Is it Time to Spring Clean your Account Engagement?

Now that Spring has sprung and the sunshine is finally starting to make an appearance, there is no better time to clear out your clutter and tidy up that bulging wardrobe. And your Account Engagement account is no different! We have updated our Spring Cleaning blog for 2023.

Whether you’ve been using Account Engagement for 3 months or 3 years, over time your account can become full of old templates, inactive prospects or inaccurate information.

There are many ways you can keep on top of your Account to make sure you continue to run a successful Marketing Automation system – see below for our top tips.

Sending Emails

• Are your email domains authenticated? This gives Account Engagement permission to send emails from your domain and ensure they don’t end up in the spam filters. Check whether your email domains are verified by going to Admin > Overview. If your email sending domain is already verified using DKIM, after the Spring 23 Release the domain will show as Legacy Verified. Learn more about email domain validation in our guide here.

• Do your emails have any rendering issues? Are they mobile-friendly? If you’re not familiar with how to code emails, head on to our guide we’ve put together with best practices, resources, and HTML generators to get you started. Are you using Engagement Studio? There are many lead nurture campaigns that you could look to run on both new and existing prospects – see the 6 common use cases for Engagement Studio here.
• Are you using the new Email Builder for Lightning Experience? We have created a series of blog posts covering all aspects of the new Email Builder that you can view here.

Forms

• Are your forms optimised for conversions? There are a few things you can do to help increase conversions on your forms:
  1. Ask for a suitable number of fields in relation to what the prospect is going to receive i.e. a prospect may be willing to give more information if the content they are looking to download is a high-value research paper.
  2. Customise your Submit button text to include a compelling call-to-action. Relate it to what the prospect is going to get by submitting their details.

  Style your forms so they are easy for the prospect to enter information and click on the all important Submit button. If you’re not familiar with or don’t have internal resources to build sophisticated, complex form Layout Templates and aren’t sure where to start, get in touch with us.

• Are you opting-in new prospects according to GDPR guidelines? Read our article about GDPR and Privacy Policies here.
• Are you using progressive profiling? If you have multiple forms across your website and Account Engagement landing pages, you could use progressive profiling to increase the amount of data that you collect over time. Read our previous blog post “Improve Form Conversion Rates with Progressive Profiling” here.

Syncing with Salesforce

• Check for any Sync Errors between your prospect records and the corresponding Salesforce record by going to Settings, Connectors and select the action cog next to the Salesforce connector, and select ‘Sync Errors’ from the drop down. The most common reasons for syncing errors are due to validation rules in Salesforce i.e. if a field is mandatory on creation of a lead or a field has particular picklist values, then Account Engagement will be subject to the same data entry validation. Read our article here on how to resolve the most common sync errors.
  
  
• Audit how and where you are getting new sources of data. Are you collecting or importing data with consistent values? Do they match your validation rules in Salesforce?
• Ensure you add any new sales reps as users to Account Engagement so that the prospect assignments remain in sync i.e. if Joe Bloggs owns a lead in Salesforce, he should also own the prospect in Account Engagement.

Personalisation

• Personalisation and targeting starts with data – do you know what you need to know about your prospects in order to personalise their journey? Consider what would be useful to know – can you start including that field on forms to update their profile based on what page they visit? i.e. if a prospect is on a particular product page when they enquire, you could update their Product Interest field using JavaScript.
• Have you upgraded to Handlebars Merge Language (HML)?Read our blog here to understand more about the capabilities of this feature and how it can affect any of your existing variable tags.
• Consider which content is most useful to your prospects depending on their industry, job title or role in the decision-making process. Repurpose existing content or create smaller bite-size chunks of content to see how your prospects engage with it before you commission any new pieces of content.   

Lead Qualification

• Are you using scoring to qualify your leads? Create an automation rule to set a ‘Marketing Qualified Lead’ threshold and assign it to a user, group, queue or Salesforce assignment rule.

• What if inactive leads still have a high score? Decay score over a period of time if a prospect has been inactive for over a year.
  

• Start to think about grading so that you can begin to prioritise your leads on not only how interested they are in you (i.e. score) but also how interested you are in them (i.e. grade). See more at the Scoring & Grading Lab from Account Engagement here.

Account management

• Moved office? Got a new Account Engagement Administrator? Make sure your account details are up-to-date by navigating to your Account Settings and ensuring that Service Notifications are going to the right person.

• If you are using ’Assigned User’ or ‘User’ mail merge values in your email templates, then make sure your sales reps details are correct in their user settings. Navigate to Admin > User Management and Users to check their details.
  
  

• Check that your third-party connectors are verified by going to Admin > Connectors. Any that are unverified will require up-to-date log-in credentials.