Happy holidays and congratulations, you wrapped up another successful year, and it’s on to 2017. Now your Marketo instance resembles the family car after a long driving vacation. End your year on a high note with some simple tips for keeping your Marketo house in order.
Don’t let your work get slow and clunky, do a thorough clean-up! Here is a check list of some annual housekeeping tasks that can help reduce the clutter and keep your Marketo instance running smoothly:
year-end checklist
Create a Global Form Strategy
Time and again we’ve all seen forms that seem to be designed and implemented without much forethought. They are recognized by the comments they inspire, like “we should have added the Country field,” or “why can’t we use progressive profiling?”.
Use the year end to discuss a strategy where the least amount of forms works for the highest amount of use cases. If progressive profiling is needed, investigate what it will take to implement, and how that new information can best be used.
If your organization is still using 1.0 forms, discuss how 2.0 forms can get more bang-for-your-buck, and how you would roll those new forms out to your website and program templates.
Create Folders for the New year
By now you’ve established a reliable folder structure and naming convention. Marketo sorts alphabetically in chronological order. Because of this, your naming and folder hierarchy should be organized by Year, quarter and/or month. Now is a good time to create all of your 2017 folders.
Clone Programs for the New Year
If you’re keeping track of which work belongs to which time period, then clone 2016 programs that will continue into the new year.
On one end of the spectrum you have programs that are evergreen in nature. These programs must remain active year after year and have no expiration date. These could be tracking programs or website asset fulfillment programs. These programs should be saved in an evergreen folder at the top folder level.
On the other end of the spectrum you’ll have your expired programs. These are programs that took place in 2016 but have a clear start and end date. Tradeshows and webinars are good examples of programs which have expired and can be placed in the que to archive.
But what about the programs in between? You may have marketing initiatives that span over multiple years – but have specific quarterly or yearly budgets. These could be content syndication programs, GA tracking programs, or other vendor related lead generation programs. So how do you choose whether or not to clone these for the new year?
The answer is: it depends on your desired reporting. If you have specific yearly or quarterly revenue goals and budget for the initiative – and if you’d like to very clearly report on the success and expenses separately year-over-year – Then clone these programs for the new year.
Archive. Archive. Archive.
Archiving will keep your instance clean and easier to navigate. You can archive just about anything in Marketo including programs, campaigns, folders, templates or any type of asset. When you move an item into an archive folder Marketo will no longer display or prioritize that item and it is no longer visible to search.
Before you archive remember to deactivate expired registration campaigns, Sales Insight emails, and Invitations/fulfillment emails. Triggered campaigns will remain active after you archive and Sales Insight emails will still remain in the list of available email even if archived. To get optimal results, remember to clean these up before you Archive.
Update “footer dates”
Do you include a copy write date within the footer of your landing pages or email templates? If so, don’t forget to update all of your templates with the new year. Once you have updated your templates you will need to remember to approve all affected Landing Pages and Emails.
Clean Up Images and Files
Don’t forget about your image and file library in the Design Studio! This is frequently overlooked and can also become cluttered and hard to navigate. Spend some time reviewing the images and files to identify any that can be deleted or archived.
Clean Up Sales Insight
Sales Insight can be a big culprit of clutter in Marketo. You may have a number of emails published to Sales Insight which were specific to a time frame or initiative. Heck, you may have emails published to Sales Insight that you didn’t even know where published to Sales Insight. Now is a good time to review all Sales Insight emails and un-publish any that are outdated or no longer in use.
The scoop on dupes
Since you’re already in clean up mode – make it a regular habit of checking your possible duplicate list. Staying on top of this list will help you keep your database clean and identify trends or issues. Take some time to review and merge obvious duplicates.
Long story short, if you establish a regular process to clean your Marketo instance you’ll be able to find things easier, your Marketing Activities will look cleaner, you’ll keep on top of your database integrity and your life will be easier!
This blog post is an update to a post written last year, but the information was so good, we dusted it off and published it again.
