3 Reasons for a Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Health Check in 2023
Be prepared to take your marketing to the next level
With 2023 just around the corner, there’s no better time to execute a health check of your Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE) — formerly Pardot — platform than in the new year.
What is an MCAE health check?
A health check is an in-depth review of your MCAE account, and the processes built within it (Think: lead assignment process), from top to bottom. Health checks identify foundational problems and opportunities for optimization and growth.
While it’s important to perform MCAE maintenance regularly to keep a clean, current system, it is not always necessary to go deep with a proper health check.
So, when is the right time?
If any of these three scenarios sounds familiar to you, consider doing a health check:
1. You’ve experienced resource changes.
Many organizations have seen a lot of staffing changes over the past three years, largely attributed to COVID-19 driven turnover. This attrition is forcing many companies to navigate the challenge of losing their most experienced MCAE Administrator without a robust system for training the new hires (if there are any).
Admins new to MCAE don’t always fully grasp the mechanics of the system, history, and conventions due to lack of process documentation or a “playbook” that explains assets, automations, and their purposes. Left “untreated”, critical assets get deleted and downstream processes break ungracefully. As a result, admins and non-admins alike are left overwhelmed and discouraged — to say nothing of significant harm to business continuity and prospect or customer experience.
2. You’re exceeding database or usage limits.
If you are getting MCAE emails saying that your mailable database limit has been exceeded or you’re trying to set up an automation rule and you don’t have any available you’ve hit your usage limits.
Once that happens, you have two options:
- Buy more usage (if that’s even an option).
- Hatch a strategy to manage database limits (which often includes deleting data you no longer need).
Unfortunately, there’s no easy hack for a good cleanup and the need to dig through a trough of marketing assets can be overwhelming — trying to determine what’s current, what’s old, what’s being used for operational processes, what needs to be updated, etc.
3. You plan to perform optimizations and enhancements.
Do you still have outdated system settings like the MCAE-Salesforce connector version one (V1)? Have you connected your MCAE and Salesforce campaigns? Are you yearning for those newer features you’re not leveraging today: scoring categories, progressive profiling on forms, or grading profiles for lead qualification?
Before you rush into upgrades, it’s best to audit your MCAE-Salesforce systems to ensure pre-requisites are met.
Bonus reason: You’ve never done one!
Maybe you are reading this post because you didn’t know what a Health Check was and have never done one. Think of a Health Check as Spring cleaning your house: it’s crucial to keep your MCAE account clean, organized, and up to date with new releases and policies.
Summary
Start off 2023 right with a health check on your MCAE org. This will help put you and your company in tip-top shape, and you’ll be prepared for the enhancements you need to take your marketing to the next level.
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