Email campaigns Management - Time consuming?

[Natascia_Almeid]

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!

[Kevin_Weisenber]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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_]

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

[ChristinaZuniga]

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]

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]

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.