Overview
When it comes to Marketo Engage Program Templates there are a lot of questions on how to get started. What are Program Templates? When should companies focus on addressing templatized programs? How should a company use Program Templates to improve campaign experience consistency?
What are Program Templates?
Program Templates are Marketo Engage Programs that contain the necessary campaign assets and components in a standardized configuration to support an entire campaign initiative that can be created and leveraged by marketing operations teams.
A campaign production process can become scalable with the implementation of Program Templates. Program Templates can incorporate Smart Campaigns, Smart Lists, email assets, landing page assets, and/or reports. The variables that make up a Program Template should incorporate placeholders that can be updated via My Tokens to allow updates to be made in one place.
Why should companies use Program Templates?
Companies should use Program Templates to help regulate automated workflows, create efficiencies in the campaign build process and help new team members create campaigns quickly. Program Templates are programs that are intended to be cloned to significantly reduce the amount of time that it takes to build programs from scratch and leaves less room for builder error. Incorporating Program Templates into your Marketo Engage instance can also regulate the amount of assistance requested from program builders if most of the program setup is already done.
Using Program Templates results in a harmonious brand image across initiatives to enhance the customer experience. Program Templates also can be used to lock-in best practices for automated processing. All in all, the reasons to use Program Templates ultimately improve campaign performance.
When should a company use Program Templates?
A great opportunity to incorporate Program Templates is when there is a recurring need for a specific type of program. Building Program Templates for scenarios that come up over and over again is going to present greater value to an organization versus creating templates for scenarios that are one-off. If there is a frequent use of a template for certain audience configurations, different versions of that template can be created for the purpose of audience targeting.
How should a company use Program Templates?
When an organization is looking to implement or modify an existing Program Template strategy, it is essential to think of the strategy inclusively. The Program Template strategy should be based on an organization’s use cases and needs; understanding the needs of program builders within an organization can accomplish that.
As part of the template strategy it is important to plan how global and local Tokens will be incorporated into each template, along with a folder structure and standardization of naming conventions for all parts of a Program Template build and across all Program Templates.
Once there is a strategy and action plan in place, the building of the Program Templates can begin. After the build is complete, QA of each template should take place. As part of the implementation of Program Templates, there should also be a plan to conduct training and provide documentation on how to use the Program Templates.
Who should use Program Templates?
Anyone within an organization that builds programs within their Marketo Engage instance should be utilizing Program Templates. Planning a Program Template strategy and building the Program Templates may be a significant time investment; however, the long term benefits outweigh this due to the time savings for future program builds and reduction of the need for troubleshooting due to the decrease in builder errors.
It is important to note that Marketo users who build programs within a Marketo instance should understand the benefits of using Program Templates and be trained on how to use them to ensure proper use of Program Templates. Understanding the benefits, along with training and documentation on how to use the Program Templates, will go a long way in making sure organizations are maximizing the value that comes from having and using Program Templates.
Conclusion
To ensure a consistent customer experience, a harmonious brand image across initiatives is a must; this can be accomplished by the use of Program Templates. Ultimately, the use of Program Templates can ensure your programs are set up consistently and improve campaign performance which is a win-win for all.
