Best Practices to Keep Your Marketing Automation Data Organized

Let’s talk about organization, or more specifically the data in your Marketing Automation System (MAS).  Yep, the dreaded black hole of data that after time starts to remind you of the junk closet under the stairs.  You know the one that everyone throws things into with the belief that it will magically sort itself out.

This is one of those topics that should occur when setting up an instance but unfortunately usually doesn’t happen until sometime down the road when there is a year or more of campaigns and accompanying assets and you just cannot find anything in the instance anymore.  Maybe you had an organizational plan setup but never adjusted it as the amount of work and number of people grew.  More often than not an organizational plan was setup and the person or group that was responsible for keeping the MAS organized left and there was not a written plan in place.  In other cases the plan may have just been overly complicated and users just gave up trying to figure out where to put things. So let us start with the basics and work our way out to organization.  Keep in mind that this kind of organization can be accomplished in any MAS that allows folders or separation, even Eloqua.

Best Way to Begin

The best place to start is to setup a fiscal year folder to keep all of that years projects, campaigns, email blasts, etc. in.  This makes archiving at the end of the year so much easier.  Once the year is over and all of the campaigns for that year are complete you can archive the entire folder.  This makes end of year cleanup very easy and very quick.

Obviously there will be things that should not be placed in a Fiscal Year folder.  These types of items would have their own folders that would not be archived.  The reason for this is once a campaign or asset is archived, depending on the MAS, it will no longer function or collect data.  This step takes a little bit of planning and forethought and the questions that might be asked in this step include:

• What types of campaigns will be running?
• Of these what is considered near future (this year) vs distant (year or more) future?
• What kind of quantity will be produced – couple per week? Couple per day? more?

Some of the items that should be included in non-fiscal year folders may include campaign templates, newsletter archives, view on-demand webinars, nurture campaigns, ongoing/long running landing pages and landing pages that are tied directly into the website.  Basically anything that will not expire.

Sub-folders with a KISS

Once the base folder groups are setup and there is an idea of how much will be produced per day, week, month, or year then the nitty gritty folder process can be setup within the year folders.  Often this is where people will go overboard on organization and make users want to give up on the organization process.  The KISS principle (for those that have not heard of this principle it stands for: keep it simple stupid) is very good principle at this point.  Do not overthink the folder process.  Here are a few questions to ask in order to set up the organization from this point out.

• Do we need geo or location breakdown?
• Do we need fiscal quarter breakdown? (typically large production groups use this)
• What types of campaigns will be running? (Events, Webinars, Newsletters, etc.)

When a geo location breakdown is needed it tends to occur first in the sub-year folder process with either the fiscal quarter folders or the campaign type folders occurring next. If a fiscal quarter breakdown is needed it can be implemented in a couple ways.  The campaign types may be located in the fiscal quarters (Fiscal Quarters) or the fiscal quarters maybe be placed in the campaign types (Traditional Layout).  Traditional Layout example tends to be the preferred layout.

Best Practices

You may have noticed a couple things in the examples and wondered about them.  Things like the months listed in the fiscal quarter folder titles and repeating year in the folder names.  This is a good practice for a couple reasons.

• It makes cloning templates into folders much easier. If there are similar named folders under each sub-folder then it is very easy to clone a campaign into an incorrect folder.
• Some MAS (Like Marketo) do not allow folders with the same name. For example, in Marketo if there is a folder titled APAC in the 2015 folder then the 2016 folder (when it is created) will not be allowed to have an APAC folder and an error message will pop-up stating a folder by that name already exists.
• Listing the months with the fiscal quarters helps others know exactly what months go with what quarter. Those with a standard fiscal year of January-December are probably thinking – Why?; but many companies have a non-traditional fiscal year and by listing the months with the quarter you will be help prevent the “what quarter is this” guessing game.  This is especially beneficial for new hires and contractors that may work in the CRM instance.

Eloqua

Eloqua is a bit of a different beast when it comes to organization since it has taken a silo approach to production.  The biggest thing with Eloqua is whatever structure and naming format that is implemented in one folder should be implemented in all folders.  For example if the “Emails” base folder structure looks like below then Campaigns,  Landing Pages, Forms, Component Library, and Segments should be set up the same way for a consistent organization.

File Naming Convention

The last and most important step in organizing a MAS is to coming up with a naming convention to be used on all parts of a campaign build, (campaign, assets, lists) and stick with it.  A good naming convention can make or break an organization plan.  If the name is too short folks won’t know what the campaign or asset is for.  If too long, then it becomes a nuisance and hard to search for.  Here are some best practices and an example for a good naming convention:

• Put the year at the beginning of the name
  • This makes it easy to file, sort and search for a campaign name within a list
• Use the date of the Event or Webinar and not the first send date
  • This makes it easier to see when a campaign will end at a glance
• For newsletters and blogs just use the year and month for the date
• Use a short description of 2-3 words
• Do not include spaces or periods in the names. Instead use an underscore (_) or dash (-)
  • This is especially important when the name will be used in links and asset names
• Use the campaign name for all images, lists and files to make it easier to find the parts for a specific campaign.
  • This is especially important with Eloqua’s Silo approach to organization
• Exceptions to this naming rule – Files (pdf, docx, pptx, xlsx, etc.) and any reusable images
  • Files: should be the company name, title of document and year (if applicable)
    • DemandGen_Naming-Convention-Best-Practices.pdf
  • Images: Reusable images should be prefixed for easier searching and include the size of the image for easier coding and selection  Some examples are below of reusable images
    • Headshots: HS-Name
    • Banners: BAN-Name
      • ex: BAN-Spotlight-450×75.png
    • Buttons: BUT-Name
      • ex: BUT-Green-RegisterNow-150×36.png
    • Logos: Logo-Name
      • Ex: LOGO-Eloqua-135×43.png

Lori Mann is an expert in web and email design and deployment. As a DemandGen Production Specialist, she uses her advanced knowledge of HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP, and MySql to build and deploy emails, landing pages, forms/smartforms, and microsites in requesters’ Eloqua and Marketo systems. Lori also helps requesters make the most of their marketing programs through sophisticated email template development, script authoring for automated form input, and rigorous quality assurance testing.

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