Anyone doing/thinking about automated testing of their marketing processes?

[Anonymous]

I'm not talking about A/B or split testing here.  More like this:

We have a load of triggered campaigns (for example: new lead fills in form F, they should be added to campaign C and receive email E1. Three days later they should receive email E2.)

Over time we make tweaks to form dropdowns, landing page links and so on... so eventually the process stops working (if we rename one of our products, perhaps).

To avoid losing leads "down the cracks" (i.e. lost potential revenue), I test the processes, but it's tedious, and prone to mistakes.

Is anyone doing automatic testing of their processes? I would be interested to learn from your experiences...

Anyone want to collaborate on thinking about how this might be achieved? The Community is quiet on the subject, as far as I can see.   Perhaps a script could run against my site, submit the forms and wait for the emails, or use the SOAP API to check that things were working as expected, or...  I wonder if I'm the only one for whom this seems so important...!

[Josh_Hill13]

That's an interesting idea Richard. Perhaps you should post it as an Idea.

Engagements now let's you test them, but not automatically and not very well. I usually clone the Program, change the Wait Steps to 1 minute and setup several Test Leads that meet various conditions. It's laborious.

If you are able to setup a test script to enter lead info and then take lead actions, that'd work.

[Anonymous]

One testing I've set up is smart lists to catch exceptions.  For example, if all leads over 100 points should be assigned to owner, I have a smart list for leads over 100 that do not have an owner.  To make it easier to check these, I roll them up into one smart list of exceptions (member of any exception smart lists) and then keep that list empty.

Not testing, as you suggest, with specific sample leads on a regular basis.  Good idea and would welcome the automation of this.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Josh and Steven. "Guardian campaigns" are a good idea - I have a few batch campaigns that tidy things up in case leads fall through the cracks, but not enough of them - and keeping them up to date is hard because we keep adjusting what we do.

Also, you're kinda relying on Marketo to look after itself... it might be overly paranoid but if Marketo stopped working in some subtle way, I'd want to know about it.

I'll give this some more thought, but it's starting to look like I will have to roll my sleeves up!