Best Practice - Campaign Creation

[Anonymous]

How much time do you allocate to build a campaign in Marketo? Not sure if this is your basic campaign - but one that involves porting in custom HTML, creating separate webinar events and linking, soft bounce control, A/B testing and testing, testing, testing?

I need a baseline to build into my monthly schedule.

Thank you,
Deirdre

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi Deirdre,

Between 2 days and 2 weeks... a more narrow estimate would require more information 🙂

• Is it 1 webinar event, or multiple webinar events? How many emails do the webinar events have... invites, reminders, followups.
• What do you mean by "soft bounce control"?
• Give an example of "A/B testing and testing and testing." How many emails, how many variables
• and various other details

I'm not sure attempting to describe it here is the best way to estimate the time. Its very easy for my company to scope and schedule such things, but it requires far more detail to give a good number.

[Josh_Hill13]

I'd say if you have the content already, this would take about 2 weeks to properly test (assuming you had other things going on). Possibly 5 days if you had all the parts ready to insert.

Soft bounce control is a bit vauge as Dan noted. If you want to setup a separate workflow to handle soft/hard bounces and report on it, that could take a couple of days to properly do.

[Anonymous]

I need to share this at my company. We're down to hours (excl copy writing and design). We have standardized and create master campaigns to clone from. We also have a process for copy/design requests.

[Anonymous]

Thank you all!

I'm so new to Marketo and just don't have the marketo experience/history to plead my case on why we need more than one day to build. I am going to use your responses to help me schedule more time to build campaigns and give myself more time to test, test, test.

[Anonymous]

Diederik - can you share more on how your master campaign is built? I would like to create one so that I can clone from it for better time efficiency, instead of always starting from scratch. Thanks!

[Anonymous]

I'll use this example, even though there's the new Mail Program type, where I built a complete mail blast program.

The program has these assets:
- Email - Email
- Trigger - Opens email
- Trigger - Clicks any link
- Trigger - Conversion
- Trigger - Unsubscribes
- Report
- Campaign - Master

The triggers refer to the email in the smartlist and in the flow they update the program status accordingly. The master campaign has a dummy smartlist with recipients and some of the criteria we always use and the flow sends the email, updates the program status to Sent, and sends it again if they didn't open the email in 3 working days. Some of the assets also use program tokens so you only need to set them once.

The idea behind this is that when you clone the program all the new assets are still  connected to the new assets in the same way the original program was. In other words a marketer would only need to update the texts in the email and the smartlist with recipients in the master campaign and they are done.
- This saves a huge ammount of time
- Reduces issues and fault
- Creates consistancy in all campaigns

Als omake sure people only clone directly from the original dummy campaign, which you keep up-to-date. This will make sure all campaigns are always using the latest settings. And it prevents clones from clones, as every little (css) mistake gets cloned over and over again, untill there are dozens of issue with your emails (e.g. MsWord tags).