By implementing a simplified Marketing Cloud business unit and preference model across all campuses, the eComm team will reduce costs, streamline the constituent experience, and decrease the level of backend management needed. The current model has 151 business units and 373 associated preferences. This project aims to reduce these numbers by at least 50%.
When faced with a failed send, a send to 0, or failed Data Extension, review the items below. Often, the root cause is something over which you have control rather than a systemic failure in Salesforce or Marketing Cloud. If there is an outage or broad issue, users will be notified as soon as possible.
Person of Interest or POI data is used for Contacts with a non-traditional, close affiliation with CU. As of March 2023, POIs make up 32K+ Contacts. Some examples include Security / Training, Volunteer and Student Athlete.
Have an email in full HTML but want to send it from Marketing Cloud? It's doable (not to mention a great approach), but it must be approached a certain way to ensure CAN-SPAM compliance, including a footer for recipients to opt-out. Find details on how to test the recipient's experience, instructions on how to create an HTML email correctly, and the most common misstep we come across.
Reports can often have the same contact listed numerous times, so identifying the unique count is important to confirm the Report criteria is accurate. Having a total 9,000 unique contacts when expecting 250 is an indicator of incorrect criteria and should be investigated.
For those that have used ChatGPT or other AI language modeling tools, there’s no arguing that the results are often impressive and time-saving. While it may seem like a great idea to use AI to write content, there are a few reasons why you might not want to rely solely on AI.
Anchor links are clickable links that direct the reader to a specific section or location of a webpage, document, or email. They are often used to provide quick navigation within lengthy pieces of content. Although tempting to use in emails, anchor links are not without limitations.
The Free Map Tool has a ZIP Code Radius Search Map which allows you to determine what Zip Codes fall into a set range from a set point (ie. 10 mile radius of 80203). These Zip Codes can then be used in a Salesforce Report to capture an audience based on where individuals live. This is often useful when hosting an in-person event and determining who to invite.
GeoCode, a field in Salesforce available on a Contact's record, currently comes from the Advance database. Advance will be getting rid of this field during the migration to Ascend, so it will no longer be available in eComm's instance of Salesforce. In preparation for this change, Salesforce Reports currently using this field need to be recreated with an alternative method or deleted by April 25, 2023.
Effective email marketing is data-driven and should not be viewed as set it and forget it. As an email marketer, looking at reliable metrics when analyzing your email marketing performance is essential. Using your own data as a benchmark is the best practice for determining if you are meeting your goals or need to optimize to improve performance.
