Marketo Relaunch for Operational Efficiency

Opportunity

Marketing teams face immense pressure to meet the ever-growing demands for personalization and exceptional customer experiences. The last thing they need is the added burden of a poorly designed or malfunctioning Marketo instance while trying to strategize, implement, optimize, and analyze campaigns.

Despite a team’s best efforts, technical debt can accumulate and business needs evolve, requiring a refresh of your instance. This is exactly what happened with the TTEC Marketo instance:

Integrate a New CRM Instance

They had recently gone through an acquisition where new business units and teams were added to their organization. With these teams came their own workflows, processes, and technologies. In order to streamline core systems, a new instance of Microsoft Dynamics meant that they also needed a new instance of Marketo. 

Relaunch According to Marketo Best Practices

After years of working inside their existing instance, TTEC Digital had issues with intentional duplicates, discrepancies in data, and more. To ensure they were starting on a clean state, TTEC Digital wanted to relaunch their instance according to best practices. 

Revised Lead Scoring Program

Their existing instance had three workspaces with separate lead scoring programs. As a result, scoring was unbalanced across the three brands, leading to less effective lead qualification and creating the impression of lower quality MQLs due to premature qualification.

Launch a Formal Lifecycle

While there were connected elements of Marketing and Sales processes between Marketo and Microsoft Dynamics prior to the new instances launching, there was no formal lifecycle connecting leads across both systems. This made it difficult to accurately determine where leads were in the customer journey, impacting lead quality and marketing ROI.

Solution

To help TTEC Digital flawlessly manage the delicate transition to a new Marketo instance, MERGE began by conducting a discovery process, consisting of auditing TTEC Digital’s old instance. 

The audit provided insights into overlooked areas and opportunities for growth – such as developing operational programs ranging from scoring and lead lifecycles to consent management. 

From what was learned, MERGE established best-in-class infrastructure for their new Marketo instance. This consisted of building a sensible naming convention, folder structure, and most importantly, more efficiently and effectively syncing their Marketo instance with Microsoft Dynamics. 

To support the Dynamics to Marketo sync, MERGE created a custom sync filter that would ensure disqualified leads and records without email addresses would not be synced from Dynamics to Marketo. This ensures data is cleaner and leads are more reliable. 

MERGE also provided TTEC Digital with extensive documentation – ranging from a data dictionary to documentation on their lead lifecycle and scoring program, Marketo folder structure and naming convention, and Microsoft Dynamics custom sync filter. Documentation was also provided on the implementation timeline and functional QA grids to test the new build.

“Documentation is something we lean on constantly – the technical worksheets and the working documents are a big asset to our team.” Michelle Chopin, Marketing Automation Manager at TTEC Digital

As part of the new instance relaunch, MERGE helped TTEC Digital facilitate a new lifecycle program. MERGE led the discovery, design, and implementation of this new program, ensuring that it worked smoothly between Marketo and Microsoft Dynamics to support every step in the customer journey. 

MERGE and TTEC Digital’s marketing technology teams collaborated on complete User Acceptance Testing to ensure that every element of the program was working as intended. Since TTEC Digital had no established Lifecycle process prior to this project, this was the biggest and most impactful project component that MERGE supported.

In addition, MERGE’s creative team stepped in to rebuild a range of their assets such as landing pages and email templates.

Results

Partnering with MERGE meant gaining an extension of their team – the additional bandwidth of MERGE’s consultants ensured the solution was sound and functional, while project managers kept the project running on track. MERGE also stepped in to orchestrate collaboration among TTEC Digital’s cross-functional teams to ensure CRM and Marketing teams were aligned and each team felt heard. 

“MERGE gave us a clean and efficient Instance to work from. Duplicates have been greatly reduced, as well as the challenges associated with duplicate entries. Although things may change, we have a stable foundation to grow upon.” Michelle Chopin, Marketing Automation Manager at TTEC Digital

TTEC Digital and MERGE celebrated many wins throughout the project duration, such as:

• Rebuild all templates: 8 segments, 10 programs, 10 landing pages, and 6 emails
• Connect roughly 180k database records from Microsoft Dynamics to Marketo
• Migrate assets: 117 marketing programs, 88 design studio assets, and 70 static lists

Overall, MERGE provided a deep well of knowledge on Marketo best practices and worked with TTEC Digital to elevate their knowledge on both Marketo and Microsoft Dynamics. 

“I feel confident using our new instance knowing it’s set up according to best practices” Michelle Chopin, Marketing Automation Manager at TTEC Digital