Part 1: Elevating Your Marketo Game with FlowBoost – Setup and Things to Keep in Mind

If you’ve been working with Marketo for a while now, you’ll know that maintaining clean, accurate data is crucial for effective marketing strategies. However, as your database grows, keeping data standardized and free from errors becomes challenging. This is where FlowBoost, a powerful scripting engine for Marketo, comes into play. Flowboost is the brainchild of legendary Marketo veterans Sanford Whiteman, and Edward Unthank of Etumos. In this 3 part-series we will go through:

• Part 1: What can Flowboost Do + The basic setup of Flowboost
• Part 2: Using Flowboost for basic phone number data cleaning
• Part 3 [Coming Soon]: Proper capitalisation of First and Last Names value when new persons are created in Marketo + Advantages & Limitations of the Community Edition of Flowboost

To begin, we’ll explore how to use the FREE Community Version of FlowBoost for simple data cleaning tasks in your Marketo instance.

Why Flowboost

If you’ve been navigating the waters of Marketo and are well-versed in the ins and outs of Smart Campaigns, you’ve likely hit a wall or two when trying to get Marketo to do exactly what you need. Sometimes, the built-in functionalities just don’t cut it for the specific tasks you have in mind.

Consider a scenario many of us face: you’re collecting new sign-ups, and with each new entry comes a mobile number. I’m sure many of you have seen phone numbers in varied formats like:

“+1 234 567 8901”

“12345678901”

“1-234-567-8901”

“123 456 789 01”

Those of you who have worked with Marketo for a while would know that there is no built-in Marketo flow step for this problem. Enter FlowBoost; FlowBoost can help transform a jumble of digits, dashes, and spaces into a consistent, uniform format.

All you need to do is to set up a Marketo webhook and call on the cleaning webhook and call it for the Person records in Marketo you want to clean

….And your phone number data goes from unstandardised to standardised!

But before we get to the phone number cleaning webhook, let’s start with a simple Flowboost webhook that changes the text in a Marketo text field to “Hello World”.

Setting Up FlowBoost

Here’s what you need to get started:

1. Sign Up for FlowBoost: Visit the Flowboost website and sign up for an account.
2. You should then receive an email containing the free API key and an Implementation Guide
3. Follow the Implementation Guide to set up in Marketo:
   1. If you find that step 3c in the Implementation Guide does not work for you, replace the URL provided: https://api.teknkl.com/flowboost/v19/run?authoringEnv=standard with https://api.teknkl.com/flowboost/v21/run?authoringEnv=standard
4. The implementation guide comes with a bunch of nifty scripts to get you started. We’ll go with changing the field value to “Hello World” in a chosen Marketo field.

5. Add the chosen test script into the Payload Template section of your Marketo webhook and save the webhook.

6. Remember to set up the Response mapping as well!

In this case, we have mapped the variable myResult to the Marketo field Company. You can choose to map it to another suitable Marketo text field.

Now to test your webhook

7. Create in Marketo

1. A handful of test leads (3-5), populating them with dummy values for First Name, Last Name, Email.
2. An empty static list you created to add the test leads to for testing
3. A batch smart campaign with the following

Smart Campaign 1

4. A trigger smart campaign

Smart Campaign 2

5. Schedule run your batch smart campaign (step 3) and it will request the trigger smart campaign to call on the Flowboost webhook
6. Wait for a few seconds and check in the “Results” tab of your smart campaign. You should see that Flowboost webhook was requested

7. Double click on the “Results” and you should be able to see if your script executed as expected. Here you should be able to see if there were any errors while Flowboost was trying to run your script.

Success:

Error:

8. If there were any errors, read the error description to get a sense of what needs to be changed.
9. Click into the Person Record and check that the relevant fields are updated.

10. Success should look something like this, the field data changed to Hello World:

11. If it worked, congrats! If it didn’t work, try checking your script, the custom headers and your response mappings again to see if there were any issues.

Tips:

• Start with a simple script, such as this “Hello World”script or converting the email address to lowercase, to familiarize yourself with the scripting environment.
• You may like to consider starting in Postman to debug and refine your scripts based on real-time execution results, before implementing your script in Marketo.

Rate Limits and What to Look Out For

Both Marketo and FlowBoost impose rate limits to ensure fair usage and system stability.

• Marketo’s API Rate Limits: Typically allows 50,000 calls per day, though this can vary based on your subscription. Exceeding this limit could delay data processing, integration workflows and incur additional costs.¹
• FlowBoost’s Rate Limits: The Free Community Edition API key includes 50,000 calls per month.²
• Monitor Usage: Regularly check your usage dashboard in both Marketo and FlowBoost to stay within limits.

To check API limits, go to Admin then Web Services, same as you would to retrieve your API keys for the webhook.

Conclusion

And that summarises Part 1 of our Flowboost x Marketo Series. With this setup, you are equipped to begin experimenting with different Flowboost scripts in your Marketo. Again, credits go to Sanford Whiteman, and Edward Unthank of Etumos for creating Flowboost. Stay tuned for Part 2 and 3 of our Flowboost x Marketo series, where we will go into the hows of implementing a simple phone-number cleaning script and first/last name data standardization script.

1. https://developers.marketo.com/rest-api/marketo-integration-best-practices/#:~:text=API%20Limits,of%2010%20concurrent%20API%20calls. ↩︎
2. https://flowboo.st/ ↩︎