Overview

That shiny new piece of marketing automation software is garnering all the attention with your team and rightfully so. However, sunsetting your Marketo Engage instance is not as simple as turning the off switch. Usually during the post go-live of a migration project you start to notice some small things that you may not have thought about that exist in your old instance. Instead of scrambling and hoping you still have access to your old Marketo Engage instance, this blog will provide you with some tips to ensure you sunset your instance with confidence and well documented plan.

Plan and Prepare

As mentioned earlier, along with a full migration project plan, you should also take some time to plan to shut down your instance as well. During this stage, make sure to highlight some of the key items and dates to keep in mind. Utilizing our Marketo Sunset checklist will help get you started.

Some starting points would be:

• Determine the final cutover date of your instance
• Determine a plan for Marketo data that will be exported: Marketo-only records, Marketo-only field values, critical engagement activity, reports, ect.
• Have your IT/Web team scan the website for Marketo assets, form embed code or Marketo API calls and remove/replace
• Some other teams might be using Marketo Engage assets in their systems as well such as Customer portals, Helpdesk links, etc. Work with your internal teams to ensure any and all teams that might be utilizing these existing Marketo assets
• Plan a timeline of when Marketo smart campaigns and programs will be deactivated

There can be other items or areas you might think of for your company, so be sure to use this as a starting point and allow for other tasks to be added to your shut down plan.

Put your plan in action: Deactivate and Migrate

Now that your migration is almost complete, it’s time to take your sunset plan and put it into action! Below are some example tasks that you will need to accomplish in order for your sunset plan to be complete.

• Deactivate active batch and trigger campaigns; use Campaign Inspector to identify them
• Turn off engagement programs; use global search to find them
• Ensure permanent redirects are in place for Marketo landing pages, especially for those that are high volume, important or relatively recent – at a minimum it’s recommended to create redirect for the unsubscribe page for compliance purposes in case a person tries to unsubscribe from a past email
• Export/migrate Marketo data according to plan
• Disable the SFDC/CRM sync to isolate any record creation/updates
• Remove Marketo integration configuration from 3rd-party platforms (such as webinar providers)
• If you use SFDC, ensure Sales Insight components are removed from SFDC page layouts as they do not function without Marketo data

Post sunset: continue to monitor

Even after you shut down all of the integrations and CRM sync in your old Marketo instance, it is always a good practice to continue to monitor for any oddities that might have been missed. One of the common practices we suggest is to utilize smart lists to track some of the common Marketo activities that should no longer be happening in the instance.

Those actions would include:

• Newly created records
• Form fill activities
• Data value changes
• Email sends

This will catch any outliers or things that may have been missed during the shutdown process. You can go into these smart lists and look at the activity history to be able to pinpoint where a form fill or new record creation is coming from and be able to stop it from continuing and make sure your new system accounts for those loose ends.

Your final cleanup

After finishing your monitoring and tying up loose ends, you can now complete the final aspect of your Marketo instance shutdown. These are the more technical Marketo pieces that an admin along with the web manager can perform.

Some of those actions include:

• Expire integration users
• Export/migrate any final data
• Remove Marketo munchkin code from website
• Remove DNS records relating to the sunset Marketo instance

Conclusion

Shutting down a Marketo instance sounds simple in practice, but as you can see, without a proper plan in place you can have some small gaps that need to be attended to. Having a plan in place for your Marketo shutdown will ensure you have all your bases covered and not scrambling post-migration to see what you still might need from your Marketo instance.