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In Part 1 of this article, we discussed Marketing data and audits for Campaigns, Forms, and Segmentation Lists (For Emails). Here, we continue with three more audits to round out our six.
Table of Contents
4. Emails
How & When To Audit
This audit may be tough to perform on a weekly basis because it’s possible that your team may create a segmentation list and email on a Tuesday and send it out on Wednesday, while your audits are on Thursday. To avoid issues, discuss the list creation, email creation, and send process with your team so you can audit details beforehand.
An option is to have one person be the gatekeeper for all emails and lists before they go out. This way, for example, one person creates the list and email, then a second person, perhaps you, audits them for compliance.
Automation
Check that automated emails do not overlap with other emails. When you have a good naming convention, the search for similar emails is quite easy, which should eliminate this issue before it even becomes one.
Check that automated emails are tied to workflows if needed. Perhaps you have a new campaign where you want to send emails out to a small set of contacts. When contacts respond to your email, you want to stop the automation. This is why you want to check workflows; if the automation doesn’t stop, it’s going to be odd for someone you now have regular communication with to get an email that reads, “I don’t know if you saw my previous emails, but I wanted to see if we can get some time on our calendars to discuss our offerings.” Audit your automation.
General Audits
As part of your audits, remember to check all of the fields in an email: To, From, Subject, and Body of email for spelling and grammar errors, personalization tokens, etc.
5. Images, Videos, Documents
Organized Folders
If your system allows you to add images, videos, and documents, it may be in a file folder set up. If so, be sure to properly organize your assets carefully and name them in accordance with a naming convention. How to organize your marketing data could be an entire other post, but for now, we stick to the audit aspect: check your folders every week for newly created assets and ensure that they are organized into the correct folders. If not, make the necessary changes and continue on.
Tagged Properly
If your system enables you to tag images, videos, and documents in addition to file folders, I highly recommend that you take advantage of this. The search for assets is extremely fast when you can filter images by industry, target personas, associated company, etc. Much like the organization of folders, tagging assets can be an entire post on its own. With regards to audits, the key is the same as above: Every week, check for newly created assets, ensure they are tagged properly, and if not make the necessary changes.
Accessibility
This may seem a bit simple, but when new content is added, ensure that the necessary teams have access to it. A new case study in the CRM is useless to the sales team if they don’t have permission to see it.
6. Workflows
If you use workflows in your CRM, which you absolutely should, there are almost an infinite number of things to look out for. Accordingly, we’ll keep it to 4 essential areas of focus:
Incomplete Steps
When you check newly created workflows, ensure that they are completely filled out and make logical sense. This may seem obvious, but let’s look at an example.
Imagine you want a workflow to send out invitation emails to an upcoming event whereby if the contact doesn’t RSVP within 5 days, send the email again, and do so 3 more times.
The person who created the workflow set it up to send a total of 4 emails. However, when you audit it, you notice that they did not set up an un-enrollment criteria. This means that even if the person RSVPs after the 1st email, they continue to receive 3 more. This makes your organization look quite unprofessional.
Remove & Replace Steps
Imagine that you have a workflow whereby people fill out a form on your website, it goes out to reps based on location. Let’s say one rep covers all of Europe.
What happens if that rep leaves? Well, if you do not update this workflow to remove and replace them with someone else, then you could miss out on new leads.
Add Steps
Image the same workflow as above, but this time where each rep sells a specific product. Each time a form gets filled out and a product of interest is specified, our workflow triggers and notifies that appropriate rep. Now, if you add a product, but forget to add it to your workflow, no one gets the notification.
Change Steps
Let’s stick with the same type of workflow as above. Imagine that the head of sales decides to change the territory assignments. If you don’t change who covers what area, then your lead assignments go to the old territory set up.
Check your workflows on a weekly basis for new ones created. However, you also need to be vigilant throughout the week to make note of any major changes that occur such as a rep’s exit, the addition of new products, the change of territory assignment, and more.
Additional Audits to Marketing Data
Think about other marketing data that is unique to your system then set up an audit for those key pieces of data (e.g. perhaps you create landing pages through your CRM or Marketing Automation tool. Audit new pages to ensure form fill outs work, workflows fire, and that links on the page work properly).
Wrap Up – Marketing Data
I stated this in the contact, company, and deal audit posts, but it bears repeating for a 4th time: it’s important to have accurate data in your system so your teams can execute as quickly and efficiently as possible. The best way to ensure you have clean data is to perform regular audits on your marketing data.