Marketo Slack Integration

Since people now live in Slack, the out-of-the-box email alerts sent by Marketo are outdated and notifications need to be sent to Slack for the most timely follow up from Sales and Marketing teams. In this post I will walk through the Marketo Slack integration where webhooks from Marketo are sent to Slack containing the message to be shared in a direct message or a channel.

If you want to learn how to set up webhooks in Marketo, see different use cases, and how to troubleshoot issues then check out the Marketo Webhook Guide with Examples.

Why would you want to Integrate Slack with Marketo?

Slack has become the dominant internal communication tool within may companies with email falling into the shadows, inboxes going monitored, and unread email count growing. We want to make follow-up from our Sales and Marketing team as convenient as possible a) so that they actually do it and b) they can follow up on these notifications as soon as possible.

Therefore, instead of sending Marketo email alerts that will go unread or not be looked at in time, it is much better to integrate Marketo and Slack so that you can send messages directly to individuals or channels in Slack, where people can be tagged for follow-up or communication continued in the thread.

Creating an App in Slack to Integrate with Marketo

The first step needed to integrate Slack with Marketo is to create an App for Marketo (don’t worry this is not as intimidating as it sounds!) in Slack following these steps:

1. Navigating to the Apps section of the Slack API center
2. Click “Create an App”
3. Click “From sratch”
4. Enter “Marketo” for the App Name
5. Select the Slack workspace that you want to integrate with Marketo
6. Click “Create App”
7. Click on “Incoming Webhooks” on the follow-up screen or under “Features” in the left hand navigation tree
8. Click on the toggle button besides “Activate Incoming Webhooks”
9. Click on “Add New Webhook to Workspace”
10. Select the Slack channel or individual you would like to send notifications to
11. Click “Allow”
12. Copy the “Webhook URL” that appears for this channel/person

You will need this “Webhook URL” later on in Marketo when setting up the destination for the webhook.

Creating a Webhook in Marketo to Integrate with Slack

Follow these steps below to create a Marketo webhook to integrate with Slack:

1. Navigate to the Admin section in Marketo
2. Click on “Webhooks” under the “Integration” section in the navigation tree on the left hand side
3. Click on “New Webhook” at the top of the screen
4. Name your webhook using the “Webhook Name” field
5. Enter an optional description if you desire
6. Paste the “Webhook URL” that you copied from the Slack App in the previous section
7. Leave the “Request Type” as “Post”
8. What you put in the “Template” field will depend on the message you are trying to send to Slack (see below for an example template)
9. Leave the “Request Token Encoding” field as “None”
10. Leave the “Response type” field as “None”

Crafting Your Slack Message

What is included in the “Template” field will depend on what information you are trying to send to Slack. I have included an example template below where lead and company tokens are used to populate the message body based on information submitted to a contact sales form (see how you can send notifications from Marketo to Slack for form submissions in the “Trigger Sending from Marketo to Slack” section below).

N.B. If you are looking for a general introduction to Marketo tokens and how they can save you time when building your emails, webhooks, and smart campaigns then check out the Great Use Cases for Marketo Tokens post.

You can also use trigger tokens within the payload of the webhook to provide context about the trigger that caused the smart campaign to run (especially useful if the smart campaign has multiple triggers). If you want an example of how to do this and a refresher on trigger tokens then check out the Marketo Trigger Tokens Example Usage post.

One cool addition to this template are the “Lead Link MKTO” and the “Lead Link SFDC” links that use lead tokens to pull in a person’s Marketo and SFDC ID into URL paths so that links to the person’s Marketo and SFDC records can be opened right from the message in Slack.

Pretty neat right!

N.B. If the person is created by a form fill in Marketo and has not yet synced to SFDC then the SFDC ID will be empty and the link will not work.

Once you know what event you want to send notifications to Slack for and what information is available via lead, company, or trigger tokens after the event, then you can insert similar tokens into your webhook template using the “Insert Token” buttons when creating or editing the webhook.

If you want to make your message look real fancy like then you can use the advanced formatting features that Slack offers.

{
"text": "\n\nContact Sales Form Fill\n\n

Name: {{Lead.First Name}} {{Lead.Last Name}}\n
Email: {{Lead.Email Address}}\n
Phone: {{Lead.Phone Number}} \n
Company Website: {{company.Website}}\n\n

Reason for Contact: {{lead.Reason for Contact}}\n
Budget: {{lead.Form - Budget}} \n
Use Case: {{lead.Form - Use Case}} \n
Additional Information: {{lead.Form - Additional Information}}\n\n

Person Status: {{lead.SFDC Type}}\n
Account Status: {{company.SFDC Type}}\n
Lead Owner: {{lead.Lead Owner First Name}} {{lead.Lead Owner Last Name}}\n
Lead SDR: {{lead.SDR Name (Formula) (C)}}\n
Account Owner: {{company.Account Owner First Name}} {{company.Account Owner Last Name}}\n
Account SDR: {{company.SDR Name (Formula)}}\n\n

Lead Source: {{lead.Lead Source}}\n
Lead Source Detail: {{lead.Lead Source Detail}}\n
Querystring: {{lead.Querystring}}\n
UTM Source: {{lead.utm_source}}\n
UTM Medium: {{lead.utm_medium}}\nUTM Campaign: {{lead.utm_campaign}}\n\n

Lead Link MKTO: https://app-ab20.marketo.com/leadDatabase/loadLeadDetail?leadId={{Lead.Id}}\n
Lead Link SFDC: https://telnyx.lightning.force.com/lightning/r/Lead/{{lead.SFDC Id}}/view" 
}

Trigger Sending from Marketo to Slack

Now that you have your webhook and message crafted it is finally time to complete the Marketo Slack integration by calling this webhook from a trigger based smart campaign.

The smart campaign shown in the images below will trigger whenever the contact sales form is filled out and then it is as easy as calling the webhook we previously created within the flow of the smart campaign.

What’s After Marketo Slack Integration?

Now that you have completed the Marketo Slack integration and have gotten a taste for what webhooks can do, see how you can expand your webhook toolbox even further by checking out the Marketo Webhook Guide with Examples post to see how to:

• Unlock all the automation potential of Zapier and all its 3rd party integrations by sending webhooks from Marketo to Zapier
• Send SMS to customers
• Route Leads In Salesforce with Chili Piper
• Compute formulae and store the output in a field

OR if you want to see how you can tag salespeople when their leads appear in a Slack message check out the example in the 3 Ways to Reduce Zapier High Task Use post.

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