While Excel is familiar, it's not ideal for complex QA workflows. Version control, collaboration, and audit trails become cumbersome.
Testing is crucial to avoid any Moops (Marketing Operations + Oops). Consider these alternatives:
- Create a centralized document (e.g., Google Docs) with a comprehensive checklist for each campaign element (emails, smart lists, links, etc.). This allows for version control and easier collaboration.
- Tools like Adobe Workfront, Asana, Trello, etc., can be adapted for QA workflows. Create tasks for each review step and assign them to reviewers. This provides transparency and tracks progress.
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Best Practices for Effective QA:
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Clearly define who reviews what (copy, design, technical aspects) and establish approval workflows.
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Assign QA tasks to someone not involved in building the campaign to ensure a truly objective review. It is so easy to blindside self's mistakes, so a fresh set of eyes for QA, if possible goes in a long way!
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Develop standardized checklists for different campaign types. Document your QA process for future reference and training.
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Allocate sufficient time for thorough testing. Testing at the last moment is a lot of times, no testing at all!
Some takeaways:
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Integrate QA early in the campaign planning stage to prevent last-minute revisions and delays.
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Maintain clear communication between campaign builders, reviewers, and stakeholders throughout the process.
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Analyze past campaign issues to identify areas for improvement in the QA process. This is a little obvious, but still, many users fail to retrospect on the issues they faced in the past.
The best approach depends on your team size, campaign complexity, and budget. Start by implementing easily adoptable solutions like standardized checklists and gradually evolve your QA process as needed. Also, along with the campaigns, it's also crucial to thoroughly test the marketing assets including forms, emails, landing pages, etc. to ensure they're setup correctly and are responsive (in the case of emails and LPs). Additionally, for forms, I'd consider creating testing scenarios and then testing the forms based on those to ensure that all the types of scenarios and cases are covered in the testing instead of just doing one-off testing.
PS: Marketo doesn't call its workflow journeys; you can simply call them campaigns, programs, and components within them (e.g., Smart List, Flow, Schedule, etc.).
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