AMA: Heap Vice President, Marketing Acquisition & Growth, Sheena Sharma on Campaign Operations

I think that strategically, there are definitely some things that make sense to work from a centralized perspective: Ex. global lead scoring, tech stack integrations, lead routing, website operations. Then, there are places where decentralized operations make sense, especially as it relates to regional demand generation programs that need to be localized - emails, events, field, campaign activities. It became not scalable for us at Eventbrite at a certain point to have a single email marketing m ...Read More

Typically, I've seen this fall under marketing operations. There have been cases where marketing operations owns more of the tech stack, integrations, and programs like scoring and database management, and campaign operations + execution sits within the demand generation teams. I've seen a decentralized model work well for global organizations, where you need coverage across different time zones and for different channel and campaign needs. In general, if you can have more than one person on Mar ...Read More

Clear QA processes and approval processes. At Envoy we actually created a Google Form that at least one person (who didn't build the campaign/email) had to fill out to confirm that every critical QA element was covered (ex. subject line, correct links, correct targeting on emails). AND, we had a different person who was the official approver who could say the email was good to go AFTER they had seen the email QA come through. Realistic SLAs for (1) acknowledging requests and (2) resolving or com ...Read More

I have a three-pronged strategy that works pretty well: And that's the concept of (1) quarterly plans, (2) documented strategic briefs for every campaign and (3) quarterly retrospectives. I love the concept of quarterly retrospectives, where you revisit your strategy (which should always be clearly documented), and reflect on the performance of your campaign. You should include both quantitative results, as well as collecting qualitative feedback from internal stakeholders, as well as bringing i ...Read More

I think A/B testing and evaluating statistical significance is obviously the highest fidelity type of testing you can do, but in the startup world I find that the speed with which you can test and learn is limited if you solely rely on A/B tests. I have found that thinking about things from an MVP perspective (minimum viable product/project) can help you learn and iterate more quickly. For example, if you are launching a new type of email program to see if triggered emails do better than traditi ...Read More