Avoid the needle AND the haystack.

“Wouldn’t it be awesome if every landing page and email had a code that told you 1) to which marketo instance an asset belongs and 2) to which program? Yeah it would be awesome. And yes, that is what I’m giving you. ”

— Me

We’re all familiar with this problem: A rogue email or landing page has caught the attention of someone because it has incorrect formatting or information. It needs to be fixed, and fast! Nobody has a clue where this problem email lives. Who worked on it? Which instance is it in? Why do you all hate me so much? All questions we never seem to get the answers to when time is of the essence. Same thing for landing pages. They’ve just been living their best lives until they became problems, and now we must hunt them down.

Let’s do this to avoid searching for the needle in the haystack in the future:

1. Create a program token such as ““Program ID” on a high-level parent folder in your marketing activities module. The higher it is in the folder tree the more programs it touches, which is what you want. The token could look something like this: {{my.Program ID}}

2. Create a naming convention for your token. I like to use an indicator that contains a code for the instance and a code for the program. If you only have one instance of Marketo to work with, then all you need is the program code.

   • Something like “A-XXXX” where “A” correlates to the instance housing the asset and “XXXX” is the program ID.

3. Add this token to your emails and landing pages in an unobtrusive, and preferably hidden, manner.

   • Add the token to the email footer and set the text color to match the footer background. This will blend the token in so that the majority of recipients will never see it. When someone asks you to fix this email somewhere down the line, you know where to look. Simply highlight the area with your mouse and see the token value.

   • Landing pages are a little more technically challenging but are still quite easy. Go to your LP template and edit the code. Somewhere near the bottom of the page enter a comment that includes your token. A comment is a way to call things out in the code, without it being displayed on the page. Now, if there is a rogue page, you can view the source code and look for your program ID to easily locate it in the marketing activities module.

     • Your comment would look something like this <!-- {{my.Program ID}} -->

4. The most important piece is training your users so that they 1) understand how beneficial this token is and 2) how to implement it.

That’s it. Put this into place and reap the benefits down the line. Just remember that it’s important to get the buy-in from your users. They’re the ones updating the tokens in their programs and sometimes they’re also the ones editing LP templates and emails. That all just depends on how your org is setup and how resources are allocated. Just make sure whoever handles the individual assets and programs knows that this token should be included.