SOLVED

Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

Go to solution
Natascia_Almeid
Level 3

Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

Hi,

I was wondering what were your experiences in Campaign management; to be more specific how your teams have been handling all the campaign activities (how does the marketing request a new campaign, where are the assets shared, if you used ticketing tool or excel, etc.).

I have worked with Jira for the campaign requests where then the marketing would attach an excel sheet with the email template and details of the campaign but found it quite time consuming.  I was wondering if anyone has a better approach.

Thanks!

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions
Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

Hey Natascia,

Let me spill some of my tea for you sis... 

Graph:

Campaign Request Flow.png

The tools I use are:

Airtable

  • Tabs include: Email Request, Program/campaign request- includes landing page
  • Tabs also can turn into form landing pages which are hosted on a massive landing page that lets you pick your request by email, landing pages, campaigns, programs
  • Sample Email tab consists of basic information: name (concatenate formula for naming convention), product type, email date/time, data segmentation (drop-down list),

Zapier

  • I use this tool to connect Slack, Asana, Salesforce
  • You will have to ask a technical customer service rep to increase your path decision, they usually allow 3 but you can increase it if you say please

Gmail

  • Create a specific calendar for marketing campaigns, helps with marketing team meetings and sales meetings (automated)

Asana

  • Automatically creates the task under the Campaigns and connects to Gmail Marketing Calendar section that gets created

Slack

  • Specific channel for campaign request or email if your company doesn't have slack

Salesforce

  • Created a Salesforce campaign apex triggers that  automatically creates campaign status by type

Marketo

  • Template my programs so I can clone the standard workflows and connect to SFDC 

Knak

  • Plug and play email and landing page SAAS platform

1. Request from the marketing campaign coordinator (internal or external) through a master landing page that has different campaign types

2. Request sends to Slack alert on a specific channel

3. Campaign Manager approves and Zapier automatically creates an asana task which then creates a specific Gmail calendar and also creates a Salesforce Campaign with the correct salesforce campaign type

4. Marketing Operations clones templates and puts the correct information in the designated areas, sends for approval from the requester and connects the Campaign flow to the approved SFDC Campaign

Benefits

- If you have external campaign individuals helping you with campaigns and content they can create a campaign without you having to create an SFDC user (which cost money)

- Creates a specific Gmail Calendar that allows you to have a full idea of content to help with marketing and sales play and align specific it for full effectiveness

- Reporting: Go to Airtable to see campaign request vs. campaign approved

- Data Normalization when doing attribution with Bizible and Leandata Clarity with campaign status on SFDC

View solution in original post

21 REPLIES 21
Kevin_Weisenber
Level 4 - Champion Alumni

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

Hi Natascia,

We have a PM who intakes all of our materials for us. We have trained her on what to look for, what could cause issues, etc. and she then uploads it into our project management software (teamwork which is like Jira) and a notification goes out to my team. This way we are not responsible for directly interfacing with the business when in taking requests, she understands the workload of asks coming across and can filter them for priority, and my team can focus on building and optimizing rather than back and forth edits or chasing down materials.

Josh_Hill13
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

There is no perfect approach. Depends on how you've setup MOPS and Campaign Production.

  • Central Intake - Kevin's approach.
    • I generally do this for submissions, but I don't rely on the PM to know or do all of the follow up. I know a lot of BPOs do this in Asia though.
    • I find that this helps the kickoff but you still  need a Journey Call with most marketers.
    • Most marketers don't want to fill out forms or aren't as prepared as you want. You need to sell the process or get Execs to require it.
    • you will still need to work with them to translate requirements into Marketo-speak.
  • Systems to Try - I use these mostly for recording communication and central files for each campaign.
    • JIRA
    • Wrike (designed for marketing and creative teams)
    • Trello
    • Asana
    • Excel
    • GoogleDrive - in my ideal world all the files are attached to a ticket in Wrike, but sometimes you can't do that, so creating a Drive folder for each Campaign is the next best choice.
Jesse_Richard
Level 3

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

We use Wrike (project management software built for marketers) to manage all campaign requests. On our team, each programs manager has a specialist under them that creates the program, cloned from a shell. We have forms set up within Wrike for the Program Manager to submit all the information needed for a program, at which then the specialist creates the program. If they want an email sent out to promote the program, they then submit another form to my team (MarOps) for deployment.

Anne_Angele1
Level 4

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

I've worked with a variety of different tools/approaches (PM/no PM, Jira, Asana, GoogleDrive, Basecamp, etc). Regardless of the tools they use, the companies I've seen that are most efficient all have a template or form that marketing uses to provide materials - sender name, copy, template, send date, audience, images, etc. - and have been trained to exclusively follow this process. While it's unlikely you can completely eliminate the back and forth, having a clear outline of what is needed helps a lot and little details are overlooked less often.

Josh_Hill13
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

Yes, I agree. It will never be perfect.

Create a process, define it, setup some type of request form/template and keep making people fill it out with you. The people who get it will be your friends and get their stuff done faster.

Dan_Stevens_
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

We use Workfront.  More detail can be found in my reply in this thread: Re: MARKETO SOP

ChristinaZuniga
Level 10 - Champion Alumni

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

One of my previous jobs was HEAVILY focused on filling out forms to get things made. I worked as a campaign specialist at a large international company on a team where 3 of us would come up with campaigns for our respective products and then spend probably 30% of our time trying to get stuff built. By that I mean filling out forms for different groups (content, images, website, marketo, etc) to request items for our campaigns. Naturally at multiple times different managers tried to combine ticketing systems to make this go easier, but it never worked. Project management is a major area for MOPs that is often overlooked by leadership who underestimate the time something like this takes.

Natascia_Almeid
Level 3

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

Right, in my past experiences either there was someone dedicated to filling out the forms from the Operations team or the Marketing would just refuse to make email campaigns with Marketo as they were used to deal with Agencies that took care of everything without any forms to fill.

J_Grant_Gray
Level 4

Re: Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

I would also evaluate Podio.

Super customizable, has great automations and integrations.

We had to move to Workfront and it took months to get close to what was created in Podio and it wasn't nearly as easy to use.