Overview

In the fast-paced world of marketing, it may be tempting to prioritize quantity over quality when it comes to campaign creation. However, quality over quantity is the key to building trust with your customers and ultimately driving business growth.

With Program Templates, marketing teams can ensure they are delivering high quality error-free campaigns while also streamlining the campaign production process. This allows your team to not only create higher quality campaigns, but also do so at a faster rate!

What are Program Templates?

Program Templates are standardized, cloneable versions of Programs used to track and deploy marketing campaigns. They live in your marketing automation platform and can be customized to meet the specific campaign needs your team may have. Program Templates make the lives of everyone in marketing operations a lot easier.

Why are Program Templates relevant to campaign quality?

Program Templates and campaign quality go together like peanut butter and jelly. We can’t talk about Program Templates without talking about how integral they are in improving campaign quality. They allow your team to spend more time on strategy for marketing initiatives and less time on execution. The benefits of utilizing Program Templates include:

• Reducing build time
• Increasing campaign production
• Reducing errors
• Streamlining the QA process

When should a company use Program Templates?

Program Templates come in handy for all kinds of campaigns from newsletters to webinars. As a marketing team, you should take inventory of the various programs you build and how often. Are you hosting monthly webinars and constantly creating programs from scratch? This would be a great opportunity to implement a webinar Program Template. When you’re manually adding in webinar assets (including invite emails, reminder emails, and registration page, etc.) each month, it increases the likelihood of errors or inconsistencies. When you use a Program Template, now all you need to do is clone the webinar template and update the assets accordingly.

How can a company improve campaign quality with Program Templates?

Implementing Program Templates is a great step in improving your overall campaign quality. If you have existing templates in place, a more appropriate first step might be a complete audit of how they are working and what’s missing.

Regardless of which stage your marketing organization may currently be at, the SCRIM methodology is a helpful framework to improve campaign quality when implementing or upgrading Program Templates. It is our mantra at Etumos for when constructing Marketo architecture, we follow best practices for each pillar:

Scalable: The program and its functionality will work equally well at 10x the volume or 1,000x the volume. ‘Volume’ can be the number of people flowing through campaigns, the amount of campaigns running, the number of people building in the system, or anything else where throughput matters.

Clear: An advanced Marketo architect should have a high-level understanding of a system’s functionality just by looking at its campaign names, folder hierarchies, the order of sidebar local assets, and list and program descriptions. The order of operations should be clear from the naming conventions in place.

Robust: A slow rate of depreciation—modifying operational programs or system/data flows will not negatively harm other operational programs. In other words, if you need a small change made to a program, you won’t have to rebuild from scratch.

Intelligent: An intelligent program uses comprehensive, positive logic. There is an avoidance of “silent errors” in the system—any operational breakdown results in a tokenized exception alert sent to the administrator. Exception cases don’t fall through the cracks, and the MOPS team is immediately alerted when something breaks.

Modular: The larger, overall system is broken down into small components (modules) that interact together at a higher level to create a well-functioning machine. There are hooks to get the program flows started, and there is a clear end data process.

Who should manage Program Templates?

The marketing operation team typically handles the implementation and maintenance of Program Templates. Ideally, the person managing Program Templates is already familiar with the organization’s marketing automation platform and campaign build process. Having someone with this experience handle the implementation, helps to ensure your Program Templates are customized to meet the specific needs of the organization.

Another thing to consider is who will be building campaigns and using these Program Templates on a regular basis? It is important to ensure those team members are properly trained in how to effectively use the Program Templates. If there is a Project Manager on the team, they can help manage the project plan and determine weekly priorities.

Conclusion

If you’re looking to improve the quality of your marketing campaigns, Program Templates are a great way to do just that! New to Program Templates? You don’t have to conquer this journey alone, we’ve got plenty of resources to guide you through the process.