The birds are chirping, the sun is shining, and the smell of flowers is in the air; it must be time for a bit of spring cleaning (for those of us in the southern hemisphere!). Everyone knows that a well-used marketing platform can clog up with old campaigns, out-dated lists, and freezing cold leads. What better time than now to get in and give it a tidy up, ready for new initiatives.
In this article, we will run you through a few different areas in Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE, formerly Pardot) that you may wish to declutter.
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Campaigns
Campaigns are where you group people associated with an initiative. They’re great for tracking, reporting and attribution. Normally, you may run a campaign for a certain period – at the end of which, the campaign would be over and you would create a new campaign for the next initiative.
So what happens to all the old campaigns? If you didn’t set any end date in the Campaign settings – nothing. Now is the time to clean them up! Here are some tips for cleaning up Campaigns:
- Untick the ‘active’ checkbox for any campaigns that are over
- Set end dates for campaigns that are still running*
- Delete any campaigns that were tests, accidentally made, or didn’t end up running**
* Reaching the end date won’t automatically untick the ‘active’ checkbox – you will still need to do this later, or automated it using a Flow. You could even take it one step further and require an end date for campaigns that aren’t evergreen, and automate the creation of a task when the campaign end date is nearing to confirm the end date is still accurate. Reach out to your Salesforce Admin or Resonant to help you set this up.
** Don’t delete campaigns that did run, but are over – you will still want them for reporting purposes.
Lists
If you send a lot of emails, you probably have a lot of lists. In fact, you can quite easily have hundreds of old lists that you’re never going to use again. A good way to tell is if they are dynamic or static lists – dynamic lists are built with rules and are always up-to-date, but static lists can become out-dated, fast. Here are some tips for cleaning up your lists:
- Click the ‘Dynamic’ column header to sort your lists and group all the ‘no’s, then go through your static lists
- Edit a list that you no longer need, or know you won’t need for much longer, and set an ‘archive date’ (a date in the past will automatically archive the list)*
- Delete any lists that were tests, accidentally created, or didn’t get used
- Switch to the inactive and unused Dynamic list views (navigate there from Optimizer or by toggling the ‘All Current List’ in Prospect Lists), for prime candidates to be deleted
*You can still access archived lists by changing the view settings from ‘All Current Lists’ (the default view) to ‘Archived Lists’.
Prospects
This can be a tough one, because no one wants to shrink their database. However, prospects that provide zero value aren’t doing your database limit any favours. With MCAE you can send prospects to the recycling bin, and they will automatically come out of the recycling bin if they become active again. Here are some tips for cleaning up Prospects:
- Use a free email verification tool to check if the email addresses in your database are still active or if they will bounce. Then, send the ones that will bounce to the recycling bin. This is a great way to identify inactive email addresses without affecting your sender reputation.
- Run a re-engagement or opt-in campaign: create a list of all the prospects that haven’t interacted with you for a long time and send them an email to prompt engagement. Then, send the prospects that don’t engage to the recycling bin.
- Delete any test or spam prospects
Other areas to check
- Forms: You may still have old forms around from an old event or an out-dated downloadable. Check they are no longer on a live webpage and delete them*.
- Custom Redirects: If you use Custom Redirects in your social channels or advertising (go you!) you may have quite a few old ones lying around. Check they aren’t being used in any active advertisements and delete them*.
- Emails: If there are a few too many emails sitting in Email Templates/Content/Account Engagement Emails and it’s making your eye twitch, it might be time to sift through them and delete some of the ones you’re not going to use again*.
- Automation Rules: Check your Paused or Inactive Automation Rules (navigate there from Optimizer or by toggling the ‘All Automation Rules’ from your Automation Rules list) for prime candidates to be deleted*, where Inactive Automation Rules are those that haven’t matched any prospects in the past 30 days.
*Form, Custom Redirects, Email Templates and Automation Rules are all sent to the Recycling Bin when you delete them, meaning you can go into the recycling bin to restore them if you need to, and they will still appear in a prospect’s engagement history. However, they will drop off your Account Engagement Reports and any custom Salesforce Reports you’ve created using the Campaign and Marketing Forms/Links object relationship. Be sure that a Campaign has collected the important information for reporting and attribution.
Account Engagement Optimizer
If you haven’t already, now is the perfect time to check out Account Engagement Optimizer – a handy tool that monitors Account Engagement processes and provides recommendations to improve processing efficiency.
Account Engagement Admins (with the View Optimizer permission) can access it in Account Engagement Settings. Click into the Prospect Change Monitor to further breakdown each process or feature area, and adjust the date range.
Read more about Optimizer here.
Need a hand?
Our team of experts are ready to help you with all your Salesforce and MCAE (Pardot) needs. We can help you with a re-engagement campaign, run a health check on your org, plus more! Send us a message by filling out the form below.
