Marketing automation system deployment is not the end of our work and it can be easy to fall into bad marketing automation habits. There are some good things you should get in the habit of doing, daily, weekly and monthly.
Daily
Look for System Errors. Some platforms show an error log of issues updating records or issues with any integrations. It is important to review these daily and make sure you adjust or resolve these issues before they break your system or cause a data integrity problem.
Weekly
Review your data. I like to set up automated reports that help me easily see if bad or dirty data is infiltrating my system.
A few examples:
- Lead Created by Lead Source over past week. This allows me to quickly see if data loaded into the system contains bad sources, or if there is a form or webpage that is malfunctioning.
- Possible Duplicates. This may not be as effective to you if you have thousands of duplicates, but if you have taken the time to clean them up, I recommend you make sure new ones are not being created. If I see the duplicate number rise, I will immediately investigate what is causing them, so the number is manageable. This ensures I don’t have thousands of duplicates to clean up months down the road.
Campaign analytics should be reviewed weekly. These are not necessarily reports that you share outside of the Marketing Operations team, but rather weekly performance reports that allow you to make critical decisions on live campaigns that can help improve your overall success. Example: You notice the second email in a nurture is getting really bad deliverability during a weekly review. Maybe the subject line had a word that triggered spam for many email servers. You can see that, and make a change real time, instead of just waiting to review the end of campaign results.
Deliverability should be monitored and managed. If a lead hard bounced, but wasn’t marked invalid; problem. You should review and mark the junk as you see it.
Monthly
Every month review the success of your lead management system. Determine if your lead score model is working. Is your sales team sending back all of your MQLs? Did the conversion rate of MQL-SQL decrease? If so, you should be looking at why and making thoughtful adjustments to your scoring. Taking a few hours each month to review is smarter than waiting until sales is screaming that they are getting “bad” leads.
Take the time to keep your marketing automation platform healthy is worth it. It prevents you from having a big mess to clean up in a few months. Planning helps catch issues that human error can create, before it disrupts the entire system and allows you to make strategic changes to campaigns, content and lead management that pay off quickly.
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