Are Marketing Automation Audits Part of Your Agenda? Here’s Why They Should Be

Are you uncertain whether or not your marketing automation platform is performing as it should? 

If so, what you need is a detailed assessment of your MAP. 

In light of the pace of technological evolution and organizational shifts, a marketing automation audit is more than a regular checkup; it’s a tool in itself that helps you identify performance gaps, optimize campaigns, discover and utilize platform features, and improve your ROI. 

As specialists in all major marketing automation platforms, we understand how important these audits are. Let’s explore their benefits.

Benefits of auditing MAPs

Components of a marketing automation audit

How to do a marketing automation audit

Questions to ask during MAP audits

Benefits of auditing marketing automation platforms

The benefits of auditing include, but are not limited to, the following:

1. Improved efficiency 
2. Enhanced lead generation 
3. Performance optimization
4. Better platform utilization
5. Staying ahead of the curve

Let’s explore each of these benefits in more detail.

1. Improved efficiency

The major benefit of a marketing automation audit is improved efficiency. Now here’s how an audit can help:

• Uncover duplicate workflows, overlapping campaigns, redundant steps, complex processes, etc.
  
• Analyze existing campaigns, identify areas of improvement, from better segmentation to more targeted messaging.
  
• Identify data issues in the form of incorrect or missing customer info, duplicate entries, inconsistent data across records and fields, out-of-date data, unregulated access controls, unclear data ownership, compliance violations, lack of standard encryption, and so on.
  
• Unlock opportunities for more strategic resource allocation, leading to more effective team bandwidth management.

2. Enhanced lead generation 

With respect to lead generation, a marketing automation audit can help you identify the following: 

• Whether or not you are using effective, well-differentiated lead scoring models, and if the sales team gets how you prioritize leads.
  
• Are the right leads being routed and assigned to the right sales reps at the right time?
  
• Determine which of your marketing channels are driving the best-quality leads. Optimize resource allocation on the most productive channels.
  
• Are you adhering to lead-nurturing best practices? Which of these best practices seem obsolete?

3. Performance optimization

In the course of an audit, you might come across aborted conversion paths owing to employee attrition. With their emails still the only point of contact, customers would be trying to communicate with a particular employee. Over time, lack of response can freeze such potential conversions. But audits dig them up, and you can resurrect these lost opportunities. Not to mention the abundance of unnecessary items in your MAP, such as outdated templates, groups, profiles, lists and reports, and irrelevant data relationships—audits help uncover these vestigial artifacts.

4. Better platform utilization 

Given the complexity of MAPs, one can’t make these platforms too efficient. It’s an ongoing process, involving minor and major tweaks. 
Consider Salesforce. From working on the first version in 1999 to launching the Lightning Experience in 2015, followed by Einstein, Einstein GPT, and so on, they have been reinventing themselves in order to achieve greater efficiency. More such upgrades are certainly underway. In fact, as far as minor updates are concerned, audits reveal many hitherto unused features. From UI/UX enhancements to faster data processing to reconfiguration of reporting and workflows, these minor discoveries can be quite impactful.

Salesforce: Old vs. new

5. Staying ahead of the curve

Since the marketing landscape is evolving even as we speak, audits can help you identify emerging trends, technologies, and best practices. 

Many CRM vendors launch new features in sandbox environments, enabling users to trial them. Audits involve, among other things, going through vendors’ Release Notes. It is here that you can learn more about a platform’s rollouts (minor or major), schedules, timelines, sandbox availability, and other important notifications. Consider Microsoft’s Business Central Online, which, although not a dedicated CRM, is still instructive in the present context.

The point of trialing new features is to pre-gauge how they’re going to affect your automation workflows for real.

Components of a marketing automation audit

The key components of an MAP audit are: 

• Data health: Examining the customer data quality and accuracy across the system. “Even the cleanest CRM implementations have data issues, so don’t avoid this important step,” advises Val Riley, who is Vice President of Marketing and Strategy at Unbounce. (The cost of bad data is high. Gartner estimates it to be $12 million per year on average)

• Compliance check: Whether or not your landing pages, email templates, text messages comply with updated branding and legal requirements.
  
• Feature evaluation: Determining which new features and functionalities are expected to be added to the platform.
  
• Performance review: To identify missed opportunities, potentially lost conversions, new conversion opportunities, frictions, etc.
  
• Integrations: Are there integrations that are yet to be configured? Are new add-ons required or should existing integrations be improved?
  
• Analytics and reporting: Understanding whether you’re tracking the right metrics, both for long-term relationship building and immediate sales. 

Now, let’s learn how to do such an audit. 

How to do a marketing automation audit

You can start auditing your MAP in some of the following ways:  

1. Map out your MAP visually and share it with the stakeholders. Don’t rely on conceptual clarity alone. Others should be able to get it.
2. As your MAP evolves, both from within and without, your branding will also evolve. Audit the branding across email templates, landing pages, banner ads, text messages, etc. Test legal compliance as well.
3. Review conversion paths across marketing channels. You’re likely to hit upon aborted threads, lost customers, and suspended programs.
4. Keep an eye on new features being added to your MAP and update your visual map by adding those features wherever relevant.
5. Test user permissions. You may want to interview a candidate from each department to understand the levels of access needed.
6. Improve the usability of your MAP by bringing disparate teams on board with respect to naming conventions. Make sure every user is aware of what kind of naming convention structure you’re following on your MAP.
7. Document all changes, updates, and edits made within the MAP. 

Questions to ask during MAP audits

In the course of a marketing automation audit, ask yourself: 

• Are you actually using the right automation platform for your business?
  
• Do you have a documented audit strategy or best practices? Is there any such document in your organization’s repository?
  
• Is your CRM reflecting the latest updates, minor and major? When was the last time your team updated your CRM instance?
  
• What’s the data health of your marketing automation platform?
  
• Is social media part of your MAP or is it run and managed independent of your platform?
  
• Is your CRM well-integrated with your MAP, e-commerce platform? Is there room for improvement? If so, where?
  
• Are your landing pages and emails optimized for conversion? Do you maintain recognized email deliverability standards?
  
• Has your company analyzed funnel data to identify the stages where there’s substantial customer or prospect attrition?
  
• Does your MAP and CRM reflect all customer touchpoints, both online and offline?
  
• Is your company aware of the most productive marketing channels and content assets? Is your content production pipeline full and ready?
  
• Are you focusing on the right KPIs? How often do you adjust your KPIs to meet short-term and long-term business goals?
  
• Are there any forms on your website that are not synced to your platform and fail to feed lead information into the system?
  
• Does the team responsible for handling marketing automation need to address potential knowledge gaps?
  
• Which channels generate maximum ROI with minimal effort?
  
• How often do you review your security standards? How updated is your IT team on the latest cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities?
  
• Are all marketing channels synced up to your MAP? If not, which ones have been left out, and why?
  
• Is there a historical log of all martech solutions hitherto implemented?
  
• Does the current MAP edition provide accurate, actionable, and granular insights consistently? 

And so on. Most of these questions come up naturally mid-audit, but there are times when you need to connect the dots and extend your inquiry. 

Wrapping up!

Using a platform is not enough—are you also upgrading and optimizing it from time to time? That’s the question. Using an automation platform that is up-to-the-minute is indispensable to your business. 

Many companies don’t recognize the need for an audit unless there are signs of a performance slump, lower productivity, overmanning, etc. But you don’t want to wait till you’ve accrued enough technical debt. 

Instead, you should be doing regular audits since not just technology and CRM vendors, but your organization is in a state of flux as well. 

Which is why an audit is the first step of our own six-tier marketing model (see below), which has been designed to help businesses like yours. 

Next up, catch our expert post on marketing automation best practices.