How to Connect Amplitude and Marketo

Product-led growth thrives on great product insights. Amplitude is a popular choice for PLG companies to get insights about how their customers are using the product. These actionable insights are crucial for optimizing the product experience and ultimately revenue.

Building the best product experience might not be enough to drive growth on its own. Many times, you need to re-engage a distracted user or persuade a buyer to log into the product. A marketing automation platform is what usually comes to mind when companies need to communicate with their customers at scale.

This article explains the process of connecting one such prominent marketing automation tool - Adobe Marketo with Amplitude, for running PLG comms.

Data Sync Between Amplitude and Marketo

You can establish a data sync from Amplitude to Marketo, allowing you to engage your users based on behavioral cohorts from Amplitude and the lifecycle stage. This integration combines Amplitude's segmentation capabilities with Marketo's tools for in-app messaging, push notifications, and email.

Prerequisites

If you are using email addresses for mapping users between these systems, note that the email value is case-sensitive and it should be consistent in both systems.

In order to sync behavioral cohorts from Amplitude to Marketo, you need to enable Upsert Leads on the cohort sync screen.

Marketo Set Up

Login to Marketo and copy the Client ID, Client Secret, and Rest API Endpoint. Refer to Marketo's guide on their REST API for more details.

To identify the cohorts in Marketo, create a new custom boolean field. This field is to match and flag a user in Marketo, who is in the Amplitude cohort.

See the Marketo documentation for help creating the field. You must create a custom field for each cohort you want to sync.

Copy the API name of your field. You need this to configure the integration.

Amplitude Set Up

Key in the API key, API secret, and base URL (REST API endpoint) from Marketo.

When prompted enter Name - the API key’s name. This step is required to select the API target when you are syncing the cohorts.

Choose the Amplitude field that you want Marketo to associate with the Amplitude User Property.

Enter the Marketo field that corresponds to the Amplitude user property, for Target.

To send a cohort:

Go to Amplitude, and open the cohort you want to export to Marketo.

Select Marketo after clicking Sync and choose the destination - the Marketo custom field. This is the same API name you copied during the Marketo setup.

Select the sync cadence and save.

Note: You can see a checkmark next to the custom field you've created if the user belongs to the Amplitude cohort. You can filter for these user lists.

Before you Connect Amplitude and Marketo

If you are a PLG business using Amplitude for analytics, the integration with Marketo might not be the powerful unification of product and firmographic data you are after. Here’s why:

Cohorts are not actual data events. Cohorts like the name suggests are user segments with common traits. Syncing Amplitude cohorts to Marketo doesn’t give you the flexibility to trigger campaigns based on product events.

You will have to build your audience segments in Amplitude and export these to Marketo. Not being able to build an audience from where you’d trigger a campaign is a considerable blind spot.

You can’t personalize your campaigns based on product data events. Triggering product-led and personalized communication is impossible with this integration.

If you use Salesforce CRM, you’ll find it difficult to combine firmographic intelligence (like company size, job title, etc) with product events.

Inflection for PLG Use Cases

If you are a PLG business and Amplitude user, Inflection is the alternative automation platform to build and run growth automation at scale, at PLG-friendly usage-based pricing.

Inflection combines product activity and CRM data to give you a unified view of your customer. By integrating with Amplitude, Inflection can trigger campaigns at the right time - that means your message to the customer gets delivered in the right context.

Combining product analytics from Amplitude with actual data events and CRM data powered by a robust native integration with Salesforce is the ultimate blend for accelerating product-led growth. See Inflection in action.