How do you use lessons learned from previous campaigns to inform future strategies?

I highly recommend building rituals around campaign briefs, kickoff meetings, project check-ins, and retrospectives. Essentially, you'll want to consistently convey what is working and what isn't working on a regular cadence.

This not only helps inform future strategies but also aids in developing organizational alignment and creating an effective feedback loop. It's also important to document these feedback loops for future use and to disseminate performance across the broader team.

Separately but related, I am a big proponent of low-investment and time-bound experiments. In this scenario, once I have collected enough positive signals, I then use this data to inform a more fleshed-out campaign as I have the data to support it.

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 in feedback from customers or prospects. My retrospectives usually follow a similar format: What did we say we would do, what did we actually do, and now what do we want to do differently going forward?

You should time the retrospectives to be IN ADVANCE of the next quarter's planning, so that you can bring in the learnings from the last quarter into the next quarter's plan. What this looks like practically is that you are often already planning the Q+1 when you are reviewing the most recent results. For example: By January 15 you want to do the retro for Q4's email performance, covering October-December. If your Q2 starts on March 1, you probably want to have your quarterly plan set no later than Feb 1 (30 days before the quarter starts). That means you are using Q4 email results to inform Q2 strategies - but if you are doing this on a rolling basis each quarter you are always finding ways to iterate and improve on what you've done in the past.

Finally, I think it's important to leverage lateral thinking and work to apply learnings from across the organization to your campaigns. For example, you should be paying attention to your competitive win rates and what's happening with win/loss reporting, as you can then bring those trends into your marketing campaigns for the next quarter.