Learning Marketo

Marketo is used across the entire university. Our central team started using it before my time and initially had over 430 users on our account. The central team creates the standard templates for Marketo and I customize them for my department. We didn't initially have any governance over Marketo, and my role has been to come in and streamline it for my department. My department has 53 subgroups and we use Marketo for email marketing, event outreach, etc. Currently, my department is only using Marketo for emails and to collect analytics.

I have had a lot of success standardizing the use of templates across departments and in working to increase accessibility with the use of smart links.
The most important lesson I have learned is to clone an email before making any changes. One of Marketo's largest weaknesses for me is that there are very few options for to undo changes since it saves after every change. You better really like the change you are making or have cloned your email because otherwise you will have to live with the changes or rebuild your entire email.

Since you can't edit images directly in Marketo yet (unless you are beta testing Sky), I have figured out how to easily try out several images in an email. If you name them email_name_image_01 and then increase the number for each subsequent image, then to cycle through the images, you only need to replace the "01" with and "02". I have had to compare up to 10 images so this comes in helpful.

Understand that it is a very powerful tool with a very steep learning curve. Make sure that you reach out to a user group if you don't have seasoned users with a lot of experience to help you out. In Marketo, things happen and often without a lot if information available about how to fix them. I am lucky to have a whole team of folks to rely on but there are definitely user groups out there if you don't.

I have learned how broken the text only version of emails are. The CTA buttons and many modules are not translated from HTML into text only. So, if you are ever using (Call to Action) buttons, you have to hand-copy them into the text versions. I thought it was an oversight and a bug, but I learned that this has been an known issue since 2016 and it just isn't important enough to fix.

The dashboard stats that are displayed after an email program is sent is a neat snapshot in time - BUT the numbers shown aren't reliable data for comparing programs. If you want valid data for comparisons, ALWAYS export and save the Email Performance and Email Link Performance reports ( I recommend within 5 days). As you add and remove people from your Marketo database, the numbers will change. If you want to compare apples to apples between programs, export the reports the same amount of time after each send and then compare those reports over time.