Checklist for Marketing Cloud Beginners

Your Marketing Cloud person leaves and you're the one who takes over. What do you do next?

As an "accidental Marketing Cloud Admin" or whatever you want to call it, it's your job to:

• Learn Marketing Cloud

• Pick it up fast enough to get value from it

• Build campaigns that your company will benefit from

That was my life back in 2017.

Our internal Marketing Cloud expert went to work at an agency and nobody at the company knew what he did.

So 2 weeks into my new Salesforce admin job, my manager called me into her office and asked if I could learn this foreign tool I'd never heard about called Marketing Cloud.

I jumped in, got frustrated, took a Salesforce class, read documentation, got my hands on the tool, learned from an amazing mentor, and the rest is history.

To make a long story short, I've been working in Marketing Cloud for nearly 10 years and know your pain.

This checklist is meant to help you out if you don't know where to start.

So let's get going.

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What to do first.

Real quick... If you want hands on practice with Marketing Cloud, you should check out the Marketing Cloud Growth Program. It'll get you up to speed in Marketing Cloud and teach you everything you need to know if you're a beginner.

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This is a super practical Marketing Cloud checklist.

Answer the questions and you'll get up to speed really fast with your Marketing Cloud account.

It'll be challenging, but you'll ramp up super fast.

You can follow the checklist step by step or you can take the parts you like and apply them to your situation.

Here you go.

When you first get logged into Marketing Cloud, there's a few things to do.

This is your Marketing Cloud checklist:

1. Find out who your Marketing Cloud Account Executive (AE) is.

   1. Get their name, email, phone number.

   2. Call them and find out what they sold to the company.

   3. How many contacts are you paying for?

   4. Why did the company buy Marketing Cloud in the first place?

2. Find out what kind of customer support you have

   1. Do you have signature success?

   2. If yes, that means you have dedicated Salesforce support.

   3. This is crucial to know

3. Level set with your manager

   1. What does your manager want you to do in Marketing Cloud?

   2. You can send emails, text messages, App messages (if your company has their own IOS or Android app).

4. See what journeys you’re running

   • What messages are being sent in the journeys?

   • How many journeys do you have?

   • What triggers the journeys?

   • How often does each journey run?

   • What’s the goal of each journey?

   • What is the criteria for someone to enter the journey?

   • How does each journey tie into your overall business goals?

5. Who’s in charge of bringing data into marketing cloud?

   • How is data coming into marketing cloud?

   • Manually with CSV files?

   • Through Marketing Cloud Connect?

   • API’s?

   • How frequently is data coming in from each place?

   • What data is coming in ?

   • Why is that data coming in?

   • What business objective is each data source solving for?

   • How is it helping you achieve business goals?

6. Is there a default or custom preference center?

   • Which one is the company using?

   • Who created the custom preference center if they have one?

   • How long ago was it created?

   • If someone unsubscribes, do they unsubscribe from all emails, or just certain categories of emails?

   • Does the preference center align with the business objectives?

   • Does every email have a link to the correct preference center URL?

7. What does the business want to achieve with Marketing Cloud?

   1. What does success look like?

   2. What are the Quarterly marketing objectives?

   3. What metrics (data) are used to track those objectives?

   4. What is your role in helping achieve that (get specific)

8. Is Marketing Cloud talking with Salesforce CRM or a CRM in general?

   • What data is being sent into Marketing Cloud from the CRM?

   • What data is being sent into the CRM from Marketing Cloud?

   • How often is data going back and forth between the two systems?

   • Who controls the connection between the two systems? 

   • What is the username, password, and email for that connection between the two systems (hint - that’s a marketing cloud connect type of question).

9. What’s the structure of the email content?

   • Where are the emails sitting at that we send to customers?

   • What message are we saying in each email?

   • What’s the goal of each email? What journey do they fit into?

   • Is there personalized content in the emails? AMPscript, Personalization strings, Dynamic Content?

   • What is dynamic content, AMPscript, Personalization strings (this is where the MC growth program can help you learn)

10. Are there any reports we need to keep track of?

    • How many emails are we sending per week?

    • How many emails per day?

    • How many unsubscribes are we getting per week? Or per journey?

    • How many people are saying we’re SPAM?

    • How many people opened emails but didn’t click? What can we fix?

    • How many people are not opening our emails and haven’t opened in the past 90 days but have been subscribed for at least 90 days?

    • Who needs to get this emails?

    • Should we send out of the box reports to managers?

    • Do we have Marketing Cloud Intelligence and should we set that up to send reports?

11. Understand what you’re paying for

    • How many contacts do we have

    • How many email subscribers in Email Studio do we have?

    • How many business units do we have?

    • What is each business unit used for?

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I hope this helps.

If you want hands on practice and want to see real world Marketing Cloud projects with practice data so you can see all this in action, check out the Marketing Cloud Growth Program. It'll get you up to speed in Marketing Cloud and teach you everything you need to know if you're a beginner.

That's all I got for ya today,

Kaelan Moss - MinuteAdmin out ✌🏽

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PS - hit me up on LinkedIn if you want help with a project or need career guidance.