Our Experience
Marketo was an early brand leader in the email marketing automation space. While they didn’t invent marketing automation, their system’s design quickly came to the attention of marketers. Marketo launched its first products in 2008 and later went public in 2013. Their lead and sales automation tools — which provide email auto-responses, drip campaigns, and analytics that help companies understand and efficiently manage customers at different stages of their lifecycle — gained immediate traction.
Marketo’s email automation services include automation related to any repetitive, schedulable marketing tasks common to sales pipeline management, recurring campaigns, social posting, and other tasks that are often part of inbound marketing efforts. We have several clients using Marketo to manage their marketing automation tasks and pipelines, and a vast majority of work happens within the Marketo tools themselves.
The Benefits
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Internal Form Builder: Like most email marketing tools, Marketo has the ability to create forms within its system. Admin can then get an embed code and “drop” it directly into a block or content area in their CMS (Content Management System) for display on their website. There are some limits to the ability to theme and customize error handling in these forms (since they’re coming from Marketo).
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Forms Built Through Drupal Webform Module: This option is better for a direct API connection and lets the website handle Marketo’s webforms in its native environment. We often use the Drupal Webform module and have extended that to be integrated with the Marketo API, allowing clients to create as many forms (typically lead collection point forms) and pass the data over the API into Marketo.
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Marketo’s Javascript API: Called “Munchkin,” Marketo’s Javascript API is great for a full set of lead tracking tools and can be dropped in on the theme level, or added via Google Tag Manager.
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The Audience Hub: A tool offered by Marketo which automatically manages and updates your segments based on client behavior, allows you to configure personalized content, and conducts testing on customer response.
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Email Deliverability: Marketo addresses deliverability with both a safe and supportive method of email deliverability. They offer the ability to preview your emails, ensuring that everything, from the design to the HTML, is in line with your intended email send. Marketo is also a participant in the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group and Online Trust Alliance forums, keeping up to date with the latest practices in email security.
When Do We Recommend Marketo
Marketo is a leader in email automation and campaign management tools for medium and large business. Many of our clients have adopted it as their marketing automation platform. Typically, Marketo has been brought to us, rather than us introducing it to clients. Most often our clients have chosen to adopt Marketo as their marketing automation platform and want to backward integrate it into the front-end of their website. Since leads often start at the website, it’s essentially the “front door” to all of Marketo’s features.
There’s strong competition in this space, and we encourage companies to evaluate the leading marketing automation systems - because of their similar feature sets - and come to a price-point, support, and tool selection model that fits well with their style of business.