Governance Considerations when Planning Your Marketing Automation Implementation

January 12, 2021 Stan

Governance within a marketing automation platform is commonly used as a tool for managing workflows and mitigating risk. Practices are typically well established and ingrained into the daily production routines of a marketing team’s processes, and they can often be overlooked or under appreciated when an organization implements a new marketing automation platform.

The fact is, there’s a lot that can be accomplished during an implementation by a robust and well-considered governance policy. More and more frequently, organizations that are switching MA platforms are bringing governance to the front row to help manage the transition and set the team up for success moving forward.

Team Readiness

One of the biggest areas we’ve seen governance officers take on during an implementation is preparing the marketing team for the transition. While this is typically seen as the role of change management, governance teams are often better positioned to provide critical resources to marketers. It is also the first step in establishing best practices for the organization. Here are a few ideas on how governance teams can take the lead on organizational readiness.

Resources Links Page: Collect all training documents, videos and how-tos available from the new MA platform and organize them into a resources page for the Marketing team. Consider grouping the links by role or task, especially if the resources available from the new platform are poorly organized or hard to search.
Contact Form: Set up a form that marketers can use to ask questions or request assistance. Some employees are hesitant to ask for help with a phone call or in a meeting. Having an internally available request form is a great resource and will help you get your team ready for day 1.
Internal How-tos: Create a custom-tailored collection of asset creation guides and other how-tos that address your organization’s specific business requirements.
Certification Tracks: An internal set of how-to resources can be a starting point for developing internal platform certifications. Define the different tiers of users, align them with their core tasks and create a series of instructional materials to support their needs. Certification can be as simple as having watched or read the materials, or more complex requiring exams and periodic renewals.

Maintenance and Monitoring

Team readiness is an area of governance that focuses on the migration and launch period of an implementation. Maintenance and monitoring is largely a post-implementation effort to ensure that systems and processes created for the implementation launch remain.

DNS Maintenance: Secure domains are a necessary part of any modern marketing automation platform since they are used for things like landing pages, image hosting, analytics trackers and more. At some point, however, all of them will expire. A governance officer is often well positioned to keep track of these renewal cycles and can alert IT at the proper time to prevent things from slipping through the cracks.
Field Cleansing and Normalization: Make sure a data cleansing program is included as an implementation task. Aligning phone numbers, country codes, industries and other fields around a common set of values is important for successful campaign execution and CRM integration.
Database Health Monitoring: Set up a collection of key metrics that reveal the overall health of the contacts in your database and can be displayed on a dashboard. Typically, this is a set of engagement points intended to show at a high-level what percentage of your database is engaged and what percentage is reachable. This is also commonly used to track database growth and show the frequency and volume of net new contacts entering the platform.

When governance is involved early in the implementation process, it becomes much easier to ensure the right training is provided, that standards are established up front and that all marketers are empowered to support your organizations best practices.

After an implementation is completed, governance can help ensure smooth operations, high data fidelity and ongoing visibility into key health and engagement metrics.

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