6 Areas to Focus Your Email Platform Monitoring

July 31, 2023 Stan

Many of us have been there. Maybe it comes in the shape of having no sign-ups for a webinar… because an integration on the registration form is suddenly broken. Or even worse, your sales are down because you’ve discovered that contacts have not been receiving emails from your main lead nurture campaign …. for weeks! No one likes the unpleasant surprise (and corresponding fire drill) when they learn that a campaign or process has stopped running. The good news is that these sorts of emergencies are completely preventable with some good email platform monitoring habits.

Email Platform Monitoring: 6 Focus Areas

SSL Certificates

There’s nothing quite like a website certificate expiration to add some excitement to your day. Since renewing a certificate takes multiple steps and may involve multiple departments in your organization, it is something that you will want to start working on well before the expiration date. Unless you are on a platform that manages SSL renewals for you, keep track of all of your certificates and expiration dates, and set reminders allowing ample time to work through the process.

Imports / Exports

You’ve got enough to deal with in your inbox, and it’s easy to ignore the daily notification emails if all is well, so consider opting into only failure notifications, or using mailbox rules and filters to highlight key failure notices. When you do receive a notification of a data import or export failure, act on it immediately to avoid needing to handle a large backlog of data. And don’t just rely on your inbox, avoid issues that come from a “set it and forget it” mentality by checking in on automation at least monthly to assure they are continuing to run and have not been unintentionally paused.

Campaigns Sent

One easy metric to confirm that your campaign assets are running smoothly is by validating that there have not been any significant dips in campaigns sent.

Eloqua: The Campaign Analysis Overview in Eloqua Insight allows you to view campaign metrics within a selected timeframe.
Responsys: The Monitor Campaigns page within Insight shows campaign metrics for your active campaigns including Skip and Sent counts.
Marketo: Create an email performance report within the Analytics section of Marketo so you can monitor the total sent volume in the past X number of days and view other key metrics for a quick pulse on performance.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Account Send Summary found within Analytics Builder > Reports is a useful summary of recent sending activity and campaign metrics, or use the Intelligence report of Email or Journey Performance.

Comparing multiple timeframes will allow you to see not only how your campaigns are performing, but if all of the connected elements are functioning. If you’re seeing a drop in campaign members entering or progressing through the campaign, check the entry criteria to make sure all associated forms or data feeds are functioning correctly. For multistep campaigns with decision criteria based on field data, contacts getting stuck in steps may be an indication that there is a change or discrepancy to expected data values.

Forms Submitted

Another easy metric to monitor is the trends of form submissions. If you find that there is an issue with receiving your form data, you can track down if the landing page where the form is hosted had any updates that would have impacted the connection to the form. If the form is hosted on an external landing page, check to see that the corresponding HTML values match the values on your form.

Eloqua: Check the form submissions report in Eloqua to see if submissions ceased on a particular date. The Form Field Completeness report in Eloqua is another good tool to ensure that there have not been any unintended changes to your forms during a website update.
Marketo: Use the Smart List report using the Filled Out Form Fill filter, which can be sent as a report to anyone whether or not they have access to Marketo.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Review the Data Extension where the form results in the land to determine the most recent submissions, as well as the setup of the Data Extension to confirm that no new required fields have been added which need to be added to the form.

Deliverability

If you have migrated to a new sending domain and properly completed an IP warming campaign, you should have taken the appropriate steps to mitigate any deliverability issues. However, it’s a good idea to continue to monitor your deliverability and to periodically review authentication, potential blacklisting, and overall reputation.

Eloqua: The Bounce Back History with Messaging report in Eloqua is useful to gain insights into bounceback reasons.
Responsys: The Deliverability Trends tab on your Interactive Dashboard shows several metrics associated with deliverability. Drilling down by date range, campaign tags, or individual campaigns can help in finding where problems may be affecting your deliverability. Also, using the Deliverability by ISP report can help narrow down issues in specific regions or ISPs.
Marketo: You can set up data management programs to improve deliverability and mark records as having an invalid email or flag if they have generated a certain number of soft or hard bounces so they’re excluded from subsequent email sends automatically. Additionally, you can create segmentations (aka dynamic Marketable lists) to reference as qualification criteria for each email send/nurture cast to avoid sending to folks who are inactive or likely to flag your emails as spam, hurting your deliverability.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: You can query bounce activity and automate an alert to provide recent details yourself or sign up for their SenderRating service for a helpful summary of sending and bounce activity. These alerts compare current and historical sending metrics to highlight positive and negative changes over time. Salesforce Marketing Cloud also offers a Sender Reputation Audit through support to obtain a summary of your current configuration and potential concerns.

Marketing Automation Platform System Updates

Subscribe to system updates about quarterly releases as well as other emergency releases. Some resources by the platform include:

We’re here to help you with solutions to make your email programs run more smoothly. Contact us to learn more about email platform monitoring and overall platform optimization.

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