Table of Contents
If you’ve read our previous posts, you know why audits are so important and can skip to the next section. For those who are new, allow us to explain.
Without regular audits, your CRM or Marketing Automation System can quickly become outdated and cluttered. This can lead to incorrect lead routing, inconsistent messaging, and decreased productivity for your sales and marketing teams. Audits help you keep your database clean, accurate, and organized, which leads to better customer experiences, higher engagement, and increased revenue.
Three Audits to Perform on All Marketing Material
Below, we have 6 different pieces of digital marketing collateral that should be audited. For all of them, there are three things that need to be checked.
1. Newly Created
We should look at newly created material on a weekly basis. If we stay consistent and diligent about our audits, it is easier to find errors, fix them, and correct team behaviors to ensure they don’t happen again.
2. Naming Convention
It is imperative to establish naming conventions for all digital collateral. This makes the search for data extremely easy. We have an extensive example in the next section, Campaign Audits.
3. No Duplicates
Audits are all about the cleanliness of your data so you can sort, filter, navigate, and analyze with ease. Duplicates lead to confusion. Again, we have some examples below.
1. Campaign Audits
Many systems enable you to tie other digital collateral to a campaign. This is great because you can then see which forms, emails, lists/segments, images, videos, sales ready messaging, etc. are associated with your campaign. Accordingly, when you audit your campaigns, check to see that the proper digital collateral is associated.
Newly Created
Remember to perform this audit on a weekly basis on newly created campaigns. If you don’t check this data often enough, there may be too many campaigns and other digital assets that float around unattached. This means that your system may become cluttered and an attempt to sort everything out may be extraordinarily difficult and time consuming.
Naming Convention
I highly recommend a naming convention for campaigns and for all assets that are stored in your CRM and/or Marketing Automation System. This applies to campaigns, forms, deals, workflows, etc. An example:
You have a campaign for a tradeshow that your team plans to attend in July 2024. You also have forms, emails, segmentation lists, images, videos, documents, and workflows tied to this campaign. As you navigate into different sections of your system, the easiest way to find all of these is if they have a common thread.
Let’s call our campaign, “NYC Tradeshow – 2024 10.” 2024 Is the year, while 10 in the month; October.
Now, every other asset related to the campaign should have that name in it too.
- Form = NYC Tradeshow – 2024 10 – Request a Demo
- Email = NYC Tradeshow – 2024 10 – General Outreach 1
You can also stack the names if they specifically relate to other content such as an image for that General Outreach 1 email:
- Image = NYC Tradeshow – 2024 07 – General Outreach 1 – Banner
It may have stood out to you as particularly odd that I used the year then the month. This is for sorting purposes.
Imagine you attend that same “NYC Tradeshow” 5 years in a row. It’s easy to sort data by year if you use the year before the month.
I also use the numbered month because it sorts better than the months written out as they are not alphabetical. Imagine this NYC Tradeshow occurs twice a year; in July and December. If you write out the month and sort the data, December will come before July alphabetically. However, if you use the numbered month, “07” comes before “12.”
Feel free to also add industry, product, or any other details that you may need onto your naming convention as you see fit.
No Duplicates
As noted above, it’s important to remove or merge duplicate data. Imagine that someone in your organization accidentally creates a duplicate campaign of the NYC Tradeshow. We plan to tie digital collateral to the campaign. If we have a duplicate, then some assets may be tied to one campaign while some get attached to another. This means that we won’t get an accurate picture of what occurs in our campaign, it’s more difficult to understand results vs. budget. Even worse, it may result in the duplication of other assets because we won’t see all of the forms, emails, etc. that need to be attached.
2. Forms
Newly Created, Naming Convention, and No Duplicates
Hopefully at this point, you understand the importance of these audits, so I won’t go through these all again. Let’s move on.
Workflows
When you create forms for your website or landing pages, the end result is a form fill out which gets you contact data. While many systems enable you to route the form fill out results, you may also want to route that data in a more complex fashion.
Perhaps you have a demo request form on your website and every time someone submits it, you want it to be routed to your team based on the country. You may not be able to natively do that within the form itself, which means you need to create a workflow. Accordingly, when a new form is created, think about how the form submission should get routed. This of course means that workflows as related to forms need to be audited.
Lead Scoring
If you do lead scoring and you include form submissions as part of that process, it’s important to audit your lead scoring criteria when a new form is created. If you are unfamiliar with the topic, you can check our Sales Funnel post, which explains the basics of Lead Scoring.
Essential Forms
Some of your forms are likely in heavy rotation (i.e. they are on permanent website pages, not landing pages, and get filled out more than other forms). Accordingly, it’s a good idea to ensure that they work properly. You never know if there is a bug in your system or perhaps someone messed with a form when they shouldn’t have. While most of the audits I discuss should be done weekly, this is one that can be done once a month.
3. Segmentation Lists (for Emails)
“Send To” Lists
For one off emails (i.e. not automated), you need to select a list of contacts for your outreach. Double check that the filters are properly set; pay special attention to Boolean operators. You don’t want to mistake an “And” for an “Or.” This audit may also be tough to perform on a weekly basis. We’ll discuss why in the Emails section below.
Do Not Send To List
Ensure that you have a Do Not Send To list for your emails. Let’s use an example where you have a handful of contacts in your database that left their company for another organization. However, you do not want to move these contacts to the new company nor do you want to delete them because they were tied to a deal that closed. Accordingly, you want that data to sit right where it is because you want to know who you worked on those deals with, the emails, calls, and notes related to those contacts.
We now know that we plan to keep these contacts, but their email addresses are not valid. We also do not want to email them because it will bounce and lower our email score, which can lead to us being listed as an unsafe or spam sender. Thus, we have two choices.
We can update every single segmentation list we have to exclude these specific contacts, and the others as they continuously change companies, which can be beyond time consuming, depending on how many you have.
The other, and far better option, is to create a Do Not Send list. Add contacts to this list as it comes up and include this segmentation on your emails.
Naming Convention
We discussed this above, but this bears repetition and an example here.
You may have several lists in your system that are very similar. Perhaps you have 5 lists that contain all of your database contacts, but each one is filtered by industry. Be sure to use a good naming convention so you don’t confuse the lists.
In our example in the Campaign Audits section, our email was called, “NYC Tradeshow – 2024 07 – General Outreach 1.” If we want to send out different emails for different industries, we could name our list based on the campaign and email, but this time add industry.
Segmentation List = NYC Tradeshow – 2024 07 – General Outreach 1 – Software
Segmentation List = NYC Tradeshow – 2024 07 – General Outreach 1 – Manufacturing
These list names seem quite long, but in fact they make it quite easy to sort through the hundreds of lists you might have. Let’s think about this for a minute. Imagine it’s a year later and you want to see:
- Lists related to that tradeshow, you type in “NYC Tradeshow – 2024 07.”
- Lists for the first email related to that tradeshow, you type in “NYC Tradeshow – 2024 07 – General Outreach 1”
- And, Lists related to manufacturing, you type in “Manufacturing.”
Remember to come up with a naming convention that suits the way you target contacts whether that’s by industry, product, location, etc.
To Be Continued – Marketing Data
In the next post, we will finish marketing data audits where we discuss emails, images, videos, documents, and workflows. Stay tuned.