Like any software, things can go wrong with marketing automation. Having the knowledge of what these things are will help you prevent them and make you more confident that your marketing automation endeavors go smoothly.
The most common mistake people make is lack of thorough testing. Yet, testing marketing automation should be a critical step in your marketing automation planning and execution.
Here is a list of items to test when using marketing automation:
- Ensure that your tracking code is implemented correctly and on all necessary pages.This is obvious for your main marketing website, but there are other situations where you want to double-check, as well. For example, if you are using an independent landing page builder (e.g. a custom CMS or Unbounce), make sure your tracking code is firing on that page and the subsequent conversion page.
- ALWAYS testing your forms in private/incognito browser window. By testing forms in a private browser window, you are using a “clean” testing environment, mimicking the exact experience of a brand new visitor. Further, it does not use any existing cookies, so there’s no chance of overwriting an already-tracked contact with “test” information. Marketing automation users frequently test forms with dummy data which we highly discourage you doing.
- Use an email rendering service like Email on Acid to check how your email looks across all the various email clients. There are lots of email web, desktop and mobile email clients these days (Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) and you want your emails to look good in each of these clients. Testing them is essential and there are services (like Email on Acid mentioned above) that make it easier to do so. Note: Net-Results has done significant testing prior to launching it’s mobile responsive drag and drop builder to make sure emails look good across the many email clients.
- Checking your email creative with a spam checker. Why risk getting flagged as spam or having your email never make it to your audience’s inbox? Again, Net-Results has integrated their email builder with SpamAssassin to make this easier for our customers to run this test.
- Testing to confirm your campaign executes as planned. For starters, in basic drip campaigns, make sure your scheduled dates are accurate. If it’s a perpetual drip, double-check the spacing between emails is as desired. As you build more and more complex campaigns, you will want to make sure the emails and other events (e.g. alerts, list management) you have planned, execute as you’ve intended. Often this is based on an web event (or combination of events/data analysis) occurring. Consider using flowcharts to plan your campaigns and then run them through accelerated test scenarios until you are satisfied that the execute as desired.
- Analyze that your segments are outputting what you’ve created. Not all platforms have deep segmentation tools, but the ones that do can have very complex variables defined. When you are creating these complex segments, make sure you test that the list of contacts that are output matches what you’ve defined in your tool. Examine sample records to make sure the contact meets the specific criteria of that unique segment.
- Lead scoring rules are applying properly.Lead scoring can be tricky business. Aside from creating a lead scoring plan and mapping that to your specific marketing automation software’s scoring technology, you’ll want to test all of the elements that create scoring changes. Form submissions, contact field values, specific web page visits and more, test that the proper score value is passed to the contact’s record.
Obviously there are more aspects of your marketing automation platform you should test like reviewing reports for accuracy and that email alerts are properly routing. The above recommendations were just some of the key elements that should always be tested.
Keep in mind that the extra time spent testing is worth exponentially more than the hassle of trying to clean up and/or explain mistakes.
What are some things you find most important to test in your marketing automation platform? Your feedback in the comments below is extremely appreciated.
