How to personalize your content in Marketo?

The basics

10mn   Beginner Level
 

Thanks to Marketo you now have a platform that allows you to automate all your inbound and outbound marketing processes, but also to personalize your content in Marketo.
Ah the Inbound Marketing…, or the Art of attracting your prospects naturally thanks to all your downloadable premium content (infographics, videos, powerpoint presentations…).

 

So now you have created all your landing-page or email templates that you just need to clone and adapt for your different marketing actions. But now a question arises: how to manage your eight languages? Do you have to do eight emails? Eight landing pages? Clone all the programs?

Fortunately, Marketo has the answer.

The ABC’s of marketing: segmentation

Segmentation – Targeting – Positioning, does that remind you of anything? Yes, it’s the first thing to define in a marketing strategy, we’ve told you that too often.

It’s even proven, small well-targeted emailing campaigns offer 30% more opening than a large number of non-differentiated emails. The latter generate far fewer engagements than small, intelligently segmented campaigns.

Personalize your content in Marketo

Personalize your content in Marketo

In Marketo, you can subdivide your leads into several “segments” according to different rules of segmentation via well defined “smart lists“.
You can create up to 20 different segmentations: geographic/sectoral/demographic/linguistic…, including up to 100 segments each.

Be careful, once your segments are defined, they are mutually exclusive, a lead cannot belong to two segments simultaneously. You must therefore pay close attention to your segmentation rules. A lead that meets the criteria of two segments at the same time will belong to the first on the list!
And if he doesn’t belong to any segment? Don’t worry, define a default segment!

To go back to our example of the 8 emails: we can define a “preferred language” segmentation based on the Marketo field of the same name. Your leads will be divided into several segments according to the language they have selected (without forgetting English by default if they don’t fill in anything).

Now that you have identified your different targets, it’s time to offer them personalized content.

Personalize your content in Marketo: the basics of personalizing your emails and landing pages

Your leads receive a considerable amount of emails every day, so to get their attention you need to integrate your beautiful graphic design. It’s well known that it’s useless to bore them with a dozen paragraphs.
A synthetic message, a few well-chosen images, a call-to-action to a beautiful and engaging landing page and that’s it: +1 lead in your database!

Marketo offers a fully customizable landing page editor. After defining its general shape (logo, colors, backgrounds,…) in your template, you will be able to add different objects such as text zones, images, call-to-actions, videos, forms or even surveys. And the Marketo library allows you to manage your content in one place.

personalize-content-marketo2

Concerning your emails, it is in the definition of your template that everything will be played out, Marketo does not offer as many objects for their customization as for the landing pages.
Don’t panic, you can import free and ready to use templates from the template library available on templates.marketo.com and customize them easily thanks to its simplified HTML editor.

Finally, whether for your emails or your landing pages, you can dynamically customize your content, depending on the data you have on your leads, thanks to the integration of two objects available in Marketo: snippets and tokens.

Personalize your content in Marketo: dynamic content snippets & tokens

Snippets are zones, blocks of dynamic content that adapt to your segmentation rules. They will be very useful in Marketo: you create them once to use them in different tools. As soon as you update them, all the objects that use them will also be updated automatically, needless to say that this will save you a lot of time…!

The proof by example:

  • You can use a snippet for your signature whose text will dynamically adapt according to the recipient’s location.
  • Or, personalize your landing pages by integrating a dynamic call-to-action zone: redirect to different links depending on the characteristics of your recipients: customer versus prospect, engineer versus marketer, …

Tokens are variables created to make your life easier in managing your emails, landing pages and Marketo smart campaigns. They are displayed between two braces {{token}}, some are natively available in Marketo but you can also create custom tokens called “My Tokens”.
Just like snippets, you define them in your program and all objects in that program that use them synchronize directly.
They are filled either dynamically according to the information associated with the leads and users (country, first name, email address, position,…) or according to the value you assign to them yourself.

Different types of tokens exist to integrate into your assets:

personalize-content-marketo3

For dynamically integrated tokens, if you can’t get the custom information, Marketo allows you to set a default value. The default value allows you to integrate a value even if the lead does not have one for the field used.

So, if we go back to our example of 8 emails in 8 different languages, the use of tokens and snippets saves us time when cloning the program: no need to enter each email to change the language

  • The tokens are defined in the program and all the assets that contain them are automatically updated according to the data available on the lead or the value you have assigned to it.
  • The snippets will adapt to your segmentation, to each language associated with each lead.

Differentiate yourself from the classic mass emailing, cold and generic, thanks to a personalization of your message that will allow you to create or maintain a real conversation with your prospects.

Still need help to dive into the Made In Marketo personalization?

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Posted By Sylvain

For the past 20 years, Sylvain has been choosing and assembling the best technologies for his key account clients, to help them create a successful end-to-end customer experience. Surely the Leonard of the team, he is a fan - and expert - of Marketo! He sits next to his clients, drives them forward and makes Marketing Automation projects succeed with his team.