Welcome to week 3 of the 30 day marketing ops fitness challenge!
Choose practitioner or leader workout below.
WORKOUT C: DATABASE HEALTH AND DATA HYGIENE
1 deletion
Time to clean up! The goal is to execute 1 purge of bad data from your system. Create a report of one or more of the following: invalid email addresses, spam emails, outdated email addresses, unqualified leads, and/or inactive records. For both unqualified leads and inactive records, because the data is accurate but not useful, use a time parameter to control your deletion. For example, purge unqualified records that are more than 12 months old, and inactive records that have had no activity in the last 2-3 years.
1 inactive exercise
Inactive records bring down your engagement and eventually your deliverability. If a record has not engaged with your marketing in 6 months or more, you should suppress them from your email campaigns. Add these to your suppression/exclusion lists and monitor every 2 weeks to evaluate the result. If 6 months seems to short, begin with 8 or 10 months.
1 measurement exercise
You need to measure your database health over time. Ideally, this is done by tracking health metrics such as mailability in a time series chart, which can require some engineering help. Start with a regular cadence of database health reviews, at least once a month. Take a snapshot of database size, mailability, unsubscribes, invalid records, and unqualified leads. By reviewing these metrics regularly, you can ensure the health of your database is getting better versus getting worse.
WORKOUT G: MEETING CADENCE AND PROGRESS UPDATES
1 evaluate one-on-ones
How are your one-on-one meetings going? Instead of a routine status update, one-on-one’s should be productive sessions to unblock your direct reports and to give and receive feedback about current projects and performance. Take a pulse check of how regularly you meet and the quality of these meetings. If you find it lacking, try adding “feedback time” to each agenda, you’ll be surprised by how much you learn.
1 review the last project
Your team should focus on improvement and progress. Sometimes, we get so busy that we move from one project to the next with little thought about making things better. Conduct a “post-mortem” with your team to review that last project you completed. What went well and why? What could have been improved and why? How could we improve team communication to create an even better work experience? Document your learnings, and create action items from each one.
1 end of year exercise
Begin with the end in mind. With each of your direct reports, go through this exercise: Imagine that it is the end of year. What did we accomplish? What did we learn? Are we satisfied with how the year went? Thinking through these questions will help you adjust your goals and workload, and will serve as a compass for your team to start the year in the best way possible.