CEO, Principal Consultant
7/8/2024
When it comes to improving email performance in Marketo, a 0.25% increase can make the world of difference. We have been picking the brains of our consultants for their top tips to drive more from your campaigns.
In this post, we’ve come up with three ways you can boost your email engagement in Marketo Engage today! Best of all, they’re super easy to put into practice.
Optimising send time based on historical engagement
We are all guilty of scheduling the email send at 08:00 or 12:00, or whatever you think you best sending time is – but the reality is your audience probably spans two if not more time zones. For those of us targeting EMEA, we may even have up to 7 time zones to manage.
Does it really make a difference?
Tyron Pretorius (The Workflow Pro), reports an average 3% increase in open rate by optimising send times based on historical engagement. The assumption would be that if you can get a 3% increase on open rate, you’re likely to see an increase in clicks as a result.
Wait, what about Recipient Time Zone in Marketo Engage?
For those of you using Recipient Time Zone, you are a step ahead of the rest. But this again is you deciding when the best time to send an email to your audience is, rather than taking into account Joe who always engages at 6am versus Livia who reads her emails at 4pm.
How to do it
There are a couple of options to activate this kind of optimisation, and it will all depend on whether you are looking to run a proof of concept, or looking for an always-on self managing solution. Here are your options:
- Using AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT: Manually feed the data to Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools in order to calculate the best time of day to send. Remember to give the context of the time zone you are scheduling within, and want to optimise for. Do remember to anonymise any data you feed into AI, and always be cautious of the information shared.
- Using a secure always-on Machine Learning (ML) service: We have developed a secure method for extracting Marketo Engage data, processing it using machine learning in our secure environment and pushing the updates back to Marketo Engage. The beauty of our service is that it is always-on, meaning your campaigns are constantly optimising as your audience’s behaviours & engagement changes.
🤖 Discover more about the always-on machine learning service; or speak to our team about getting a pilot campaign for free.*
Personalise webinar dates and times using time zones
Webinars account for 40% of marketing campaigns developed in Marketo Engage (Source: JTF Marketing Marketo Audit Data), but we fail to regularly optimise them! If you use the previous solution in this post, you will begin to deliver invites at the best possible time for recipients, so the next challenge is relevance.
Timezones in webinars
Nothing sucks more than trying to work out what 10:00 BST or 17:00 PST is in your time zone, and why should it be the recipient’s job to figure that out anyway? We should make the decision as simple as possible for the recipient to decide if they can or cannot attend.
In our own internal tests, we’re seeing a 3-5% increase in registrations depending on the topic of the webinar.
How do you do it?
The easiest way to do this is use a velocity script that will automatically update the time displayed based on the time zone information in Marketo Engage, and if you don’t have that populated you can use the country field to fill in the gap.
🤖 Get a copy of the velocity script to improve your event invitations today.
Generate your A/B test using AI
With 58% of marketers leveraging AI tools to support content generation, it’s important to remember that whilst AI will never write the perfect piece of copy by itself, it can help you to optimise. For example, here are a few prompts that we’ve found useful:
- Add urgency to this email subject line, utilising the attached brand prompt guide**
- Make this email copy more action orientated, utilising the attached brand prompt guide**
- Summarise this email into a top performing subject line and preheader, utilising the attached brand prompt guide**
Interested in what else you can do to improve Marketo email performance?
Speak with a member of the team to arrange a Marketo audit – we’ll run some analysis of your instance and give you recommendations free of charge.
*The free Send Time Optimizer pilot is available for one single email campaign with one single target list. The target list can not exceed 5,000 people.
** We’ve used a brand prompt guide to align tone of voice and exclude certain words like “rocket” and “take off”, which AI uses a lot!