Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot offer a set of functionality to easy build and send e-mail campaigns. This is great, however, the fact that it is so easy to send e-mail to thousands of people comes at a cost. At a huge cost. Let me tell you a bit more.
While working in a campaign management business I’ve had too many cases where campaigns were sent:
- With misspelled email subject lines
- Where test messages sent to the whole email list of 500,000 subscribers
- The wrong images were used, in some cases images of one client were sent to the contacts of another client
- Links were missing or were broken
- Coding errors that wipe out all text and images, or would populate dynamic content with completely different content such as:
“Hello Woodcresent Drive, Denver” or “You have been our customer since “married” and we are grateful for it”
This is unacceptable. It shouldn’t happen. However, it generally it does. Why? As some put it “its too cumbersome to QA a campaign”. I have to say I hear it too often.
How to implement a defined process that governs a campaign build and QA process?
We approached it by introducing a 2-step process. The process we, internally call 360° build and QA process.
The process consist of two basic steps:
1, Campaign build defined process
2, Campaign QA defined traffic-light process
What we do is simple. First of all, we clearly define each and every campaign using a “campaign brief” – it lists all the requirements in terms of header, footer, images, subject lines and body of the e-mail.
We then introduce a QA process that defines each and every item that has to be checked.
We also require our e-mail developers to follow QA process in a very strict and defined manner. We achieve it by having a traceable checklist that sits in Jira and responsible parties (always 2) will check off the points they need to check. It is puts responsibility in place and we can trace if someone has missed the checkpoint.
Now, as I said earlier there is always a 2nd person who will re-check whatever developer has done. So each of the responsible parties will make sure that the campaign meets the required standards.
Generally, based on thousands campaigns checked, we have identified that QA process takes on average 3 minutes, while the number of identifiable errors had been reduced from 11 per 100 campaigns to 4 per 100 campaigns. Great results!
Do you want to build the same process in your practice? Download our Salesforce Marketing cloud & Pardot e-mail campaign build and quality assurance processes guide.
If you have any questions or need to improve a quality of your e-mail campaigns, reach out to us: support@digitalaquila.com
*Please note the guide doesn’t lists process of QAing cross-device compatibility.