How do you share email marketing/communications plans throughout your organization?

[Beth_Massura]

How do different departments within your organization share their email marketing/communications plans with other groups using the same Marketo instance, across multiple Marketo instances, or even accounting for non-Marketo email service providers? Basically we all want to have a better understanding of what everyone else is sending and be more coordinated so we aren't sending things on the same day.

Here are some ideas that came up; what's been your experience with them, or do you use something else?

• Outlook calendar (currently used by one department)
• Google sheet
• Marketo calendar within a single instance (but there are functionality limitations)
• API to pull from multiple systems into one view (particularly interested in this solution)

[Kevin_McMahon1]

At my previous company we used Outlook calendars and they worked well. We tried paying for a more "robust" tool but it ended up being too complex and created barriers because people had to log in to view add, update, or view the calendar.

Assuming your company uses Outlook for their work calendar, it's easy to share a marketing calendar with those that need visibility. Then that person can easily show or hide the calendar to their liking. You can also color code based on region, channel, etc. For example we had virtual events, live events, and email blasts in different colors.

The company I'm at now follows the same idea and it also works well, we just use Google Cal instead of Outlook. Same concept though and it's free and simple. Hope this helps!

[Beth_Massura]

Thanks, Kevin! Good point about not adding another tool for them to use.

[Carrie_Chandle1]

Similar to Kevin McMahon‌ I used a shared calendar at a previous company. We're still struggling to find the right solution at my current company, especially for the Sales side of things (they like to know when anything is going to a customer). Right now we keep and share on a weekly basis a Google Doc that lists upcoming emails as well as key activity-based recurring emails, so we can keep those in mind, too.

[Natalie_Kremer · Accepted solution]

We use Smartsheet to track and manage all of our campaigns. Our whole submission process is done through a Smartsheet form which automatically adds campaigns to the master sheet/calendar. Our team is able to track where a campaign is in the process and adjust dates as needed. The Product Marketing and Sales teams are able to use the Calendar View to see what's going out in a given week and also integrate it right with their Outlook calendars. It works well for us since we use it for campaign management, too, but also gives the rest of the company visibility into what's happening.