If you didn’t use your holiday time to plan for the next 12 months, it’s not too late to create your marketing automation strategy resolutions for 2024!

Planning your marketing automation strategy can seem overwhelming at first glance, but if you dedicate the time to enhance your usage of your marketing automation platform’s features and create a scheduled and custom test plan, you’ll be well on your way to crushing your marketing automation goals this year.

Enhance the Usage of Your MAP’s Features

Marketing automation platforms are extremely powerful. They have a lot of features to help you automate your marketing execution, but because of their vast intricacies, marketers often don’t use MAPs to their fullest extent.

If you are hoping to get more out of your marketing automation platform, start by creating a list of features you have not used or want to improve your usage of. Then, start to pair up the list of features you want to improve your usage of with the campaigns and initiatives that make the most sense throughout the year using an actual calendar (and don’t take on your most daunting features during your busiest time of year).

Try working with a new feature or improving the usage of an existing feature at least every other month, and by the end of the year, you will have leveraged or improved your usage of at least six of your marketing automation platform features.

Now Let’s Talk About Testing

Every marketing manager should create their own test plan for the year. Consider the testing that has already been done and what you know about what works, and doesn’t work, in your marketing, then consider what you don’t know or haven’t tried yet.

Make a list of tests you want to run and the questions you want to answer about what will work in your marketing efforts. Common testing areas include subject, text-heavy vs image-heavy, long text vs short text, audience/message/topic/timing combinations, “from” names and addresses, and frequency. Look at your campaign schedule for the year (you can use the same calendar you created for feature usage enhancement) and add tests to your calendar to align with your marketing efforts. Each marketing manager should be running at least one test per month.

Also, consider building more advanced tests on top of previous tests to drive more granular learnings. For example, if you find out whether text-heavy or text-light performs better in one test, your next test can determine whether the previous winner performs better across various audience segments, giving you multidimensional results optimized for your audience.

By setting up an effective marketing automation strategy calendar; implementing new features; enhancing your usage of existing features; planning and executing tests regularly; and analyzing, optimizing, and documenting your results throughout the year, you’ll be setting your marketing up for great success this year.

If you need some assistance getting your marketing automation strategy up and running, give us a call to learn how we can help!