Day to day operations leaves us little time to diagnose if we are using Marketo correctly. Nevertheless, it is of vital importance to periodically carry out a Marketo Health Check to maximize desired results output and to correct issues that may be affecting your business. For this reason, the following steps will guide you through a diagnosis of your Marketo, where you will be able to identify weaknesses and opportunities for improvement to take into account for your future Marketing Automation Plans.
1. Invalid Email Address Check
How:Create a Smart List with the following filter: Email Invalid = “True”
Benefit: Free up processing power in Marketo by eliminating/fixing invalid email addresses.
2. Duplicate Email Addresses
How: Go to Lead Database, System Smart Lists, Possible Duplicates List:
Benefit: Same as for Step 1, freeing up processing power in Marketo. Also, if the results of this step show a big % of duplicate email addresses, you should consider creating a de-duplication program.
3. Multiple Soft Bounce
How: Create a Smart List with the following filter and constraints:
Benefit: Identifying leads that are not active due to email soft bounce. A bounce management program could be the right approach to tackle this issue.
4. Using ALL vs ANY Filters Properly
How: When setting up a Smart Campaign or Smart Lists, always make sure to select either ALL filters or ANY filters, depending on what you want to do.
Benefit: Programming correctly the filters will allow you to specifically define how to filter information.
5. Inactive Email Leads
How: Create a Smart List with the following filters:
Benefit: Identifying inactive leads is always key to understand what % of the database is being used for marketing purposes. If the % of inactive leads is big, you definitely should review your marketing tactics to include a bigger % of leads.
6. Leads the have not been sent an email in the past year
How: Create a Smart List with the following filter: Not was sent Email
Benefit: This step will help you to determine if the leads that are inactive have been in that status for more or less than a year. By doing so, you can track down the root cause of inactivity by checking your marketing activities calendar.
7. Lead creation trends in the past 6 months
How: Create a report: Analytics – People Performance – Set Up (Person Created at Last 6 months)
Benefit: Identify months which had low numbers in terms of lead generation, analyze why this happened and take actions to prevent it from happening in the future if possible.
8. Email Deliverability, Open Rate & Click Rate
How: Create a report: Analytics – Email Performance – Set Up (Sent Date whichever period you want to analyze)
Benefit: These 3 indicators are essential for any email marketer. Within the email send process, you can identify where engagement is dropping and thus carry out corrective actions to increase it to be at least equal to the industry benchmark.
9. Using Email A/B Testing
How: Right click on the un-approved email to test – New Test – edit test
Benefit: A/B tests are a great tool to determine which setup yields the highest engagement and posterior conversion rates. By testing what is the ideal composition of an email prior to sending it to every lead, you will be able to reach increased open and click-through rates.
10. Communication Limits
How: Go to admin, click communication limits:
Benefit: Be assured you aren’t accidentally sending too many emails to your audience.
11. Check SPF & DKIM Configuration
How: On the Admin panel click Emails and then the SPF/DKIM tab:
Benefit: Prevent unwanted third parties to send a communication on your behalf by increasing security measures.
12. Using Progressive Profiling
How: On the Design Studio or Marketing Activities (where the Form you want to check is located) click on Edit Form and then Form Settings:
Benefit: By enabling progressive profiling you can make sure you only ask for information that you don’t have.
This brings us to the end of a quick but comprehensive Health Check that may uncover big things. I hope that this health revision has been a very fruitful one for you. If you have any other key steps that can help Marketo users identify health issues, don’t hesitate to comment below or contact me.
Thanks!
Mauricio Caicedo