campaign channels are. So this is going to help us get a better understanding of how we’re currently using Marketo and what our use cases might be.

We also want to understand if programs are properly set up for reporting. So obviously, we want to look for program templates, but we also want to see if those programs are properly set up. So this is really important and goes back to instance governance. Make sure that everything is set up and properly aligned to best practice.

And then last but not least, what happens when a lead enters Marketo? So I love this question, but I also hate this question because it’s a lot to try to unpack. And it will probably take a lot of digging to fully unpack all the details, but there are a lot of things we can do to try to unravel the path that lead takes when entering Marketo for the first time.

So when it comes to active campaigns, the first and probably most obvious thing you can do is use Campaign Inspector. So Cynthia mentioned this earlier.

If you don’t see this in your instance, it’s probably because it has not been enabled. So you can do that in Treasure Chest in the admin panel.

But again, you can access Campaign Inspector by going to marketing activities, selecting the workspace, and then clicking on that Campaign Inspector tab. So I love this tool. It’s a really, really helpful tool. You can use it to review all of the campaigns that are running in your instance.

You can also search for key triggers, filters, and flow actions. So you can look for things like person is created, send alerts, sync person, et cetera. So a really, really helpful resource to really help you understand what’s going on in the instance.

It’s also important that we do some digging to see what operational programs we have running in the instance. So you can search the marketing activities tab for the word operational to see what shows up. Ideally, we want to see a folder of operational programs that are responsible for things like data management, lead scoring, lead lifecycle, et cetera. So these programs are ultimately responsible for managing and maintaining the order and structure of the instance. So it’s really important to get a grasp on what’s built in there from an operational perspective.

We also want to start to understand more about the use cases for our Marketo instance. So really understanding what those key campaign channels are. So you can check the channels tag from within the admin panel.

And this is going to show you what channels there are in the instance, but it’s also going to show you whether they’re in use or not. So you can see those numbers that used by column on the far right. So that’s going to tell you what’s actually being used in your instance.

You can also use this as an opportunity to review the program statuses of each of these channel tags. I like to call them progression statuses, but reviewing these statuses, making sure they make sense, making sure they align with your organization’s goals. You also want to review the success status for clarity on how that’s being measured in the instance. So I would highly, highly recommend when you’re going through this as part of the audit process to document all of your channel tags and program statuses so you can easily reference them and also so that you can share that with your team, other Marketo users, et cetera, so that they can all fully understand how they’re being used in the instance.

Another way to get a great understanding of what’s running in the instance is to use the program performance report. So I’ve seen this particular report used in a lot of different ways.

Inventory in the instance is obviously a big part of that, but this is going to show you a list of all of the programs in your instance. So you can use this report to review the use of a naming convention.

You can also use this to check to see if programs are set up properly for optimal reporting capabilities. So in other words, do the majority of programs have membership and are they tracking program success? So those are two key best practices for program structure. So this is a great way to get a sort of an overview of how those programs are performing in Marketo.

And then lastly, a great way to see what’s running in the instance as it relates to record creation is to run a test. So create a test record and then use the activity log to just follow the path of the lead. So you can, you know, if you have the bandwidth, you can test multiple entry points. You could submit, you know, add a record via form fill. You could do manual import. You could use the CRM sync and then follow the activity log to see, you know, what happens when a new record is added to the Marketo database. So this is a really great exercise in understanding your instance. And it can also be another way to help you identify what operational programs and processes are running in your instance and also the order of operations that can sometimes be conflicting. So this is a really great way to just see things happen in real time and really understand what that flow process is like.

All right, I’m going to pass it back to Cynthia for the next focus area. All right. Well, thank you, Carly.

Yeah. Thanks for going to dive into everyone’s favorite topic or this is my favorite topic, data. But before we start, we have a poll question coming up.

Yep. Thank you, Cynthia. All right, everyone. Let’s go ahead and pull up our first poll of the day.

Let us know when is the last time you reviewed your data in Marketo. Oh, I like that. Big Ben.

All right. Most of us talking about last quarter.

Good. I like that.

Yeah.

The majority of folks either between last quarter or six months ago, a few folks about more than six months ago, and then some of which are not too sure. That’s part of what we’ll be talking about as we go back into the content. I’ll pass it back to you, Cynthia.

Thank you. Well, I’m pleased to see that almost 70% of you look at your data last quarter. So while your data in Marketo is definitely super important because it represents the audience you can market to, ensuring a clean and healthy market database is the first step to successful marketing campaigns because that’s the basis for your audience segmentation. So some questions we’re trying to answer when we review the data in Marketo are what is the current state of the database? How is the data coming into Marketo? What is the health status? How is the data quality and data hygiene? And also, are there any operational programs to help manage the data and keep it healthy? Oops. Let me see. Can someone help me advance the slides? I’m having trouble with that. I know. Yep. Thank you very much. So in the database area of Marketo, there’s a folder for system smart list. So I mean, you should all know this, but these are the out of box queries that help you get a quick glance of your database health. The first one, all people, of course, shows you the up-to-date size of your database. You can get basically the latest count of the total records in your database. So that’s where I usually look. The next list I will actually pay attention to is the bounced email addresses. These are essentially hard-bounce email addresses because Marketo had attempt to send an email to this email address and receive a notification or confirmation that the address are no longer valid. So remember, bounced email address equals invalid email addresses. So this would probably be the first population to review if you’re considering purging any bad data.

Next I would review the unsubscribed people. These are the people who have unsubscribed because they don’t want to receive emails from you. But it’s also important to kind of look at who they are and what other activity they have been doing with you. Other existing customers. So you might not want to purge them just yet. Or are they prospects? Do they have any other digital activities such as event registration or content downloads in the recent month? If so, you might still want to keep them to continue tracking other marketing efforts. But if they are prospects that unsubscribe and they have no other trackable digital interactions with you for more than six to eight months or whatever timeframe you define based on your sales cycle, you might consider purging them to gain more space in your database if you are trying to conduct a data cleanup exercise.

Another good list to review is the possible duplicates. It is important to review the source of your duplicates. Marketo by default will dedupe based on email address if a record enters into Marketo from submissions or list import. The most common duplicate source is likely to be your native CRM integration because Marketo don’t dedupe against CRM originated records. If you have duplicate records in Marketo, you have the option to manually merge them. Or if you have a large number of duplicates, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ actually offers an auto merge service. If you are interested in learning more about the auto merge service, you could fill out that form on the right hand side to get more information. Carly actually wrote a blog article about strategies to manage duplicates. It will be in the webinar handout. So make sure you look for that follow up email from Jeff to get access to the links.

Aside from the out of the box system smart list, we also recommend creating custom smart list query to identify the number of emailable or marketable records in your database. From a Marketo perspective, mailable, emailable records, the definition is that they are not unsubscribed, they are not marketing suspended, they are not email invalid and not block listed. So if these are true, if you are not any of these, then that means from a system perspective, Marketo can email to them. The best practice is to aim for about 85% of the emailable records in your Marketo database. After all, you are paying for a marketable database, you want to make sure a majority of them are emailable. You may also want to compare that to how many people you actually market to recently, or how many people will actually deliver an email in Marketo recently. Because one thing is how many people are actually emailable from the system perspective, but then how many of them you actually market to. If your data is mostly clean and emailable, but you are still approaching your database size limit, it would be a good time to kind of consider database size upgrade to ensure you have room to continue to grow your legion efforts.

So this brings us to our next, this is the next report in Marketo that can help you understand your lead generation and database growth trends using the People Performance Report.

This report allows you to group your database by different attributes. Here we are grouping the database by lead creation month, simply to show us the month over month growth. This can help you understand your legion peak month and also any trends to help you estimate how long it might take to reach your current database limits.

Another way to look at the data is to group people by original source type to help you understand how majority of the records are getting into Marketo. In this case, the Web Service API and Salesforce integration account for the largest or the biggest source.

About Web Service API, earlier in the admin section, we show you that you could kind of review the recent API user activity to kind of help you understand what system or what API integration is kind of updating records in Marketo.

And of course it helps, again, it helps to make sure different integration user have a different ID so you can differentiate the activity. And this could be updating a record or inserting a record so it’s not always inserting, but just which integration user is touching records in the database.

And in case you didn’t know, Marketo now offers a CRM sync dashboard if your instance has a native Salesforce sync. The dashboard can show you estimated sync time for each object and if the sync volume is normal or there is a growing backlog. There’s a detailed documentation about what’s included in the sync dashboard in the webinar handout so make sure you review that in the follow up email.

So last but not least, we always try to look for any existing data management program in a Marketo instance. You can simply just search for them or try to look for them. We recommend reviewing and documenting any existing practice to help you identify any additional data management opportunities. Maybe the instance can use some data normalization or maybe lead source are missing from the majority of your data so you may want to make sure there’s a lead source or acquisition management program in place.

We also highly recommend an email ability data management program to determine which records you can and cannot email to. Doing so will help you improve your email ability in general. The good news is that if you don’t already have one, you can import it from the Marketo program input library that Colleen mentioned earlier. And of course, we have that link in the webinar handout with our email. So make sure you pay attention to that.

So this is a great segue to our next topic, email engagement and durability.

So email durability should be on every marketer’s mind because it determines how much of your email reached the intended audience. And the engagement metric tells you whether they are perceived as valuable and relevant in driving your email marketing success. When we all did an instance for email durability engagement, we want to start by making sure the configuration, the technical configuration is properly set up to optimize the durability reviewing the overall email performance for all the emails sent from the instance to determine average engagement metrics and trends.

So before you send email from Marketo with any email domains, you need to make sure Marketo is authenticated, authorized to send on behalf of those domains. There are three main email authentication protocols, SPF, DKIM and DMARC. SPF and DKIM, you can simply check the status in Marketo admin or the domains you want to use with Marketo or send emails from Marketo should show a verified status. If it shows otherwise, you definitely want to make sure you work with IT and Marketo support to resolve that. For DMARC, we recommend using DMARCion.com to check the DMARC status of your email domain. And just so you know, DMARC is becoming the new standard for email authentication. So altogether, these configurations are important foundations to ensure email durability.

Your overall email engagement is a factor that will impact your future email durability. This means that if you have very low engagement rate today, you might see the durability starting to tank in a few weeks. So it is important to review your email performance report for all emails sent from your instance on a regular basis. We also recommend you enable bot activity filter in Marketo admin to filter out bot activity from your email performance report. We recommend the filtering option to remove bot activity from showing up and polluting your email performance report.

And when you’re looking at your email performance report, we recommend including all the emails sent from your instance for whatever excellent time period. And our durability team suggests you aim for 98 to 99% delivery rate, more than 20% open rate, and around mid-tings or 15% and greater click to open ratio. So this is all kind of the metric that our durability team always kind of use when they work with customer. This is kind of the ideal state we want to see every customer be at. Email insight dashboard is a great way to kind of view trends of your overall metric because it shows you that dashboard format. To more closely monitor your email durability, Marketo also offers additional tools and managed services that help monitor email reputation and provide data to troubleshoot any specific durability issues.

So this leads us to our next poll question.

Jeff, if you can help us with that. Yes, of course. One more poll question for you guys today. Do you have a deliverability management tool or service? And this could be a Marketo one, or maybe you have a third party tool that you use outside Marketo if you have it. If you don’t, not sure. Or if you want more information on kind of what Marketo can provide, you can also fill out that form on the right hand side and our team will reach out to you to kind of give you more information.

Yeah, OK, half and half. Well, yeah, please make sure you fill out that form if you’re interested in getting more information. And then next, I’m going to pass it back to Karli. Can I talk about next steps? Awesome. Thanks, Cynthia.

All right. So next steps. So I know we’ve talked through a lot of different things, a lot of areas to look at. So I’m sure many of you are wondering, how do we prioritize all of this? What do we do first? How do we identify what needs to get done? And so it’s kind of a complicated question, but I would say for the most part, we want to base that on several factors. We want to base that on things like the level of effort, the impact, the time to execute, and really just thinking through what’s most important for your business and for your business goals. So if it were me, I would plot this on some sort of a matrix. So similar to what you see there on your screen. So really trying to determine, based on effort level, impact level, where do we kind of plot these things? And I think that is probably your best bet in helping to determine what to tackle first and thinking through who on your team needs to be involved, who you need to pull in to really get some of these things moving.

Also in terms of next steps, documentation. So I mentioned before, I’m a huge advocate of documentation. I’ve had instances or worked on instances as a Marketo customer that have no documentation. I’ve also worked on instances that were very, very well documented. And it is a vast difference between the two. So you can leverage those experience checklists. So those will be in the webinar handout that you guys will get via email. But also digging through your corporate server, talking to your teammates, figuring out what documentation you already have. It may not be clean, it may not be buttoned up, but it could give you a place to start so that you’re not fully starting from scratch.

And then last but not least on here is instance maintenance. So the last thing we want to do is go through this whole process of auditing and cleaning up our instance only to have it get messy and overly complex over time. So making sure that you define that process for regular auditing, just having eyes on the instance. Maybe it’s something that you do every quarter. Maybe it’s something you do at the beginning of every year. But just having that process in place to make sure that not only is your instance clean and those governance practices are being followed, but also that the instance configuration, everything still makes sense for your organization’s use cases today, tomorrow and in the fall and the future as well. So all of those things are going to be super important.

All right, I think with that, we are going to open it up for Q&A.

Yep, thank you both. That was incredible. Lots of really great information and resources throughout today’s presentation. Just a reminder, everyone, you can expect to get access to every one of those resources in our follow up email, along with the recording of the session in our follow up email in 24 hours. And as promised, while we still have you, I also want to go over a few questions you’ve submitted to us today. So let’s get into Q&A.

All right.

So I want to kick it off with you, Cynthia, how to best document initial instance state and then track and measure improvements over time.

Yeah, I will say definitely leverage the checklist that in Experience League that we mentioned earlier, it has a detailed spreadsheet to help to kind of guide you through what area in Markel to look at what items to review and document the current state, update needs and the change logs. So that is I think the team did a great job to publish that checklist.

It’s great help to kind of have a guide to kind of know what to look. And then that also kind of have the columns for you to document what’s the current state, who that item could be assigned to for update needs and then any of the change logs. So highly recommend using that as a starting point.

Got it, Carly, this next one’s for you. How should you prioritize what needs to be cleaned up in an instance? The fun part. So like we already mentioned on the last slide, so this is going to depend on a lot of factors, right? Level of effort, what it is that you’re actually trying to do. So I would say definitely leverage something like that matrix where you’re kind of taking all of those factors into consideration and really thinking through what’s important to your business, right? Aligning that to your goals.

Bandwidth is a huge concern as well. So figuring out what’s possible in the time that you have and what’s going to give you ultimately the most bang for your buck.

Yeah, that makes sense. And one last one for you. At what point do you stop cleaning or archiving and just reset an instance altogether instead? That’s a good one. That’s a tricky one, right? Because every instance is going to be varying levels of complexity and cleanliness, right? So there’s really no hard rule for this. I would say there’s some common scenarios where we might recommend a new instance if a customer is like switching to a new CRM or something like that. But all in all, there’s really no right answer, right? There’s no point in time where you would say like, all right, it is definitely time to throw in the towel and move to a new instance. It really depends on a lot of factors again, right? Bandwidth being a big part. It is a lot of effort to clean up an instance, but it’s a lot of effort to stand a new one up as well.

Yeah, totally perfect. Thank you, Cynthia. I want to go back to you for this next one. Any advice or suggestions on how to manage duplicate data when inheriting an instance based on your experience? Yeah, duplicates. This is like everybody’s struggle. Worst nightmare.

They want to say worst nightmare, but it’s definitely a struggle. I would definitely review the source of the duplicates.

Is it coming from, like I said, the marketer would typically dedupe if it’s by email address. If you have a listing port or phone submission, so you should typically not see duplicate coming from those sources.

Common duplicate source could be CRM integration, the native CRM integration or API. So understanding the source can kind of help you nip the duplicates at its root. So if it’s CRM, you might want to kind of work with your CRM team.

Ideally, we recommend if you have a dedupe mechanism in your CRM, that’s a better place to start. Because sometimes when you’re merging Marketo, you might not be able to merge CRM records. If one of the duplicates, it’s part of like CRM contact because Marketo typically would not be able to delete CRM contact records. If you have a lot of duplicate records in Marketo, you could also leverage ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ’s AutoMerge service. If the volume is very high, if you don’t want to spend the time to manually merge them, because you do have an option to manually merge, but you have to review and kind of decide which data to keep, etc. So if that’s the case, then AutoMerge service would be an option to consider if you have high volumes of duplicate records.

Perfect, thank you. And on that note, let’s end it with our final question of the day. And it’s a great one. Cynthia, how do you recommend keeping an instance healthy? So things like data quality, duplicate records, etc. Yeah, from a database perspective, while following data management best practices, you want to make sure you have a governance model on how data gets into Marketo. If you guys do a lot of listing for it, make sure you have a process, kind of a listing for template. What does the process look like? You definitely don’t want people to just be able to listen for anything.

And then when you list imports, batch of records into Marketo, what are the kind of required fields that people need to have? Because I’ve definitely seen a lot of instances where they might have marketers who are not familiar with the listing process, and they will import a list of records without email address. And you’ll be creating a lot of junk data in Marketo that that’s not usable. So making sure the requirements, the requirement for listing for how data needs to get into Marketo instance, making sure you have centralized governance of the data, operational campaign, or centralized operational program, data management program. And again, making sure that that program has access to all the records in your database, in case you guys have a workspace and partitions set up, making sure you have the data management campaign running in a place where it could clean up all the data sets in your Marketo instance.

So this would kind of help you make sure that data is consistent and usable and making sure you understand the discrepancy in your data, like the people from performance report I mentioned earlier, I really like that report because I can kind of group my database by different attributes to see, hey, is there a lot of empty fields for certain data points, or maybe the data is very inconsistent in the format, I need to normalize my data, and also kind of setting up a recurring cleanup campaign, maybe once you have determined or decided a strategy on how to handle unsubscribed people, you can say, okay, if someone unsubscribe, we wait nine months to see if they have any other activity with us, if they don’t, and then they are also not existing customer, they’re just a prospect, they are not any kind of MQL, then that’s when we actually have an auto purge program running in the background to kind of clean up every nine months or so. So all those would be great data management practices.

Got it. Perfect. Thank you both for all of the incredible insight today. I really appreciate it. And on that note, I want to go ahead and wrap us up for today. On this screen, we have a few survey questions for you, as we mentioned at the start of today’s presentation, as well as one more opportunity to view some of our past recordings and things of that sort. If you’d like more info on anything we’ve mentioned today, please feel free to reach out, as well as keep an eye out for those resources that we’ll be including within that handout within 24 hours. If you have a question specific to your account, and we weren’t able to address it today, please reach out to your solution account manager. If you’re not sure who that is, you can reach out to me directly and I’ll put you in touch with the correct person. And as a reminder, you will receive the recording of today’s event and an email from us within 24 hours. So that is all for us today. Thank you all again for attending. We really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day. And we look forward to seeing you at one of our upcoming events.

Thanks, everyone. Thank you all so much. Have a good one.

Thank you.