Today, we’re wrapping up the deep dive into my 4-Part System for ensuring your automation programs are always 100. Let’s talk about the Quarterly Check-In.
If you can’t already tell, I really like my systems.
I don’t want to broadcast errors, and I don’t like to leave money on the table; simple, effective systems help me and the businesses I work with avoid both of those scenarios.
I touched briefly on the importance of regular quality control in the previous post in this series, and you’ll notice I encourage you to create a CALENDAR REMINDER every 90 days or so to run your automation programs through QC again. Today, I’ll talk a little more about how you can avoid automated campaign errors errors and increase your program effectiveness in just 2-4 hours every three months!
Put Automation Programs Check-In on the calendar!
Block out and hold as sacred half a day for your systems check. If you don’t use the whole time, no big deal. Blocking out half of a day ensures that you aren’t getting double booked, subsequently putting off this important element of your automation program’s success. It’s the absolute easiest thing in this whole system to do: put 4 hours on your calendar right now. I can wait.
Ask for help.
The best part about this level of planning ahead is that it gives you plenty of time to secure the support of another party (or two) to help with the quality control. Getting another person, whether they be inside your business or a trusted friend, to go through your automation program process from start to finish is a wonderful way to get feedback on what works as wekk as what might not be so intuitive, so that you can make small tweaks to get even better performance out of your campaigns. Bonus? Make it fun (for you both!) by ordering in lunch or opening up a nice bottle of wine (if you’re a solopreneur like me, this can be a very powerful motivator, and you don’t have to worry about ticking off anybody in HR).
Think of somebody whose opinion you value or who has a keen eye for details, and invite them to be your QC buddy. Go ahead, text them now!
With your dedicated time block created and your QC buddy confirmed, the pre-work is done. But when the big day arrives, what do you do with 2-4 hours?
Sample Systems Check Agenda
- 1 hour – user experience audit with QC buddy
- 1 hour – running all programs through QC
- 1 hour – making program adjustments
- 1 hour – Stack!
Tell me more about a user experience audit, Erica
Don’t mind if I do!
Have your QC buddy go through any automation programs that are triggered by an action. Have them sign-up for email through your online form, or click a specific link in a campaign to trigger another campaign. Ask along the way for feedback on whether things make sense, or if the information they are receiving makes sense based on their experience. Consider asking after they’ve reviewed an email campaign, “What do you think is most valuable to you in this email?” “What does my business want you to do next?” “What could my business include in this communication that would really wow you as a customer?”
Getting this kind of feedback helps you identify where you could be losing your customers, what information is resonating, if your message is actually effectively driving to your goals, and how you can optimize and improve to make your customer’s experience even better!
I’m pretty loose and conversational in this section of the system, but if you love you some agendas-inside-of-agendas, you could include timed activities, such as seeing how long it takes for a user to find or fill out a form, or giving them a little 3-5 question post-campaign review survey. You could even gamify the whole experience by creating scoring mechanisms for each campaign in the audit, assigning value to certain criteria, and seeing what your “score” is at the end of the experience.
Have fun with it, with the goal of learning what is and isn’t working, and make note of opportunities based on the feedback of your QC buddy.
At this point in the agenda, your QC buddy’s work is done. I like to put this part at the beginning of the agenda so that I’m using the remaining hours in my time block to implement any key insights. Finish up the lunch, high five your QC buddy and thank them for their feedback, then move on to…
Run each automation program campaign through the QC Checklist.
This shouldn’t take as long as it did when you initially did your quality control. You don’t need to do as thorough of a spelling/grammar check, since ideally your copy hasn’t changed significantly. You probably don’t need to go through as much data validation, since your QC buddy knocked much of that off the list going through the user experience audit. You will want to pay attention to any seasonal messages or inventory that needs to be updated, and definitely still review a render test at minimum on your computer and your phone. Plan for about 10 minutes per campaign, and red-flag anything that needs to be corrected to tackle in the next part of our agenda.
Fix problems and optimize existing programs
Here, you’re going to be looking at three components:
- Your Data
- The feedback from your user experience audit
- Your QC checklist red flags
Let’s start by looking at your campaign performance data.
Take a look at your email metrics, paying special attention to open rate, click through of open rate, and conversion rate (if you’re selling online); compare this to your regular marketing programs and see if you’re trending above (you should be). If something doesn’t seem to be performing as you expect, it might be worth switching things up. Does your email open rate seem low? Try adding an appropriate emoji to the subject line, or test implementing personalization or leading with an ecommerce offer. Is the click rate through the roof, but your conversions aren’t following? It might be worth taking a gander at your landing page and seeing if there are opportunities to optimize the layout and messaging for conversion to the action you wish your customer to take. Maybe your click rates are low: test out more active language in your call to action, or try another color for your button.
Hot tip: With any change, have a goal or hypothesis in mind (e.g. “A red button will get more clicks than a green button” or “Buy Now” will generate more sales than “Learn More”).
If you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish, how will you know if you’ve succeeded?
Next, take into consideration the feedback you just received from your QC buddy:
Did they find the subject line of your welcome campaign to be confusing? Did they have a hard time finding a featured product, or give you input on what they THOUGHT you wanted them to do with a specific email campaign that was WAY OFF from what your actual intent was? Maybe there’s a product recommendation in your welcome campaign that they didn’t think was appropriate for the time of year (or worse, was sold out on the website)! These are all flags that you might want to make some shifts in strategy. Sometimes it is a simple tweak, and sometimes it might require additional noodling. If the bulk is simple to implement, make those changes, baby!
Finally, was there anything straight up broken during QC?
Fix it! Create a punch list of quick fixes and tweaks, and use this time to bang ‘em out!
BONUS: The Stack
Now, you may or may not be looking at one more hour left in your time block. If you are, this is the time I want you to dedicate to Stacking. You can read all about this process towards the end of the post located here. Essentially, you can use this bonus time to build on your existing programs or identify new programs you want to implement based on the results of your check-in today. Prioritize a few high-impact add-ons, such as converting your abandoned cart email into an abandoned cart series, or maybe identify some new automation programs to create based on underutilized customer data. You won’t have time to create them all during this block, but get a good list going, then allocate time in the coming weeks for the strategy, content, and implementation of the heaviest hitters.
To wrap it up and summarize:
Make a quarterly Automation Programs Check-In a calendared and sacred part of your world. Put 2-4 hours on your calendar every three months or so, invite a QC buddy along for part (or all!) of the process, and use the time to audit the overall function of your programming and make necessary adjustments based on your findings. You’ll benefit from the peace of mind that the emails running in the background of your regularly scheduled programming are looking and performing their best.
So, how often do you check in on your automated email programs? If the answer was a sheepish “never…” did I convince you today to change that?