New instance - thoughts on our testing approach?

[Lisa_Forson]

Hello,

Back again to ask the very knowledgeable Marketo community for advice!

We are in the process of setting up our Marketo instance, however we aren't going to be syncing our CRM system until next year (other big IT projects on the go). We are going to have a custom integration as we have a very specific type of CRM system which was built for us.

This year as part of our project deliverables, we are to implement two 'proof of concept' email tests to existing clients (no leads).  The purpose of this is to evidence that the platform works as intended, before we move to full roll-out next year. Both of these email journeys involve sending an email, directing to a landing page, completing a form and an email resend if the original email was not opened within a set period of time.  One of the emails will also have dynamic content based on age segmentation. If the form is completed, this will generate an email to our customer contact center to follow up with the existing client.  

Because our CRM system will not be synced for these proof of concept tests, the list of clients will need to be a manual list import.  And the only client data we will be including in our data file is name, email address and age......which will need to map to a field somehow.  These will be very small lists, perhaps around 25-50 clients.  So there will be no other data in our instance, other than these two imported lists.

We are still going through onboarding and yet to do our launch pack training sessions where I know I can ask these questions, but I've been digging around trying to get a sense of everything we need to be aware of when setting up our proof of concept tests.  And so I know which are the right questions to be asking

So I guess my question is, is there any glaringly obvious things I should be aware of in what we are doing? Anything you can see being a potential issue or roadblock?  There's always lots of chat around tokens but I haven't learnt enough about these yet to fully understand what part they play in our tests, particularly if we are uploading a manual file of clients.  

Any help or advice would be much appreciated!

Thank you,

Lisa

[SanfordWhiteman]

There are many, many nooks and crannies one could comment on here. It's probably best to have an expert create testing guidelines for/with you on a professional basis.

I'll hone in on one area for now: you should not store only point-in-time age values in a database (any database, this isn't specific to Marketo). If you don't know the person's actual Date of Birth (the system field) then use a custom Date field Inferred Date of Birth,  which you can set to January 1st of N years ago, or perhaps N years ago - 6 months. Either of these is far better than adding data you know will be wrong within the next year.

You can use a recurring batch campaign to maintain another, secondary field, Age Range, which derives its value from the Inferred Date of Birth. And your segmentation is based on Age Range (I assume you're actually using ranges, not customizing for every single age... though you do have 100 segments per segmentation, so the latter would technically be possible!)

Note that depending on what you mean by "dynamic content based on age segmentation" you may not need a true segmentation at all. A script token can generate different output based on the current recipient's age/age range, without referring to a named segmentation. This is a type of lower-case "dynamic content" -- as opposed to what I call "Dynamic Content™", which is tied to segmentations.