We are in the the age of the customer. We’ve heard from multiple thought leaders, from Marc Benioff to our own Eric Berridge, on how crucial it is to optimize the customer’s experience. For marketers, data insights are crucial to discovering who their audience is so data is their customer: Quick access to integrated and accurate customer data is the best way for marketers to personalize campaigns and produce a better customer experience. As consumers, there is nothing more annoying than getting an irrelevant, impersonal brand email. Marketers need to think like a consumer to grow their qualified leads — but how? Marketo answers this question with its latest release, which allows for automated processes with built-in customization so marketing messages don’t feel robotic to the audience on the other side. Here are Bluewolf’s picks for the top three features that will affect how marketers connect with leads.

Marketo Integrates Facebook Ads

Companies leveraging Facebook Ads can now load lead data directly into Marketo and set up notifications for when a new lead’s data is added. Marketers can set auto-responses to these leads, ensuring each incoming lead is interacted with and on the marketing team’s radar. Here, technology invites data-driven marketing allowing marketers to create a personalized experience for every incoming lead they are notified of. 

Custom Content Is Easier than Ever

It’s estimated that in 2015, 87.9 billion consumer emails were sent each day. Now more than ever, it’s crucial that marketers deliver relevant, personalized content to their customers. Marketo’s campaigns with custom content enable marketers to schedule content to be displayed at certain times or to visitors from a particular time zone. These campaigns can be scheduled in advance and set to repeat on certain days. This empowers marketing teams to grab potential leads with relevant content that feels highly customized, but is very easy to set up on the backend. 

Email Head Start

As a marketer, timing is crucial. A lot of thought and planning goes into the timing of email campaigns, so late send-outs can be frustrating. With Head Start, emails that contain time-sensitive content or special offers can be set to go out at an exact time, maximizing the opportunity for your audience to take advantage of the offer. Your personalized campaigns and email can run at the same time in perfect coordination.

When a Marketo email campaign is activated, the system takes some time to process. If a campaign is set to launch at 9AM, it may actually be 9:30AM before the first email is sent. Using the Email Head Start feature allows users to set a launch time in advance. Marketo then prepares the campaign 12 hours before and releases it at the specified time.

There are two important things to note with Email Head Start:

1. Once a campaign enters the Head Start period (at least 12 hours before campaign launch), you can no longer make changes to the emails or Smart Lists, because they have already started to get processed.
2. The Head Start feature cannot be used if you are including A/B Testing in your email campaign. When configuring the email campaign, if you select the A/B Test option, Marketo will not let you set a Head Start time.

It’s no longer enough to market a product or a service. In an age where customers expect to be able to reach a company around the clock and on the channel of their choice, it’s crucial that marketers have the ability to offer personalized experiences before people even become customers. You have to sell the experience of interacting with your company. Marketo is giving marketers the toolkit to craft that perfect customer experience.

To learn more about custom marketing solutions, connect with us. 

Important Note on the Anonymous Filter 

While filters are a back-end feature, this change was too crucial not to mention. Previously, Marketo allowed users to segment their Smart Lists using the ‘Is Anonymous’ criteria. They realized removing this feature would increase their system’s processing ability from two million to one hundred million web activities per day, so the decision was made to remove the ‘Is Anonymous’ criteria from Smart Lists. However, Marketo has confirmed that all of the anonymous tracking will still happen in the background, the system simply won’t execute actions on this data until the contact becomes known and is a lead that is able to be marketed to. For more details on the release, find Marketo’s full release notes here.