Brand new email - ground up. Any tips, hindsight, best practices to think through with marketing?

[Erica_Dipyatic]

Hello Marketing Nation. To date, we've been using Marketo for RTP and web lead facilitation. Now, we're returning to Marketo's roots and going to start using email programs. Our first email program is a brand new newsletter - new lists, new content - all New! I'm seeking any and all tips, tricks, ideas, hindsight thoughts, etc... that we should consider as we prepare our first distribution. Even checklists would be great.  I want to make sure we think through all aspects with the marketer before pulling the trigger.

Example question I have - uploading lists - is it best to de-dupe this team's list prior to uploading into Marketo, or can it be easily done in Marketo?

If any such posts or documents exist, I'd be happy to review. I searched various topics and tried numerous ways to ask the questions I have, but didn't find any basic, start from scratch, type of information for email programs.

Thanks in advance.

Erica

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Hi Erica, I'm assuming you're going to be mailing to opted-in contacts, but that would be the top priority. A few things that I would suggest thinking through. I'm sure other people have plenty of other suggestions.

• Email preferences center/subscription management -- Have you set this up yet? If someone opts out, just remember that they're opting out of anything that you might create in the future.
• SPF/DKIM setup. Have you done this yet? Very important for your deliverability.
• What email address will you be sending from? Who will be monitoring replies?
• Email send checklist (See example below. Not all things will apply to you)
• Who are you mailing to? Marketo dedupes based on email address upon list import. Other than exact email matches, this can be challenging to manage without using third party tools.
• What is your end goal with each mailing?
• What kind of tests do you want to run so that you can learn from your mailings to constantly improve your results?

[Erica_Dipyatic]

Thanks, Dory.

Opt-in: In addition to working with our legal teams, we're first using the business relationship to reach out to the contacts to announce the newsletter. Currently no email activity/distribution comes from the sending department to this facet of targets for our company. Announcement will ask to sign-up to receive newsletter. Planning on sending 2 opt-in emails - announcement and reminder.

Debating actual 1st newsletter send to those that don't sign up with note along the lines of - last chance, sign-up to continue receiving.

The Existing Business Relationship details we have are from L-Soft. If you know of additional resources, all eyes/ears.

SPK/DKIM set up. In process of verifying (Proving I'm technically challenged :-))

Good to know about dedupes.

Thanks for all the great reminders! Appreciate your feedback and time!

Erica

[Colin_Mann · Accepted solution]

To add to the comment about end goals I would certainly consider what action you want to take based on engagement with the email content i.e. does it score out into your CRM for follow-up? Is it just for branding with no need for scoring etc?

One thing we do is that we have suppression lists built into Marketo (existing customers and partners) so that if they do engage we track that but don't score them out or pass the data to the CRM. We incldue the suppression lists as flow steps in the smart campaigns within the program i.e. using 'not in' logic.

You should look at data laws if your activity is global especially for regions such as Canada and Germany.

Excuse me if some of the above is obvious as I'm sure you know a lot of that!

[Erica_Dipyatic]

Thanks for the suppression list thinking. Not something we've considered yet.  This specific, new distribution is not client/sales driven. More brand awareness to an audience that would lend itself to such suppression activities.

THANKS Colin Mann​ for your time and advice. Greatly appreciated!!!

[Anonymous]

Hi Erica,

I am a bit of an Excel geek, and I particularly like the conditional formatting that allows you to match/find duplicate entries:

I would strongly recommend de-duplicating your list based on email - it is much much easier to do this in Excel than in Marketo, where you have to match up the records one by one.

[Erica_Dipyatic]

Thanks, Sally Dickson​. This is great. Much appreciate your time and tip!