4 Things in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (powered by Pardot) You Shouldn’t Set and Forget
There are a lot of things about a home if they go unchecked can cause problems. Gutters are one of those. They make sure that water flows to the correct areas, but if you don’t check on them every once in a while, leaves and other garbage can obstruct the water and cause it to flow in places where it can cause damage. Similarly, marketing teams using Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (powered by Pardot) also need to look at their system every once in a while to make sure marketing efforts are working as intended.
Gutters aren’t a thing you set up once and never look at it again. The same goes for Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE). You can build some great Engagement Programs, but if you never look at them again, then there’s a missed opportunity to improve them.
In this post, I’ll walk you through a few things in MCAE you should look at every once in a while to ensure you're getting the most out of your marketing automation.
Three Questions to Keep in Mind
Before you check out what is and isn’t working for you in MCAE, there are three questions you should be asking yourself.
- What are my current goals?
- Is this helping me reach those goals?
- Can I optimize what I’m currently doing?
These questions will help decide if there is something in MCAE that should be updated or be improved. Below are four things that I think MCAE users should take a look at every once in a while.
Recurring Emails
If you have any emails sent frequently, like a newsletter or emails sent with automation, then it’s a good idea to look at how they’re performing.
Again, ask yourself if the emails are meeting your goals. If yes, then great! If not, see how you can improve the emails. If you’re not getting the results you want, use your data to help guide your optimizations and testing. Let’s say your click-through-rate (CTR) is lower than what you were expecting. Something you can do to improve your CTR is A/B test new email designs that will encourage readers to click on your links.
Engagement Studio Programs
Engagement Studio Programs run in the background, so it can be easy to press play and forget about them. That’s what you don’t want to happen. You have to remind yourself to go back to your Engagement Programs, look to see if they’re performing well and if they can improve.
There are many moving parts in an Engagement Program that all work together to help you accomplish a goal. For example, you might have an Engagement Program that nurtures potential donors after they’ve signed up for a newsletter to talk with your development team. Because you only want to nurture prospects who show signs of donating, you will set rules in an Engagement Program to filter out the ones who haven’t shown signs. But if people who are not ready to donate are getting through to your development team, you’re going to want to make updates to the rules. You can only know that by going back and thoroughly going through your Engagement Program to find where the problem is occurring. Just how you have to thoroughly check your gutters to see where the water isn’t flowing correctly.
A bonus tip I have for you while you’re looking at your Engagement Programs is to ask yourself if there are ways to simplify your paths. At Idealist Consulting, we had some old Engagement Programs that looked like the roots of a tree. But we went in and simplified the paths. Now it’s easier to look at the steps in our Engagement Programs and make any necessary changes.
Tasks
Now, this can be an easy thing to forget to check on. Let's say you meet with your development team and decide that you will create Salesforce tasks for them using MCAE (powered by Pardot) automation. Now Salesforce tasks are being made for the development team in the background. But over time, priorities and organizational goals can shift, and the development team might not have the capacity to complete those tasks. If MCAE automation creates Salesforce tasks, talk to the people on the receiving end of those tasks. Ask if the tasks still make sense, if there’s enough time to complete them, and if they’re helping to accomplish goals.
It’s important to work together to figure out how to make it easier for development, sales, and marketing teams because if things go unchecked, they’re going to be a lot of incomplete tasks overwhelming everyone’s to-do list.
Grading
MCAE grading doesn’t need changing often. But as an organization grows and changes, so do its goals. When your organization's goals shift, that’s when you want to look at your grading and make sure it still aligns with what you want to accomplish.
MCAE grades help spot ideal clients or donors, but if your organization’s ideal prospect changes and your grading doesn’t change along with it, there might be some missed opportunities. So make sure your grading aligns with the people you really want to engage!
To recap, I want to highlight that it’s always important to go back and look at what you created. The point of automation is to create less work and have processes run smoothly. You don’t want your solution for one problem accidentally causing another, like how you can install gutters in the summer to then realize in the winter that the water is redirecting straight into your garden and flooding it. So before you go back and start deciding what needs updating and improving, recall what your goals are. See if what you have in place is helping you reach those goals. Then figure out how you can improve what you have built.
And if you need some extra Marketing Cloud Account Engagement support, contact us to see how our experts can help.
