Personalization

Marketo connector for Personalization

Personalization allows you to configure a connector to the Marketo marketing automation software, letting you import visitors’ lead and activity data from Marketo and combine it with Personalization visitor profiles:

  • Leads are visitors and their attributes, such as job title or date of birth and map to Profiles in Personalization.

  • Activities are visitors’ actions on and off your website, such as receiving an email or downloading a whitepaper. They map to Events in Personalization.

This additional data provides deeper insights into visitors’ identities, preferences, and behavior both on your website and through other channels such as email. You can use this data to create segments, and target visitors with personalized content. For example, you can create a segment that includes visitors who have clicked a link for a particular email marketing campaign, and then target those visitors with personalized web experiences.

Connecting visitor profiles

For data imported from Marketo to be useful in Personalization, it must be assigned to the correct Personalization visitor profile. Marketo information can be incorporated into a Personalization profile in the following two ways:

  • Email address

    An anonymous visitor accesses your website. Personalization assigns this visitor a tracking ID. The visitor then fills out a Marketo webform to indicate interest in further information—for example, the visitor subscribes to a mailing list. The visitor’s email address is then captured in Personalization and associated with the tracking ID. It can now be used as the basis for matching and importing information from Marketo. For this process to happen, you need to add custom JavaScript to the webpages on your website that contain Marketo forms. Once the visitor submits a Marketo form, the custom JavaScript uses the Marketo forms API to extract the email address, and then pushes it to Personalization using the JavaScript API.

  • Marketo lead ID

    Marketo can be configured to send a marketing email with a unique Marketo lead ID appended to each link in the email. A visitor clicks one of these links, visits your website, and Personalization assigns this visitor a tracking ID. In addition to this ID, the lead ID from the email link that the visitor clicked is imported into Personalization and mapped to the Personalization account identifier type. Personalization captures the Marketo lead ID rather than the visitor’s email address to prevent exposing personally identifying information in email links. After the Marketo lead ID has been captured, Personalization links these two IDs and creates a unified visitor profile.

Mappings

Depending on the information that you want to import from Marketo into Personalization, mappings will help you identify users and patterns. You can add activity mappings, lead mappings, or both to your Marketo connector.

Activity mappings

In Marketo, a lead, or a visitor that Marketo is tracking, performs activities or actions that are captured by Marketo, such as opening an email or signing up for a mailing list. The Marketo connector allows you to map these activities to events in Personalization.

Once you have mapped this activity to a Personalization event, it can be imported into Personalization and used to create a segment.

Lead mappings

Adding lead mappings to your Marketo connector allows you to import data related to visitors’ identities and create segments from that information.

When you have mapped this lead to a field, it can be imported into Personalization and used to create a segment.

Marketo integration with Salesforce

Marketo is also integrated with Salesforce customer relationship management software. Organizations often use Salesforce to track prospective customer interactions when they become sales-qualified leads—after the organization’s sales team decides that a customer is a good fit for their product. The Marketo connector can import any lead or activity data that Salesforce has provided to Marketo, such as opportunity size or projected close date. This data can then be imported into Personalization through the connector. Data from Salesforce can provide you with more detailed information about visitors’ demographics, their interest in your website, and the likelihood that they will complete transactions such as purchasing your products.

Note

Salesforce data is not distinguished from Marketo data after its import into Personalization. Both Salesforce and Marketo data are labeled as originating from Marketo when you view a visitor profile.

Configuring Marketo connectors

To configure Marketo connectors in Personalization, see Configuring the Marketo connector in Personalization.

Exporting data back to Marketo

Although the Marketo connector can import data from Marketo, the connector cannot export data back into Marketo. To export your Personalization data to Marketo, create a custom import script using Marketo’s Bulk Import API, and then use the script to import your data back into Marketo.