12 Days of MOPs: Tips to Keep Your Data Clean & Campaigns Bright

The holidays are here, which means it’s a great time to take a step back and make sure your MOPs is in tip top shape. Let us “unwrap” our holiday marketing operations tips to help you keep things running smoothly—so you can head into the new year with less stress and more wins.

1. For SFDC dupe rules, we recommend excluding your MAP sync user so that it doesn’t prevent people from syncing.

If you don’t do this, you will have people that get “stuck” in your MAP and you will have data discrepancies between what is in your MAP and CRM. Even if you “Allow” duplicates, if you have the “Alert” checkbox checked, this will functionally block duplicates from an API User actions. I would MUCH rather let the sync create a duplicate and let a human sort it out later than potentially miss a high-value update because of duplicate detection that may or may not be valid.

2. UTM everything. Collect as hidden fields on forms, and even stamp on campaign members if possible for attribution.

Attribution reporting is key for campaigns. UTMs are the easiest way to set attribution on a digital level and help provide insights about what channels and campaigns are working best (as well as what ISN’T working). Even if you go with Option 1 for your Campaigns structure, I still recommend putting UTMs everywhere and capturing them for forms. You’d be surprised how often this holiday marketing operations tip is useful.

3. Create program templates in Marketo (or workflow templates in Hubspot) to make campaign execution easy and seamless.

This makes day to day management and campaign execution easy. It also prevents mistakes. (For example if you clone a Marketo program that isn’t a template and has active members, particularly on static lists etc., there can be unintended consequences.) We even had stickers made to remind you to always CLONE FROM THE TEMPLATE! This is an important holiday marketing operations tip.

4. Have some central reporting of key metrics that are “locked down”. This creates one center of truth for reporting, and users can clone reports from this and customize them.

It’s key that everything is looking at the same reports when making decisions. Otherwise, you may be comparing apples to oranges, which isn’t helpful for getting everyone on the same page. If you’ve ever been in a meeting where someone said “well that doesn’t match what my numbers say,” you realize the importance of starting from a shared set of starting point reports. By all means, create a copy to dive deeper and slice and dice in different ways, but you should always start from the same mutually defined and agreed upon place.

5. Create a dashboard of zeros to keep data clean by regularly QAing key fields and reporting points.

Clean data is key for reporting. You want to make sure you’re monitoring your data, fixing any discrepancies. Fixing those discrepancies could mean one-off changes or setting up automation or normalization to help in your MAP or CRM. Run your Dashboard of Zero weekly, and fix any one-off or systemic issues regularly.

6. Have a list upload template that includes all of your required fields, picklist values (and perhaps even formulas to normalize data) to keep your upload process clean. Garbage in → garbage out.

Again, clean data is key. You want to make sure you’re prepping all data before it enters your database to keep your reporting in good shape. This can also be useful in pushing back on stakeholders that deliver data to you in an unusable format. “I can’t proceed until I have all the information in the template.” This has saved me HOURS of cleanup in the past.

7. Make sure you periodically clean your email lists (if you don’t have an automated service like Neverbounce always doing it for you) to keep deliverability up, especially if you are about to start a nurture program or engage with parts of your database you haven’t for awhile.

It is much easier to prevent deliverability issues than it is to try to fix them. Put in the work ahead of time to follow best practices. You can learn more about deliverability here >

8. Use a contact status field, not just a status field on leads. This helps ensure that you know where people are in the lifecycle even after conversion and before they are associated with an opportunity.

This helps enable visibility and accountability. Just because a Lead has been converted to a Contact doesn’t mean it’s never going to enter a sales cycle again. Make sure you have a process defined for Contacts that fall out of cycle and re-qualify again. You don’t want to create a new Lead every time and live in duplicate hell. Your MAP will thank you if you have a Contact Status field as well.

9. We recommend requiring a closed lost reason from a set of predetermined picklist values.

This can help determine if you DQ or nurture contacts associated with the opportunity and give data as to why opportunities aren’t closing for leadership. Your Closed Lost Opportunities are the lowest-hanging fruit available to you. Pretty much every company does some sort of a Closed Lost re-engagement Campaign at some point. Make sure you’re capturing WHY the Opportunity didn’t move forward so you can communicate intelligently with them again in the future if and when you or they decide to re-engage.

10. Have a strategy for Salesforce campaigns. We recommend one of these strategies 1) unique Salesforce campaigns for each combination of Channel/Content or 2) one Salesforce campaign for each piece of Content, and infer the rest from UTMs. (We recommend 2 over 1 as well.)

You can read more about our philosophy on campaigns here >. I teased this earlier in the UTMs section, but I firmly believe that there are only two acceptable structures. Holiday marketing operations tip to remember: pick one and stick to it.

11. If you want your users to do something, make it easy to do that thing. For example, if you want them log their emails, buy a tool that does it automatically. If you want them to fill in fields for a meeting, create a quick action to pre-populate those fields (as well as making them required). Utilize automation to cut out manual steps.

This can not only save your team time, but also make your data more accurate. We’re all on the same team ultimately. If your Users have to

12. Pay attention to the release notes of various products you use for new functionality and changes coming.

This may help you consolidate your tech stack or prioritize something from your backlog that is now easier to do. Even if you don’t implement something new right away, it’s always good to add more tools to your toolbox.

13. Always build and test in Sandbox for Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamics. Never build directly in production.

Building in production can lead to unintended consequences and data changes. Save yourself the headache and just test in Sandbox first. What did you think of our holiday marketing operations tips?