Marketing Office Hours· Episode 36/53
Smart list and advanced flow
In Marketo, smartlists allow you to build specific user groups based on simple filters….
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In Marketo, smartlists allow you to build specific user groups based on simple filters. These can also be used in programs, reports, segmentations or engagement programs. Let’s take a look at this functionality.
We’ll start this session with a little exercise on smartlists with AND or OR. I took a simple example with people who are in France, people whose name starts with A and people who are unsubscribed. We will build together several smartlists from this sample.
First smartlists on Maketo : beginning of the exercise
So we will create a first smartlist with people who live in France, who have unsubscribed and whose name starts with A.
Then we will make several other lists with :
- People in France who have not unsubscribed;
- People from France whose name starts with A OR people from Spain whose name starts with M, but nobody should be in the exclusion list;
- People in France whose name starts with A who have filled out a form OR people in Spain whose name starts with M who have attended the webinar, but none of them should be in the exclusion list.
Understanding the importance of the brackets in the Marketo smartlist
By default when you create a smartlist, you are on All Filters. Then you just have to activate the advanced filters to be able to manually add brackets by including the different conditions.
What happens when you don’t put a parenthesis ? In theory, OR is stronger than AND. So if you don’t put a parenthesis, Maketo will first read the conditions 2 and 3, before reading 1. So it will put 2 and 3 together, then it will do 1 OR 2 AND 3. As a result, the list will only contain people whose name starts with A.
So it’s essential to put parentheses around ORs, otherwise they are overwritten by ANDs. My advice is to always put parentheses to be sure and especially to be able to read the logic of your smartlists more easily.
Before creating your smartlist, it is therefore essential to formulate what you want to do before applying it in Marketo.
