Tip of the YEAR!

Love this thread, thank you for starting! My favorite discovery this year was the ability to add smart lists as columns in Lead Performance reports.

We started using Marketo a year ago. While a lot of capabilities are new to me, I ran into the challenge of tracking Google paid ad performance precisely rather than relying on the hit or miss gclid value. The posts on the community related to how to track Google ads really helped save the day. From there, I set up the related hidden fields on all forms to capture UTM parameter values from ads, and placed java script on our website. I am now able to tell which lead is generated from which Google Ad. And we utilize this set up to track led gen from third-party websites.

We made the move to a dedicated IP. It was a lot of work and a long process, but we've been seeing the benefits in our email deliverability rates since.

Universal Tokens! It was something I meant to do at my old company but never did. When I started this job in June, we developed new email templates (they were still on Email Editor 1.0 for some reason). At the same time, we created Universal Tokens for the footer and put them in the email templates. When I got to work today, I just updated the date in the Universal Token—no template editing or mass re-approving of emails!

Universal Tokens in Marketo – Are you using them? | Grazitti Interactive

Marketo-Fu - Episode 26: Universal Tokens - YouTube

When syncing data from Marketo to SFDC, it is important to control what data is synced, when data is synced, and how data is synced. Tips and considerations to increase sync speed:

• Hide any unnecessary fields from the Salesforce integration user: Marketing doesn’t need all the fields that are available in your Salesforce instance. Identify the fields marketing needs and hide the rest from the Salesforce integration user.
• Hide unnecessary records from the Salesforce integration user: Does marketing need to see all the records? Hide some of the records by hiding them from the Salesforce integration user.
• Do batch updates at night or over the weekend: If you’re doing bulk data updates, do them at night when marketing programs aren’t running. Consider running nightly batches with filters rather than triggers.

Something that's saved us time and time again are data program alerts. Like many instances, we have numerous operational programs built for data management (appending, updating, etc.). We also have alert programs built to alert us (marketing ops) when data is missing and/or inappropriate for specific use cases. These alerts have allowed us to continue to evolve the programs and ensure our records are getting to the right people in a timely manner.

Manage the hygiene of your database. We use a template that I found on a champion project. This is the template and we just built in thresholds.

Kristy

Not sure why I didn't know this one before, but this year I learned how you can add custom columns to People Performance Reports. This has saved me so much time on exporting several smart lists and running pivot tables!

Recently, we learned that there were leads not getting to our Sales Queues because we clone too many forms and certain conventions were not always followed. To combat this, I'm creating a single form that will be placed within our guided templates so we don't have to update 40 some-odd forms and programs to make sure all of our plumbing works.

That being said, I would also add that having a documented flow (via a PPT or Visio) is helpful to explain to SFDC admins, marketing managers/directors, etc who may not understand the Marketo lingo, but will understand a visual of how data flows between the two systems. 

It's probably a bizarre tip, but works so well for me. If you have something bothering you in the back your mind - a tiny detail, something weird / out of line, some kind of flip you don't get - do NOT ignore it!

In the majority of cases, there is something really wrong, and you can prevent bigger problems if you start investigating it right now.