2016 Marketo Housekeeping Resolutions That Will Help Keep Your Sanity

Happy New Year and congratulations, you made it to 2016. You were 2015’s marketing machine, executing all kinds of programs at blinding speed, but now your Marketo instance looks like a teenager’s room with all kinds of spent triggers, assets, and other stuff. It’s time to do some house cleaning.

Don’t let your work get slow and clunky, do a thorough clean-up! Here is a a list of some annual Marketo housekeeping tasks that can help reduce the clutter and keep your instance running smoothly:

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 2016 folders.

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Clone Programs for the New Year

If you’re keeping track of which work belongs to which time period, then clone 2015 programs that will continue into the new year. On one end of the spectrum you have programs that continue to run year-over-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 might have expired programs. These are programs that took place in 2015 or earlier, but no longer being used. Tradeshows and webinars are good examples of programs that expire and can be archived.

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, global asset 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, and 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 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.

Find out more about archiving folders

Update “footer dates”

Do you include a copyright 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.

Find out more about mass approving assets

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.

Find out more about publishing Sales Insight emails

Get 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.

Find out more about merging duplicate records

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!

Your marketing technology experts.

At Digital Pi, we use technology to connect revenue to marketing efforts. We fuse marketing strategies, processes, data and applications to make marketing technology solutions work for clients' businesses.

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