Migrating to Marketo? Here’s everything you should know.

As you scale your business, you will need to start scaling and automating your marketing efforts. Most people with growing businesses will look to migrate from their current ESP to a more powerful automation platform for better features. Marketo is one such platform. Migrating your entire marketing effort to Marketo might seem daunting, but it becomes easy if you have a checklist to guide you through the process. 

Outline your needs

Before you start preparing your migration checklist, you must prepare a list of expectations and goals that you hope to achieve from this move. Your reasons for moving to Marketo should be infallible, and you cannot list FOMO as one of the reasons. In addition to that, you will have to do a cost-to-benefit analysis to ensure that this move is financially feasible. Moreover, you can unload or remove outdated data from your storage to reduce the burden of data transfer during the migration process. 

Pre-migration checklist

• Backup 

Backing up your entire database might seem like a mammoth task, but it has multiple benefits. Migrating your marketing information and email strategies to a new platform is not a bulletproof process. There’s a chance that you might lose some valuable information during the migration. Therefore, it is better to back up all your email lists, marketing information, and other operational information. 

You can use Excel or Google sheets to compile your data in an easy-to-locate file. The spreadsheets should also contain links for your landing pages and images. Hence, even if you lose anything during the migration process, you should be able to locate it quickly.

• Clean-up

Marketo charges can vary based on the number of people in your database. Hence, having duplicate and inactive accounts will cost you significantly more. So, once you have taken your backup, you need to start cleaning your lists. You have to de-duplicate your CRM leads to reduce your migration expenses. 

Engage your entire marketing department and begin the clean-up process. At first, it might seem inessential, but it is going to make your transitions a lot smoother. You can use this time to reorganize, recategorize, and redefine your marketing strategies. This way, you will be able to locate, implement, and compare different strategies post-migration quickly. 

• Restrategize

Before migrating to Marketo, you will have to mark out the current campaigns and separate them from your older campaigns. Once the migration process begins, you will get some free hours to rethink your marketing strategies. You can brainstorm with your marketing department to find creative solutions to your marketing roadblocks. While planning for your future campaign, you can incorporate Marketo templates and other special features in your strategy.

Advantages and challenges of migrating to Marketo

The Advantages

• Price

The pricing structure is flexible and offers multiple packages. You can select the plans that suit your marketing style. During the migration process, Marketo will charge you per customer in your database. Therefore, you can drastically reduce your migration charges by removing inactive and duplicate accounts.

• Highly customizable

The Marketo marketing platform offers modular features. Consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, marketing automation, and management. Additionally, Marketo provides tailor-made solutions to your marketing woes. You will also have multiple Marketo templates at your disposal to design your emails. The dashboard is customizable as you can hide the stats which you feel are unnecessary.

• Analytics

You can track your ongoing campaign with ease. Marketo dashboard provides you the feature of pulling metrics of your current as well as your past campaigns. With such data, you will get better insights to make changes to your marketing strategies.

The Challenges

• Complex pricing model

Small businesses that are looking for simple solutions for their marketing problems might find the pricing model of Marketo a bit outrageous. Usually, marketing automation companies offer a single service with a variable pricing model. But Marketo offers four services, and each of those services has several different packages. The sheer number of combinations is enough to overwhelm a marketer.

Furthermore, Marketo is comparatively expensive. If you have planned to migrate to Marketo, ensure that the move is generating favorable ROI.

• Complex setup

Marketo indeed offers bespoke solutions to businesses. However, these solutions tend to be highly technical. If the marketer does not come from an IT or analytics background, they might have a tough time understanding and implementing these solutions. During the Marketo migration phase, you might need to hire a Marketo expert to help set you up.

Conclusion

Migrating to Marketo is infinitely easier for the Salesforce users as they are based on the same platform. If you are planning your migration from a different ESP, you only have to follow the above-mentioned pre-migration checklist to ensure a smooth transition.