Marketo Engage interview questions, answered.

1. What are the three parts of a smart campaign?

A Smart List that decides who, a Flow that decides what happens, and a Schedule that decides when.

2. What is the difference between a trigger campaign and a batch campaign?

A trigger campaign starts when a person does something, such as filling out a form or visiting a page, and acts on that person straight away. A batch campaign runs once or on a recurring schedule over everyone who matches its filters at that moment.

A smart list with at least one trigger makes a trigger campaign; a smart list with only filters makes a batch campaign. Trigger campaigns do nothing until they are activated; batch campaigns are run now or scheduled.

Use a trigger when timing matters, such as a form confirmation, and a batch for list work, such as a monthly newsletter or a data clean-up.

3. What do qualification rules do?

They decide whether the same person can run through a campaign's flow once or every time. A behaviour scoring campaign set to once only scores the first visit.

4. A trigger campaign never fired for a lead who should have qualified. How do you troubleshoot it? Scenario

Start with the person, then the campaign:

1. Open the person's Activity Log: it shows which campaigns they ran through and what each flow step changed.
2. Check the campaign is active. A trigger campaign that is not active does nothing, however well it is built.
3. Check the trigger itself: a Visits Web Page trigger that points at a mistyped page address never fires.
4. Check the qualification rules: set to once, anyone who already ran through the flow is skipped.
5. Check the filters: one that excludes everyone, such as a status no one has, means nobody qualifies.
6. For email steps, remember sends skip people who are unsubscribed or have an invalid email address.

5. How do you test a campaign safely before switching it on?

Run it with one test person first, then read that person's Activity Log and the campaign's Results, which show which people it acted on and when. That catches most problems before everyone is affected.

6. What is the difference between behaviour scoring and demographic scoring?

Behaviour scoring adds points for what people do, such as visiting the pricing page, filling out a form or clicking an email. Demographic scoring adds points for who people are, such as job title, company size or industry.

Both use the Change Score flow step, which adds points to or subtracts points from a score field. Behaviour scoring usually runs in trigger campaigns that react to each activity as it happens.

7. How would you build the MQL hand-off to sales?

An MQL campaign uses the Score is Changed trigger and checks whether the new score has reached the agreed threshold. Its flow sets a status field, such as Lead Status, to MQL, and alerts the sales owner or syncs the person to the CRM.

Agree with sales on what an MQL means before building the model.

8. Leads keep visiting the pricing page, but nobody becomes an MQL. What do you check? Scenario

An inherited scoring setup usually fails for one of these reasons:

1. The threshold: one that no real lead can reach means nobody is ever handed to sales. Compare it with the scores leads actually reach.
2. The behaviour campaign's qualification rules: set to once, only the first visit scores.
3. The trigger: a Visits Web Page trigger pointing at a mistyped page address never fires.
4. The campaign status: a trigger campaign that is not active does nothing.
5. The flow: the Change Score step has to add to the score the MQL campaign is watching.

9. Why use negative scores?

To subtract points for signals that rule someone out, such as a student or competitor email address, so they don't drift over the threshold.

10. How do program statuses and success work in an event program?

An event program tracks each person through statuses such as invited, registered, attended and no show. The program's channel decides which statuses exist and which of them count as success; for the webinar channel, attended is a success status.

Success statuses let reports compare programs by how many people reached success.

11. How would you set up registration for a webinar?

A registration campaign with the Fills Out Form trigger, a flow that changes the program status to registered, and a confirmation email.

After the event, attendance is recorded by changing the program status, through a webinar provider integration or a batch campaign.

12. A webinar program shows plenty of registrations, but no successes after the event. Why? Scenario

Attendance was never recorded. For the webinar channel, attended is the success status, so nobody reaches success until their program status changes to attended.

That change comes from a webinar provider integration or a batch campaign run after the event. Until one of them runs, the program reports registrations only.

13. How does an engagement program work?

It sends people a series of content over time, on a cadence. Content is organised in streams, and each member is in one stream at a time. Each cast sends every member the next piece of content in their stream that they haven't received yet.

Transition rules move members to another stream when they meet a condition, such as reaching a score or visiting the pricing page. People are added with a smart campaign that places them in a stream.

14. Members of an engagement program stopped receiving emails. Why? Scenario

Most likely they have exhausted the content: members who have received everything in their stream get nothing more until new content is added.

For a new program, check the basics too: nothing goes out until the streams have a cadence and the program is turned on.

15. What is the difference between a lead token and a my token?

A lead token inserts a value from the person's record, such as their first name, into an email or landing page.

My tokens are program tokens defined on a program or folder, and programs inside a folder inherit them. Changing a my token once updates every email and landing page in the program that uses it, which keeps details such as an event date consistent.

16. A subject line went out as "Hi ," with no name. What happened, and how do you prevent it? Scenario

The email used a lead token without a default value, and the field was empty for some people, so the token showed a blank.

Give every token a default, for example {{lead.First Name:default=there}}, and preview the email as a real person or send a sample to check that every token fills in.