I recently had the privilege of sitting on a panel with some of the Salesforce and Pardot industry’s top experts. Hosted by ExtensisHR’s Lara Black and SaaScend’s Stephen Stouffer, we were asked about our top takeaways from 2022. If you were to ask me the biggest lesson I learned throughout the year – it would be that maintenance is a must. So what’s next?

Email Bot Clicks

Email bot clicks can be a major issue for marketers and businesses that rely on email campaigns to reach their audience. These clicks, which are often generated by automated bots rather than real people, can skew your analytics and make it difficult to accurately measure the success of your campaigns. In order to combat this problem and keep your email list clean and effective, there are a few key strategies you can use:

1. Keep a clean list with only active, opted-in subscribers. This is perhaps the most important step you can take to reduce the number of bot clicks on your emails. By only sending campaigns to people who have actively chosen to receive them, you can greatly reduce the chances of attracting bot clicks.
2. Use the segmenting tool in your email program to filter out bot-like behaviors. Many email marketing platforms come with built-in tools that can help you identify and filter out suspicious activity. For example, you can use these tools to filter out multiple clicks from the same IP address or duplicate clicks from the same email domain.
3. Look for patterns in your email list. Sometimes, bot addresses will have similar sequences of letters or numbers that can help you identify them. Diving into prospect activities on the list can help too. If you see multiple clicks and opens all within the same timestamp, this is a clue that they are bot clicks. By looking for these patterns, you can more easily filter out these addresses and keep your list clean.
4. Run your list through a third-party email verification tool. There are a number of services available that can validate the real email addresses on your list and help you identify any that are likely to be fake or generated by bots.

Assessing your data

Effective data management is essential for businesses and organizations of all sizes. There are a few key factors to consider when it comes to managing your data:

1. Segmentation. By segmenting your data, you can more easily analyze and understand specific subsets of your audience. This can be particularly useful for targeting marketing campaigns and understanding the needs and behaviors of different segments of your customer base.
2. Periodically hire a third-party data cleaning service. To keep your data up-to-date, it can be helpful to hire a professional cleaning service to scrub your data on a regular basis. These services can help you identify, update, and remove bad data ensuring that your segments are as effective as possible.
3. Attribution. Properly recording and tracking data is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns and making informed decisions about the future. By carefully tracking and attributing data, you can gain valuable insights and identify areas for improvement.
4. Over-record actionable data. Decide collectively on the KPIs that your organization would like to report on and figure out how to stamp that data in the system. If this data is accessible by something the system already does, then you’re covered. If it isn’t, build a field for it and record the data in the form via completion actions or rules. A great example of this is the MQL date. This is multi-functional as it allows us to see which opportunities came from MQLs, to include it in formulas for velocity reporting on MQL to closed opportunities, and to report on MQLs sent Month-over-Month/Quarter-over-Quarter/Year-over-Year.

Stay Up-To-Date

In today’s rapidly-evolving technology landscape, it is crucial for businesses and organizations to stay in the know about software releases and new features. Failing to do so can result in missed opportunities and a competitive disadvantage. Be sure to consider these:

1. 1. Stay up on release functions. Salesforce and Pardot release 3 new feature updates a year. It is important to regularly review the release notes for any software you use and be aware of any new features or functionality that becomes available. This will help you stay current and take advantage of any improvements or enhancements that may be relevant to your business.
   2. Use connected campaigns. Salesforce offers the ability to create “connected campaigns” that allow you to easily track and measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Enabling and utilizing this is the crux of most marketing reporting in Salesforce including Multi-touch Campaign Influence Reporting and Engagement Metric Reporting.
   3. Be aware of different versions. It is not uncommon for software applications to have multiple versions available, and it is important to be aware of which version you are using. In most cases, newer versions may offer significant improvements or new features that can be beneficial to your business. This is definitely the case in the Salesforce ecosystem. If you are still using an older version, consider upgrading to take advantage of these improvements.

Taking the time to stay organized will save you big-time in the long run. By investing in data maintenance, you’re making sure your data is a valuable asset that supports your business objectives and helps you to succeed in today’s competitive world.

So, there are your maintenance bare-necessities! Watch the panel discussion here, and stay tuned for part 3 of the Reflections Series!