Overview

As a marketer, it’s important to optimize the time you spend on building your campaigns. Time spent on creating programs and all the pieces that go along with them, such as email assets, landing pages, reports, etc., is time you aren’t able to spend on other initiatives or campaigns you need to work on. You only have so much time in a day, right? So what’s the solution? The answer—program templates.

What are program templates?

Program templates are standardized, cloneable versions of Programs used to track and deploy marketing campaigns. Program templates live in your marketing automation platform, and have all the various pieces of your campaign already built out and ready to go.

Why should companies implement program templates?

Program templates significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to build and launch campaigns. Since they contain all the assets that you typically have in your program already there and ready, you are no longer spending time adding the same assets over and over again to every program you build.

When should a company implement program templates?

If you find yourself adding the same assets to your programs every time to build a particular program, that’s a good indicator that you need program templates. For example, every time you build a webinar program, you add a couple invite emails, a confirmation email, a couple reminder emails, a registration page, a couple reports, etc. Manually adding all those assets to your program each time you build a new webinar program takes time. Most likely, your assets have the same look and feel for every webinar campaign you run, so why not create a template that contains all those assets already built out? Then all you have to do is clone the program template and voila, you’ve created a new webinar program with all the necessary assets all in one step, saving you a ton of time. After cloning the template, all you need to do is fill in the pieces that are specific to the program you are working on. Bonus: if you implement Tokens into your email and landing page assets, you may only need to update a few tokens to have your emails and landing pages ready to go. No more manually adding each asset one by one for every program you build.

How should a company implement program templates?

Creating a program template is no different than creating any other program. First, start by taking inventory of the various programs you typically build, and the assets that are the same each time. For example, you may have an email program, an event program, a webinar program, and a nurture program, each having their own set of assets.

After you’ve taken inventory, you can start building the program templates. As mentioned, creating a program template is no different than creating a program. The template will just have a generic name, typically showing what the naming convention should be, and will live somewhere in your MAP that is easy to find. A good place is at the top of your instance tree in a folder named “Program Templates”. Once you’ve created the program, add all the assets you determined from your inventory that need to be part of every program of that type.

Who should implement program templates?

Typically, it’s best to have a person on the MOPs team, who is responsible for building the programs, be the person who creates the program templates. This person will most likely know which pieces they are manually adding each time.

Conclusion

As the old saying goes, time is of the essence, and there is no better way to optimize the time spent on building a program than to start with a program template. Gone will be the days of manually adding the same 5-10 assets from scratch for each campaign. Once you implement program templates, you can stop worrying about all the various pieces of a campaign, and can focus more on building and running a successful campaign.