When to Use Recurring Batch Smart Campaigns
There are two types of smart campaigns in Marketo; trigger campaigns that run every time a defined action happens or batch campaigns that collects people based on defined criteria and runs once. Batch campaigns can also be set on recurring schedules.
Why Use a Batch Campaign
A batch campaign can be used when an immediate action isn’t needed. Trigger campaigns increase the load on the system so anytime you can use batch campaigns instead, it is recommended. You can also schedule batch campaigns to run overnight or during periods of low activity.
I like to use recurring batch campaigns for data cleansing and normalization. These are things that don’t necessarily need to be addressed in the moment. The benefit of batch campaigns is that it can reduce the load on the system t
Normalizing State Values
You can see states comes through in various ways. If you are only using Marketo forms to collect data then the solution is easy by forcing the data you want to see. Normally, there are other ways that data flows into Marketo. You may see states come through spelled out completely (Wisconsin) or abbreviated (WI). Whichever one you prefer to use is fine as long as you keep it consistent. For this example, we will want to use an abbreviation. In the smart list, I would put:
State is:
- Alabama
- Alaska
- Arizona
- Arkansas
- California
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Florida
- Georgia
- Hawaii
- Idaho
- Illinois
- Indiana
- Iowa
- Kansas
- Kentucky
- Louisiana
- Maine
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Minnesota
- Mississippi
- Missouri
- Montana
- Nebraska
- Nevada
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- North Carolina
- North Dakota
- Ohio
- Oklahoma
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- Rhode Island
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
Now here is where it will take some time but it will be well worth it. In the flow step, we have to create 51 choices to the ‘Change Data Value’ step. So for choice 1, it should read:
If State Is Alabama
Attribute: State New Value: AL
You have to do this for each state.
Normalizing Country Values
Similar to states, people from the United States may appear as
- US
- U.S.
- USA
- U.S.A
- United States
- United States of America
There are probably more and these are all different values in Marketo. I created a recurring batch campaign to handle this issue so that every week, I look for the value in the bullets above and then change the data value in the flow step to ‘USA’.
You can use these types of campaigns any time you are seeing similar but different data for specific fields. Job titles would be another field you could do this for so that VP and Vice President and normalized and so you don’t have 5,000 different job titles in your instance.
Recurring batch campaigns are a great way to keep your database clean while also reducing the load on the system so you have a lean, mean, marketing machine.
