My First Marketo Email - Not so Mise en Place

This latest post covers my trials and tribulations setting up and sending my first @Marketo email. Even if you aren’t a Marketo user, this hopefully imparts some tips about designing and sending emails.

Remember this article I posted extolling the virtues of mise en place and how I was going to keep our Marketo instance spic and span to efficiently cook up new campaigns?

Well, I created and sent our first email last month and it was not so mise en place.  Full disclosure, I am not a designer or coder, so I relied heavily on Marketo templates and the WYSIWIG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor. It took a long time. I would have fended off hangry diners if I was truly serving a meal.

Here are some tips and tricks I learned from this experience that I will be deploying for my next Marketo meal:

1. Set up your program, including naming conventions and folder structure, according to Marketo best practices. Marketo provides a wealth of resources on this topic. I recommend starting with this video.
2. Check out this awesome blog post about email best practices by @GraceBrebner. I saved it in my favorites and frequently reference it.
3. Define success for your program. Are you conducting an A/B test? If so, the A/B test will control how you define success. We did an A/B test based on subject line, so that limited our success criteria to opens.  PS - getting the A/B test winner email was a lot of fun, like that special twist of lemon peel in a cocktail.
4. Plan out your content BEFORE you start designing – down to the subject line and pre-header text.
5. Determine how you are going to lay out the content. If you are using a quick-start template, you can custom build OR decide which Marketo template you are going to use.
6. Once you have your content plan and layout, gather all the content from photos to the hyperlinks. Do this in advance before designing the email, including cropping all the photos at once. Save everything in a central location that your colleagues can access, and upload images to the Design Studio. I made the mistake of going back and forth between cropping photos and gathering hyper-links one by one, which was inefficient and time consuming.  
7. Test! However, a test does not count as sending it to your yahoo and gmail accounts. Invest in a software like Litmus or Acid.
8. Outlook is the bane of email marketers’ existence. It kept tiling the header image in the email, but only on the desktop version. Get ready to enlist IT support, preferably someone who understands HTML coding, to help resolve those types of issues.
9. If you are importing a list manually, be aware that your first email in Marketo could result in higher bounces than normal. Fortunately, there are operational programs in place to address those issues.

The full email finally went out! How did it taste? It achieved a 27% open rate and a 30% click-to-open rate. I’ll take it for my first “meal” in Marketo, along with lots of lessons learned to prep a better mise next time.

Luckily my family wasn’t waiting that long for dinner that night, thanks to my amazing new cookbook, Milk Street Tuesday Nights, which features some great recipes you can get on the table in 25 – 45 minutes.

Stay hungry and Happy 4th – we are tackling webinars and direct mail next!