Cloning is one of the biggest time savers in Marketo, but I've noticed that a lot of people can get very lazy when they clone. You still need to be careful and thorough when you clone a program to make sure that you updated everything and removed all references to the program template you cloned from.
You may remember all of those studies showing how much better doctors do at routine things when they follow a checklist. I think the same is true for most of us. When we are doing simple tasks over and over, we go into auto-pilot mode and that's when embarrassing mistakes can happen. To make things easier on myself, I put together a simple cloning checklist that I'm going to share with you.
- In the Setup tab, update your tags and period costs.
- Change the program name to reflect the new program ID.
- Update any tokens on the program level.
- Update any lists, emails, landing pages, forms, or other assets.
- In all of your Smart Campaigns, validate (and if necessary update) references to any assets in the smart lists and flow actions.
- Check all Advanced, ALL, or ANY filters to ensure they are still valid.
- Confirm that all Change Program Status flows are referring to the new program and not the old one that you cloned from.
- Check qualification rules in the Schedule tab.
- Unapprove and delete old unused assets.
- Update the URLs of your landing pages.
- Activate trigger campaigns.
- Schedule batch campaigns.
I would also recommend that you develop a 'pre-flight checklist' of things you test and double check before you go live with a program. I like to have separate mini checklists for each type of program - one for landing pages/forms, one for emails, one for nurtures, etc. - but you can also put it in one giant checklist too. If you have a playbook about your Marketo instance setup that you use for new users, this is a great thing to walk them through when they are getting up to speed on how to use the tool also.
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