How Not To Respond to Marketo’s Fail, Starring Act-on

Yesterday was a painful day for Marketo customers—Curata included. For nearly an entire business day, we were left waiting for Marketo services to come back online. It impacted not only the marketer, but their end goals: generating leads and revenue through digital experiences. It hurt. Bad.

Even worse? It seems the issue stemmed from forgetting to renew the marketo.com domain.

I could just see the counter vigorously ticking away at the number of f-bombs that must have been collectively dropped across MKTO HQ yesterday. How embarrassing.

Not surprisingly, there was a TON of online activity around the matter.

Reactions to Marketo Going Down

Walking into the office to find out @marketo is down pic.twitter.com/FEhHtitjwA

— Tom (@espo92) July 25, 2017

GoDaddy's revenue is going to spike today as 10,000 terrified companies frantically renew their domains in 100 year increments #Marketo

— Melissa (@melissa__juarez) July 25, 2017

@marketo @MarketoCares your docs website is a bit borked at the moment. pic.twitter.com/Go2Aovzjjz

— Ian O'Brien (@MinimalMethod) July 26, 2017

To all the marketers out there who came in and saw #MarketoDown I feel you so hard. Let's grieve lost leads together… pic.twitter.com/N9UQYuhLKh

— Rina Kay (@rinaakay) July 25, 2017

There was also a slew of email and online advertising campaigns that came my way. One in particular generated a colorful dialogue between my team and our CEO. The below email came from Act-On, a Marketo competitor Curata reviewed when it first launched in 2013.

I’ll give it to Act-on, they moved fast, but it really rubbed me the wrong way. And this is coming from a former Eloqua employee who lived and worked through a very passionate rivalry with the big purple guys in the early 2000’s where finding new and better ways to out-market each other was a non-stop extreme sport!

Here’s why I didn’t like it:

• My mom always said, “Do unto others…” We all have bad days. Will Act-On be looking over their shoulders from now until their bad day comes?
• The channel was wrong. How effective is this mass email to existing Marketo customers going to be? Yes, yesterday was painful, but would I be willing to uproot arguably the core of my marketing tech stack over one bad day?
• There were so many better ways Act-On could have leveraged the #MarketoFail. Here are three that sprang to mind during a sleepless night.

Three Ways Act-On Could’ve Played the #MarketoFail Better

1. Be Helpful and Add Value—like RevEngine Marketing did with their blog and email effort, “What Should You Do Once Marketo is Back?”
2. Share a Good Laugh and Generate Social Buzz—Clearly Act-On knows some Marketo customers. Imagine if they had local employees drop off a handful of puzzles or board games to local Marketo customers with a subtly branded note card that read “Use these instead of twiddling your thumbs while Marketo’s down.” For those not reachable physically—email a gift certificate to the iTunes or Google Play store to download a premium game. I don’t know about you, but if I got that message, I would’ve laughed and told my team about it. Then I would’ve snapped a pic and posted it to our social channels as a great (and clever) marketing campaign and logged Act-On as a company with a smart marketing machine.
3. Use a Spear, Not a Net—I’m not that naive. This kind of major mistake is like striking oil for a sales team. So arm them to use it. Have them call their open opportunities and offer that helpful and value-adding content from idea #1 as a connect point. Heck—consider offering a promotional discount to the known Marketo opportunities who are considering moving.

Not everyone had the same reaction to the Act-On email as I did. My CEO thought it was quite clever! But what’s your take? Was Act-on’s email smart or stupid?