So you’ve built your campaign and it’s ready to deploy. Great! Now what? Having a Marketo Engage campaign launch checklist in your back pocket is going to help you speed up the launch process while still ensuring that the campaign is deployed accurately.

What is the Launch phase of the campaign production process?

The Launch phase is the final phase in our four-step framework for a campaign production process. It is where the magic happens – your campaign is deployed, starts collecting engagement, and reporting is provided to wrap up the process.

Because this is the final step in the process, the checklist found below assumes that the previous three steps – intake, build, and quality assurance (QA) – have been completed.

What should happen during and after campaign launch?

There are three stages within the launch phase:

Schedule

The Build Specialist confirms the date, time, and affected audience size with the requesting stakeholder before scheduling. If activating, final approval to activate the campaign should be obtained.

Launch

Once the stakeholder has confirmed the date, time, and audience, the Build Specialist schedules or activates the campaign.

Report

The final step in the process is ensuring that tasks are created for performance reporting and campaign review. Reporting should be templatized and configured to track desired campaign conversions. The Build Specialist should confirm reporting follow-up tasks have been created in the PM tool and are properly assigned with deadlines.

The final Report stage is possibly the most overlooked and most valuable stage of the entire campaign production process. Many times, campaigns are deployed and little is done with them after they launch. A mature marketing operations team will develop processes to review and analyze campaign performance post-launch and let that analysis influence future campaign strategy. Email metrics such as clicks and opens can fluctuate as engagement data trickles in. Seven days post-launch is considered to be a “safe” period to analyze engagement data, but by fourteen days you’re nearly guaranteed to have an accurate count of how much engagement your email received.

When should a company focus on post-campaign launch activities?

Any company looking to make more informed decisions regarding marketing campaign strategy should implement processes for post-launch activities. Marketo has a number of robust reporting tools that can break down the data into formats that are easy to understand. You may decide you want to feed your campaign engagement data into a dashboard for better visibility across your organization. Whether you use a simple spreadsheet or a robust marketing dashboard, bringing the valuable data from Marketo into a format that can be shared across teams will enable your marketing operations team to tell marketing’s story.

What should you include in a Marketo Campaign Launch Checklist?

Below is a template for a Marketo campaign launch checklist to get you started. Your marketing operations team’s processes may be different – this template can be adjusted to fit your needs. This checklist is the final check in the production process, and it is assumed that the campaign assets have been through an initial QA process already.

Schedule:

• Confirm the date and time of send with requesting stakeholder/campaign project brief
• Confirm the audience filters and total audience size with requesting stakeholder/campaign project brief
• Check that the Marketo send campaign or program is referencing the correct asset(s)
• Check that the email asset is correctly marked as operational/non-operational

Launch:

• Schedule or activate the Marketo send program/campaign
• Schedule or activate any additional required campaigns, such as status tracking progressions or success/influenced campaigns

Report:

• Confirm the send deployed to the expected audience size and no unforeseen blockers were hit (such as communication limits).
• Configure any reports needed in Marketo to reference the correct emails, actions, and time periods. If an A/B test was implemented, analyze the results of the test and declare a winner if one was not declared automatically.
• Export reports from Marketo and configure into the format agreed upon with your team
• Share reports with any requesting stakeholders and, if applicable, provide recommendations for improvement of future campaigns