Importance of Marketo Instance Cleanup

Timely cleaning of unused, old, and obsolete data from Marketo is known as Marketo Instance Cleanup. When hygiene best practices are implemented, they tend to keep your marketing automation platform fresh and at peak performance. The fact is, if you give your Marketo instance a thorough cleaning, your team’s productivity is more likely to increase by 20% more each week. Hence, it’s never too late to practice good data hygiene.

Poor data hygiene costs money and time to the organization, which again equates to money. Those costs keep doubling, thus bringing down your ROI and cutting on your budget by pushing you over the salesforce pricing tier or Marketo. It’s wise to set up an instance cleanup of your Marketo and not let bad data hygiene cost you money and valuable time.

Here are a few quick data hygiene tips for cleaning your Marketo:

Organize Instance

• Go through each one of your campaigns and into all folders within it.
• Check your lists, assets, and reports.
• Eliminate duplicate and unnecessary assets and tests. Anything that isn’t working or is not an asset anymore.
• Set aside at least fifteen minutes a day tidying up your instance. It’s just 5 hours of cleanup time well spent in a month.

Clean the Data

• Go through the Marketo data and find the unsubscribes, all the invalid emails, and the records you don’t want to do business with anymore.
• Delete them as they’re merely cluttered and are responsible for artificially driving up the contact band.
• Before deleting them, confirm whether they are needed in the future or not.

Automate the Tasks

Marketo’s powerful automation works for tasks beyond your events and campaigns. Lists can easily be created to retrieve data that needs cleaning and also to monitor soft bounces beyond empty or invalid email fields, hard bounces, marking them “Invalid” or “suspended” in Marketo. Data management flows that correct data values can also be set up.

Cleaning Marketo isn’t something that can be achieved overnight. It is a process that takes some thought and time. However, you can make a real difference in how efficiently your team manages everyday activities and gets more value from Marketo by breaking down basic data hygiene best practices into achievable and manageable tasks.

Keeping the Marketo database clean is a crucial part of administering the system. If your CRM or Marketo data is dirty, then as a marketing manager, it becomes a lot harder for you to explain why your campaigns went to other people.

Holes in your data, high bounce rate and too many automated replies are all key indicators that suggest you have bad data which is responsible for campaign failing or going to other people. This is a great time to leverage Sales Ops or SDRs. It would also be wise to give a human touch to your emails, ads, mailers or any other marketing content before sending them out.

Reasons to Invest in Keeping your Data Clean:

• It allows better segmentation of leads and clients, helping you to focus on sending your message at the right time to the right people.
• It avoids sending duplicate emails. Even after taking all the precautions, it is very much possible to send multiple emails to the same person because duplicate records are not usually merged.
• Pending deals can be at risk if, during sales negotiations, you email the wrong marketing material to your key prospects. You can even lose a deal or two if your database is not providing details on the lifecycle stage.
• It effectively removes old or bad leads to stay below pricing thresholds.

The cost of bad data is already too much to incur. Too many bad, old or duplicate leads are pushing you over your Salesforce pricing tier or Marketo, which can result in thousands of fees per year. Keeping the database clean should be a priority. Do not fall for the age-old “setting and forgetting” since now your ‘Master Clean Up’ program has been built.

This initial setup and discovery of database cleanup might be a little cumbersome and tiring, but once it is settled, the next few months would be fairly easy. For best results, review and run the smart campaigns once every month. Never let it go past 60 days, as the longer you wait between each cleanup, the more time each cleanup will take.

Factually speaking, keeping your database clean in a way, is saving your marketing budget. Even if the quarterly/half-yearly/yearly budget review is on the cards and the organization wants to cut costs, make sure you don’t have to let the Marketo database go as it is a handy tool.

It is good to keep costs down and ensure that you don’t have to pay for the junk in your database; clean it now if you haven’t yet done it for better performance and outcomes.