Level-up Your Marketing Campaigns With Marketo Templates

“Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches—at scale.” – David Newman

Email marketing continues to rule the charts as a marketer’s preferred communication channel. However, the art and science that goes behind creating the perfect email campaigns is time consuming.

If you run email campaigns using Marketo, you can reduce the effort spent in creating similar emails time and again.

Templates to the rescue! With templates, you can take the hassle out of email creation and management.

In this article, we’ll decode how Marketo templates can help your business grow and how you can create those templates to amp the productivity of your marketing team. So, let’s dive right in.

How Marketo Templates Help Businesses Scale

An email must be engaging to increase sales, but keeping it engaging means you have to write an original copy every single time.

Do you:

• Have an email template for every type of email you send?
• Spend more time building emails than sending emails?
• Have marketers that don’t have HTML experience?
• Find your campaigns not in alignment with compliance, privacy, and branding guidelines?

If you nodded yes to one or more of these, templates are what you need.

With templates, you don’t have to start from scratch every time you run email campaigns. Having an easy way to create original content of high quality and can witness a significant reduction in campaign execution time and effort.

How to Create Enterprise-Level Marketo Templates?

Creating a Marketo template is not a big deal. However, developing a customer-centric template strategy that meets your organization’s needs is where the real challenge lies.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can create enterprise-level Marketo templates.

1. Understand the Needs of Your End-Users

Start by understanding which programs will benefit from templatization. For this, you need to talk to end-users. Find out what they’re already doing, and make sure you’re aligning your templates with their needs.

Once they have chosen a template that they think best suits their needs, make sure you communicate that choice to the rest of your team. Also, don’t forget to document each template you plan to create.

2. Define Naming Convention & Token Strategy

Once you have the needs of internal marketing, the next step is to create naming conventions and token strategies based on those needs. With Marketo, you can create hierarchies, which help you stay organized. Hence, more stability!

3. Create Marketo Program & Asset Templates

Next, you’ll need to build a couple of Master Programs by selecting the right program type. As you choose the Marketo program type, be sure that they are all relevant in terms of how they align with the rest of your multi-channel campaign.

4. Test Marketo Templates

Once you have built your program templates and are happy that they’re working as expected, it’s time to test them. Test each of your templates with a varied set of content selections to see what your subscribers will get.

5. Provide End-User Training

Finally, you should provide end-user training on the process of cloning templates. You can also create a step-by-step training guide/documentation that shows end-users exactly how to use your Marketo templates for their campaigns.

This will ensure that when they need to make changes to a template, they understand what they are doing, and can replicate it in the future.

Most Common Marketo Template Implementation Issues & Solutions

Templates equip you to scale your customer outreach and increase engagement, but they’re only good if you use them right. Let’s decode some common issues to steer clear of when creating templates in Marketo.

1. Using Asset Templates, Rather Than Program Templates

Not all Marketo templates are created equal. If you’re not using program templates, then you might not get the most out of your Marketo instance. Program templates eliminate the majority of manual work required to execute a campaign. As a result, it increases the effectiveness of your Marketo marketing tool.

2. Making Edits to Master Marketo Templates

If you have a lot of Marketo users, there is a probability that someone can accidentally make changes without cloning them first. It can create a lot of problems and take time to discover and resolve issues.

So, make sure to adopt a centralized marketing model and not give access to users who don’t have a good command of the Marketo platform.

3. Not Using Programing-Level Tokens

Tokens are a very important and helpful part of templates. They allow you to use different forms of content in your Marketo emails, like image or text, but they won’t be helpful if you aren’t using them properly.

4. Not Using Universal Tokens

Marketo templates will eventually need to be updated. That’s a given. But it’s important that the system you use allows you to easily copy and clone templates, which will save you a lot of time in the long run. Or, you can include universal tokens, so you don’t have to develop a whole new set of templates every time.

5. Having Too Many Marketo Templates

It’s common to use too many Marketo templates. Even if all the other templates within your system are relevant and interesting, you might end up with too many. With so many templates, you might find it difficult to determine which templates are broken, which ones are up-to-date, and which ones belong to a specific team.

Wrapping Up

When it comes down to it, Marketo templates provide you the perfect starting point for creating engaging email marketing campaigns. Simply follow the aforementioned steps, and you’d be on your way to creating marketing campaigns that strike the chords of your audience’s heart strings.

If you’re also trying to find new and innovative ways to scale things up, we’re here with just the right solution for you! Just drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.