Speaker 0: Hi, everyone, and welcome to MarDreamin’ day one. Uh, my name is Marcus Gerard, and I’ll be, uh, talking to you guys about engagement studio. So our title for today’s session is gonna be Engagement Studio Madness: Executing Journeys the Right Way. So before we actually start and do anything, I wanna make sure that all the right people are in the right room. So today’s session is gonna be heavily on the more strategic and on the steps in operation to execute engagement studios correctly. Today’s session will not we are not gonna cover all the little notes and things like that that you can do to build, like, the actual hands on building. This all that happens before, during, and after things like reporting, things like making sure you choose the right style, uh, on the engagement studio, those are sorts of things. So, again, if you’re looking for maybe a little bit more intro to engagements, you know, this stick around, but this is not what this session will be about. So let’s go ahead and get started. So, again, welcome everybody to MarkDreaming. If this is the first time that you’ve joined us, welcome. If you’ve been here before, welcome back. And for everybody, this session is recorded. And any of my past sessions at Marjorie about engagement studio and other people that have done stuff on engagement studio, you can also find them on the marjoriemain.com website, uh, available for for you to consume.

Alright. We’re gonna go ahead and and do our our daily thank you to all of our sponsors. Um, if you’re if you’re sharing, uh, for the first time again, top left corner of your screen, you’ll see a couple of tabs. And if you go to sponsors and resources, that’s where you’re gonna find a little bit more about this sponsor. So go ahead and check them out. They have plenty of free downloadable stuff that you can take advantage of, uh, to make, you know, your experience truly unique.

Alright. So let’s go ahead and get started. So four things we’re gonna cover, getting started. And by that, what I mean is, again, not in the engagement studio, but, like, what are the things that have to happen before we even open up account engagement or Pardot? Uh, For building journeys, we’re gonna be talking about architecture types and things that you have to keep in mind, uh, again, before you actually hit that start button. Optimizing journeys. Once your journeys have started, what are some of those key signals that are telling us either, hey. This is going well or this isn’t going well? And lastly, reporting. So if you, uh, have used engagement studios before, you know that the reporting isn’t always great. So I have a great suggestion on how we can make that, uh, a little bit better.

Alright. Let’s go ahead and get started. So getting started. So we’re gonna break down this, uh, section into three, um, points, goals, considerations, and expectations. And, again, at the beginning, I mentioned this is gonna be more strategic. This is gonna be more for those people that have to plan from a to z to make sure not only that the engagements or the journey actually makes it, um, out the door, but also that they know who to loop in, uh, during the, um, the program and its planning stages. And, also, how do you deliver, um, those insights, right, to your executive team, uh, when they ask for them.

So let’s talk about goals today. And as always, uh, left side, session chat. If you have questions about anything in Pardot or specifically engagement studio, feel free to drop them in there. But the first kinda section, I’m just gonna go over some questions. Right? And so these slides will be available to you, um, after the after the event. If, um, let me actually graph my LinkedIn URL here real quick. I’m tossing my URL in into the chat, so feel free to add me if you have any questions afterwards as well. So first question, what is our launch date? So why is this important? Right? This is important because we always wanna know what’s our deadline. Right? And so by that, uh, you often have a deadline. Right? So if an example, if you have an event like March dreaming, right, that would have started essentially today, and we wanted to get x number of communications out, then we need to work backwards. So that’s important for you to know. Additionally, what is the actual goal or goals of your journey? So are we looking for people to scan something if they’re getting an SMS message? Are we looking for them to, uh, click on something in the email and then make it to the landing page? Are we looking for them to actually sign up for a freemium product if you have one? Right? A lot of, uh, b to b organizations here today. Um, are we looking for hand raisers? So we had a customer here that works with different, uh, branches, uh, of the, um, the military, right, after, uh, uh, they become veterans. And so it their whole mission is to help, uh, fill in gaps of service women. Um, and so calling, uh, other service women to tell, uh, the stories of people that maybe aren’t around anymore, so those hand raisers. And then if you’re looking for more of the sales side phone calls, right, um, how do we track those through ads? How do we track those either from email or SMS, that sort of situation. And then, also, how are we measuring this? So if you’re a marketing team, right, using account engagement for your journeys, you may say, well, Marcos, we have the reporting that comes out of the box. Cool. Are you the only one that needs to look at that reporting? If not, does it that data need to make it into a a Salesforce report that just shows up on your manager’s, you know, desk every Monday? Um, is it does it have to be part of a dashboard that, like, everybody in demand gen and sales and marketing need to look at? Right? So those are all the things that we need to keep in mind as we plan for this, uh, this journey. And there’s there’s a lot of more questions and things that are, of course, gonna be specific to you. But, hopefully, if you don’t have a game plan, right, and you’re just kinda starting, uh, this would be a good good way for you to think about it.

Let’s think about considerations. So considerations are gonna be the things that as you’re building the program or planning to build the program, right, what do you have to actually keep in mind? So number one would be what kind of journey is this? So I like to put them into kinda like three buckets, internal, external, and both. So internal doesn’t necessarily mean, hey. I’m sending an HR newsletter to everybody even though you can do that. Uh, it could be something like we have an internal process. Right? Things like lead routing, for example, that the end user, so the the prospect or the lead or the contact, however you wanna define that, um, isn’t gonna really be aware. Right? So that’s what I call internal. And external would be the opposite. So the end user does get something. So that could be an SMS message, right, triggered through an app like Twilio, Mowgli. That could be an email triggered through Pardot or perhaps another tool that you have. That could even be a direct piece of mail that could be triggered through, um, past sponsors like PFL, Lube. And then we have both. Right? So, uh, programs or journeys that process people. And then based on, like, the data on the record, we put them into buckets, and then each of those buckets is processed differently. Right? And then the end result of that bucket is, uh, the person gets a a unique experience. K? Channels, I included some of them earlier. So are we just talking email? Right? Are we starting there? Perfect. Uh, what does that email look like? Is it more marketing, or is it more sales oriented? Um, are we gonna have things like direct mail if you’re a nonprofit? Right? Giving Tuesday is is creeping up really fast, and so, uh, direct mail is often a big part of, uh, getting constituents to, you know, donate and and have repeated donors in that sort of situation. We could also have external processes that have to deal with other systems. So with the power of external actions, right, we can kinda, like, send signals between other platforms and say, hey. This happened. Go ahead and trigger this or or vice versa. Is this program gonna be geographically, uh, centered? Is time zone something that we have to consider, or is this just open in The US across business hours? Right? So we have to make some of those calls. Who’s this journey for? Um, so thinking about who it is and who it isn’t for, so this journey may be to nurture leads that have not been active in the last six months. Well, if somebody meets them at an event or whatever, and now we scheduled a call, we log a task, something, do they still qualify? Do you still want them to go to that process, or they’re should they be ejected? Right? So a lot of times, we just focus on, like, who do we put into the program, but we’ve known often think who we should take out if they went in prematurely. Sorry. Just turning off Slack. Um, and then things like how long should the journey be. Are we talking about, like, again, finite debt deadline, like an event, like, March dreaming? Uh, we have, you know, x number of weeks runway, or are we talking something evergreen where, like, we’re trying to stay on top of mind for, uh, you know, multiple months, multiple weeks? And lastly, here we have, are we collecting the right data? Right? So something that happens a lot when, like, we’re trying to categorize people into, like, a grading bucket, right, or a a customer persona. A lot of times, the the difficulty here is data. If we don’t if we aren’t collecting the right data, it’s really hard to do analysis, segmentation, different experiences with things like dynamic content, uh, because we just simply don’t have that data. So be as you start through your program, uh, just make sure that the data that you’re looking at exactly, Jennifer. Thanks for commenting on that. Yeah. Bad if you have bad data, you’re gonna have a bad time. And sometimes we just frankly don’t have the data. Right? If we’re just starting, that’s also an obstacle.

Alright. Let’s move on to expectations. Let’s keep it rolling. And so here, we have the expectations. So expectations not so much from, like, the customer experience, which, again, that is part of you should consider, like, what’s the expectation? Like, if somebody fills out a form, what should the customer expect our next steps are? Right? But, again, I’m talking through this on the more strategic side, like, for us as as we’re setting this up. So how are prospects being added? Is it a dynamic list that we the data that we assume is gonna pull people into this program is always up to date? Are we doing batches? Right? Like, daily, weekly, whatever. Are we waiting for the trade show or the webinar, uh, you know, people that we we pay for a booth, uh, to send us that CSV or that Excel file? That’s our situation. And so going back to the goals. Right? So let’s say we have our goal is to get a 100 people to register for a freemium account. Right? And then from that, convert 5%. I don’t know if that’s the realistic goal, but, you know, sort of situation that we may find ourselves into. But so they go through this program, right, that we design. What happens if they complete the goal? So the goal was to sign up to be a freemium and then convert. What are the next steps? Right? But what happens if they don’t sign up to be a freemium customer? Right? Do we need to add them to another nurture, or do we just leave them alone for, you know, sixty days and then start again? That sort of situation. So really thinking about all those possible avenues is is gonna be really important. And then the next question is, what happens if somebody just doesn’t complete the journey? So let alone that they actually did the thing you wanted them to, but, like, they got lost somehow in the journey. So either they were rejected because they no longer felt, um, met the criteria, uh, they unsubscribed, um, anything like that. Are we thinking through that process as well? And lastly, if, you know, they did end up signing up for the freemium product, what’s the expectation from sales? Like, should they be reaching out in fifteen days, thirty days? Should they not be reaching out at all? Are we aligned with the other teams that are gonna be looking at this data? Um, and then lastly, um, is any of the data that’s happening in Pardot or account engagement, is that supposed to be visible in other systems like Tableau, uh, Datorama, or or, you know, CRM analytics, anything like that?

Alright. So let’s go ahead and start building our journey. So now we’re gonna talk about, like, architecture. We’re gonna talk about those things and why they matter. So the one thing if you wanna take a screenshot out of this deck, this is the one that I want you to, uh, take a screenshot, print out, and put it next to your sticky notes on your desk. Engagement studios can be used for more than email campaigns. So a lot of, uh, and, you know, I’ll speak for for myself in experience. A lot of the people that I work through my career that have, um, account engagement or even, you know, other tools like HubSpot or Marketo, they’ll see, um, these, uh, these tools that can be great for, uh, building workflows, right, or or journeys, things like that. And you know what they do? They either don’t use them because they’re scared that, like, it’s gonna mess up data, or if they use it, they keep it really simple. And I’ve been on both sides. Right? I’ve been on the consultant side. I’ve been in house as well. And I definitely understand how nerve wracking it can be. But this is also one of the things that you get sold on when you buy account engagements. So the fact that you’re not using it, it’s just you know, it’s terrible. Um, Additionally, I wanted to give you some ideas. And in a in another session other years past, I talked about how you can use engagement studio for a lot of other things more in-depth, so the actual doing. Today, I’m just summarizing. So singular processes like rerouting, repeatable process like you are pulling UTMs through your forms, and then depending on those UTMs, you wanna add people to the right Salesforce campaign. Right? This is multiple. Like, people are being processed multiple times. Triggering direct mail or SMS channels. If you didn’t know you could do that, you totally can. Um, if you have chatbots like Qualify or Drift, um, you can integrate to that to some degree with Pardot two and trigger off engagement studio. Right? So where you can pull them through a playbook. Um, and then we also have external actions here. Standardizing, Rosa in the in the chat says you can use it to standardize state and country. Absolutely. We do that all the time. There’s even, uh, if you go to the website, the spot for a pardot.com, I actually have a blog post that talks about that. And, uh, fun fact, it even gives you the list of what you can copy and paste into your engagement studio to actually do that. So you don’t even have to search and and, you know, normalize those values for you. So go look at that.

Alright. So building your journey. We wanna keep it simple. And so sometimes, you know, we we need to get more elaborate, but if you’re just starting simple, it’s better. We wanna document it and use templates when possible. Documentation can look you’re scribbling on a whiteboard or a napkin. It could look like you’re using things like Miro, uh, or Lucidchart to actually draft something or even, um, PowerPoint, right, or Google Slides. Um, templates. So just like anything in account engagement, you can have templates. There’s nothing that you, unfortunately, are able to import, but if you’re doing stuff pretty regularly like trade shows and, you know, you send maybe two emails every time or whatever, um, you could set up a a template and just not actually attach like, like, you can add all your notes and the logic and all that stuff. You could just actually not add the assets, and then you just make copies. And so that saved you at least, you know, ten, fifteen minutes, and now you’re just plugging in the actual templates. Right? So, again, lots of things that you can do, just a lot easier.

We’re gonna talk about architect architecture style. I don’t know if these actually have a name. I just came out with this because to me, that’s I’m a visual person, and this is how they look like. So a rope. You’re just kinda going up and down. Diamond, right, like a chain. You have staircase, like, you’re going up, and then you have a waterfall that’s wide and then it goes down. Right? And I like to work in clusters. So if there is something that I am able to replicate, so things like, uh, earlier was mentioned like country. Maybe you’re doing something with region. Right? You wanna cluster things, so like APAC, North America, right, etcetera. Um, if you can create a cluster, you can very easily copy that cluster and then just put it somewhere else in the program. Right? And so, again, you’re not, like, doing the same steps over and over. Um, always have somebody look at it, and then make sure you test your program. And I’ll talk a little bit about how you do that, but it could be as easy as, like, you could duplicate your program and just have your internal team go through it, or you could actually add, um, your team to the list, start the program three days prior to you adding everybody else. And so everybody’s gonna be, like, three days ahead of everybody else. Right? That could be another way to do it.

Alright. Architecture type rope. So as you can see here, it is just a straight line, um, and you will see tags. Just imagine all the tags are emails because I couldn’t build emails in the sandbox. But, um, essentially, the the it’s a straight line. The way the reason why we would use something like this is we want every single person that goes through this program to touch every single node. So in this example, um, there is wait steps in between the second and the third node. Seven days, we essentially want everybody to get an email today, seven days later, and then seven days from that. Right? Everybody’s being processed the same way. So very simple. This is what most people start with. Absolutely a good spot to, you know, again, to get started with. We have chains. So, again, a chain. Um, this is usually when you’re looking at certain nodes and you only wanna wanna wanna match against, uh, one criteria. Now the one that I did it this way, it’s a chain. I’m still having everybody go and be processed through every single node because I may have a multi select pick list, or I may be using a series of lists. And I wanna say if they’re on the list, then do this. Right? And as we know, people can be part of multiple lists. So, uh, when they’re part of a list, then they’re tagged with something or a a field changes or they’re added to a Salesforce campaign. Right? But, essentially, there’s multiple things that they may match. Then we have our famous staircases. This is probably the more common thing that you would see on, like, a demo. Right? So we essentially start as a single line. We start spraying. We start listening for things. We can use triggers or rules. Um, this is when you wanna evaluate things in a specific order. Right? So we have the first step. This has to happen first. Yes or no? If no or yes, then we go end sequence. Then we have that waterfall. So it starts I don’t know. I think it looks like a waterfall. I don’t know. Uh, I watched I watched, uh, The Lion King not too long ago, so that’s probably where this came from. But this is more complex, but it also has to do a lot with bucketing. So putting people into a bucket, like, again, earlier, I mentioned regions of the world, product types, right, opportunity types, that sort of situation. There you go, Stephanie. I love that. Um, she had a a Jiffy there.

Alright. My favorite elements. Here at the start, we wanna add descriptions. Always have a description. How do you describe that? Right? You describe if there’s emails, m SMS, whatever channels, how frequent the lists are gonna be updated, anything like that. I also love to copy steps. So, again, I talked about working in patterns. Triggers, custom redirects, and adding to Salesforce convenience, super important. So you just wanna be mindful if this is meant to be something that it processes people without them knowing or if they should be aware of certain things happening. And then you wanna put them into action. Right? And so this is just something simple that I went ahead and put together, uh, just to, again, kinda keep the logic. You can put it on a whiteboard, do whatever. But with the effect of this, um, specifically, we’re looking at a list, um, because rules, you can only choose five variables. So if you make a dynamic list where all the options and then you just process them to put them into a region and assign them this way, This could be a way that you save on on space.

Alright. So this is gonna be one of my, uh, helpful, hopefully, slides. So planning. Right? Where do we start? We often don’t work in silos. We wanna work in as a group. If you scan the barcode on the left, this is Devin Stover, who is a presenter at the Marjorie Mean Conference. So he went and actually put together a template in Miro. So it has all the notes and stuff like that. You can go in there, grab them, and make your own engagement studios in Miro, which is great for documentation, for retention, um, and then also to just kinda diagnose if anything is soft before you actually, you know, give the marketers the ability to go in there and actually build it out. On the right side, you have my Google Slides template because, again, not everybody has Miro. Um, but Google Slides, uh, this has all of them and also has some questions in there and some designs that are already put together so you can you’re able to visualize and and get some more ideas. And lastly, um, one that I didn’t put in here, but ChatGBT ChatGPT can actually if you tell it what to do and you use language that’s inclusive to account engagement, it won’t come up with, like, a perfect design for it, but it it’ll follow your logic pretty well and give you something. So if you’re a little bit more autonomous and you don’t really have time to actually draft something, try chat. Chat GBT may it may give you enough of what you need. Or at the very least, if you explain what you’re trying to do, it may just break down the steps in the right order so then you can go build it. So, again, talking a little bit AI, talking a little bit more old school, whatever your your comfort zone is, we’re here to to help.

Alright. So testing your journey. So things here that we wanna keep in mind, uh, make sure that however you’re testing, that you always have a record that just has no data. And you wanna make sure you do that because there’s gonna always be somebody on your list that doesn’t meet the criteria. So you wanna make sure, like, what happens to that person. Right? And then you wanna create variations. Right? So if you’re doing a journey with three data points being at the center of it, get one that only has one of the data points, or get another one that has two of the data points, etcetera. Um, also make sure what happens when like, your team understands what happens when the prospect just doesn’t do the thing that they were supposed to do. I think a lot of times, we we’re always looking to see, like, did they do it? Did they do it? And we don’t often take the time to reflect and say, hey. It didn’t happen because of this reason. Um, and, again, just making sure we’re collecting the right data.

Alright. Optimizing your journey. So just a couple of things to keep in mind. So you can actually run a test in engagement studio fairly easily. Uh, you wanna test as many things as possible. A couple of things to keep in mind, though, is anybody that has unsubscribe or hard bounce, they can still go through your journey. So either you wanna omit them as a node in the top of the engagement studio or you wanna omit them from your list. Um, people that you cannot send an email to and you just build a journey to send emails will affect your metrics negatively. So that’s just something to keep in mind. We also wanna understand where the data is coming from that’s gonna feed this program, and we wanna understand when the journey should be ending. So just a couple of things to keep in mind.

Oops. Couple of other recommendations. Uh, this is a little bit more technical, pretty standard, but, um, engagement studio technically doesn’t have any limits. But the more notes that you add, the slower it could become. The more data that it has to process, the slower it could become. Technically, you have around 300 nodes that you could put into one, so that’s 300 little circles. Um, try to keep it under two fifty. Just kinda helps. Um, and for most people, you’ll get around 20 engagement users that you can use in your your account, if not more. Um, and then if you run out of space, you can delete them. You can just pause them. When something’s paused, it’s not running, means that it’s not taking up a spot. Right? So those are just some things to let you know.

Alright. Optimizing your journey. So just a couple of things that you wanna make sure you’re taking advantage of. Things like adding people to Salesforce campaigns so you can share data, applying tags. So you can use those to, like, skip nodes. So sometimes when we’re migrating customers, you still have your four emails from Marketo. They were done with the first two. Right? They still have to go to the two the other two. How does that work? We can add tags to those people, and then we can add rules and say they received one and two, so the next one they’re eligible to receive is three. Right? Tags can also be really useful to set your order operation. Um, so just like something quick and dirty, you can also, of course, have fields and use campaigns and other, uh, singular data points, but these are just some things that I personally use just to make life easier for everybody.

Alright. Gotcha. So remember, here we’re about two minutes. Um, so just making sure that, uh, you turn off programs when they’re not in use. Uh, remember that dynamic list continue to feed your program even if the program already started. If your business hours, like, conflict, it could hold your emails hostage until the next business day, so then you see, like, a drop off of people not getting the email. So just making sure that, um, you’re aware.

Reporting, kinda like our last couple of slides here. This is what you would see in engagement studio pretty out of the box. Um, that little black number essentially tells you what’s happening, who how many people have gone through this action, that sort of thing. Um, this data, though, until you get into Salesforce, it’s not super useful. So what you can do is you can also go into the email template reporting and just kinda see all your email temp templates, um, there and then just put them in a table action. But what I like to do is actually do something like this. So in this, uh, dashboard, I have how many people started on the top left, and on the bottom right, I have how many people have ended the program. And I do this by using campaigns to essentially feed those different numbers. Um, on the left side, I have who their account owners are and where the companies are. In the center, I have how many people have gone through essentially each step of the program, either SMS, drag mail, or, uh, email. I have a list of those, and I did a formula that shows me how long they’ve been in the program. And then at the end, any, uh, submissions, which for me would have been the goal, and then any of the opportunities that would have been tied based on the people that are in are in here.

Alright. Let’s wrap. So my main takeaway start to plan ahead, keep it simple, document, and make sure that your your data goes where you need it, and it does what you want it to. So, unfortunately, I didn’t have more time for questions. But if you have any other questions, sign up for a Genius Bar session. You may get me, uh, and then we can talk more. Or follow me on LinkedIn, and then we can keep the conversation going. Thank you, everybody.