Marketo new year spring clean

If you are a Marketo user, this is your practical spring clean guide and checklist to ensure you are all set for the new year and that all your assets are up to date.

Update those snippets and footers

It’s a new year and one of the first tasks you should check is the copyright years and dates on any templates or regularly used elements. Usually, the footer of emails and landing pages holds this information, and it can be easy to miss if you haven’t used system tokens to automate the date. Here are some common elements you should check and update:

• Email template footers
• Footer snippets
• Transactional email footers
• Nurture email footers

A great way to speed this up in the future is to create a parent-level token in your marketing activities top-level folder for the current year and insert it into all of your emails.

Tags, naming conventions and folders

Many marketers like to keep things organised and part of that is having year, quarter and month-specific folders and tags to easily identify programs and when they were active. Creating new folders and tag values in advance for the year ahead can be helpful when starting a new year.

This may also be a good time to update and/or check that your naming conventions are still fit for purpose and are well understood by your automation users.

Archiving

Keeping a tidy and clean instance is essential for marketing automation platforms. You may be tempted to delete assets but similar results can be achieved through archiving, although there are some things to keep in mind when archiving.

• The folder and assets will no longer appear in search results.
• The assets will no longer appear in the auto-suggest, but can still be referenced if entered manually.
• Archived email and landing page templates can no longer be selected.
• Archived landing pages cannot be used in test groups.
• You can still use global search to find results in archived folders.
• You must deactivate any assets such as smart campaigns when archiving as they will otherwise remain active.
• You can still report on archived assets.
• If you intend to replace an asset that you’ve archived, you may wish to rename the archived asset so there is no conflict with the asset name. A good practice is to add “XX_ARCHIVE” to the beginning of the name.

Period costs

For long-running programs such as nurtures, you may wish to take this opportunity to add period costs for the new year to ensure your reports are accurate and useful.

You can learn more about period costs here.

Nurture and content

There are usually a few housekeeping tasks to perform when returning from a break and it’s worth putting the time in to check everything is back on and relevant.

• Resume engagement programs that were paused over the break.
• Check that seasonal content is deactivated to avoid any embarrassing mistakes.
• Check any deactivated processes that were turned off for the break and reactivate them where appropriate.
• Flag any content for revisions and general housekeeping.
  

Reporting

Have you checked the date ranges on your reports? Now is a good time to check that the information you’re seeing is for the correct period. It’s also a great opportunity to check any subscriptions to ensure they’re still useful and sent to the correct people.

Now also may be the time to take a look back at the previous year and benchmark it to compare performance to the current year. If there are any gaps in your reporting, you can use this opportunity to implement better practices.

General housekeeping

• Check your users and delete any that may be legacy or no longer needed.
• Review your email and landing page templates. If anything is no longer fit for purpose, flag it now.
• Cleanse your database. This is often part of a larger project but cleansing the database of old, unused, unsubscribed, or bad data can free up valuable space.
• Review active smart campaigns using the campaign inspector. Check that no archived smart campaigns are still running and check if everything that is active should be. Any annual or rarely triggered smart campaigns may need to be reactivated as Marketo automatically disables smart campaigns that have not been triggered in a while.
• Make a list of processes for annual review, for example, scoring models, lead qualification processes, nurture and recycling. Use this opportunity to plan your year ahead.