Implementing Marketo in Five Weeks: How Fidelity Clearing Canada Launched a Six-City Event Program

Five weeks to a working Marketo instance.

In 2019, Fidelity Clearing Canada undertook a six-city cross-Canada tour as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations. Fidelity Clearing Canada decided to bring in the experts from Demand Spring to help get its Marketo instances up and running quickly.

Founded in Toronto in 2009, Fidelity Clearing Canada provides Canadian registered brokerage firms and portfolio managers with trade execution, clearing, custody and back-office support.

A bare structure first, the full setup later.

The Demand Spring team outlined a plan to build out a bare structural support to send and track event registrations, and then to backfill the ‘normal’ setup once the anniversary events were completed. The team needed to produce a multi-touch email program with event registration and database support out of very little—there was no database, no email templates, and even the basic email infrastructure (ie. CNAME configuration) was not yet set up.

Tokens that turned hours into one.

To produce the many communication assets needed to support the event, the team needed to take full advantage of Marketo’s token functionality. The Demand Spring and Fidelity Clearing Canada teams had a quick brainstorming session and sketched out the communications—looking for any overlapping content, which would be turned into Marketo tokens that were dynamically integrated across communication assets.

Essentially, the team would fill out the key pieces of information at the top of the program which would populate throughout the 12+ email and landing pages for each event location. Incorporating tokens for ‘send from’ and specific signatures allowed the team to create invitations that were personalized and signed by the appropriate sales rep.

An efficient structure was developed—the event invite process that would normally take three to six hours per event took only one hour. Members of the Fidelity Clearing Canada team were able to quickly take over building the programs immediately after attending Marketo-led introductory training sessions.

A custom multi-touch event program, on time.

The result of Demand Spring’s work was a rich, nuanced, multi-touch event program that was custom designed to meet Fidelity Clearing Canada’s specific needs.