It’s holiday time and we are releasing a stocking-stuffer Marketo tip a day this week to make you a little more productive. Before you take off for the holidays, consider doing a few of these before dipping into the Eggnog and sipping some champagne.

Today, we kickoff with some tips around how handle alerts around the holidays.

• Monday: Take a Break from Holiday Alerts
• Tuesday: Pause Your Nurture Conversation
• Wednesday:  Gain Intelligence from Your Holiday OOO Replies
• Thursday: Tis the Season: Backfill Intelligence and Data
• Friday: Delete the Junk Before the New Year

Take a Break from Lifecycle Holiday Alerts

Sales and Marketing love alerts that trigger when key events occur. For certain activities, you might want to consider putting a hold on some of those.

For example, if your organization is utilizing a No Lead Left Behind process, it’s unlikely Sales will follow up with active leads over the holidays in a timely fashion. You’ll probably want to disable alerts for some of the following activities.

• Overdue MQLs. These alerts usually hit reps and their managers after a certain amount of time if the lead is not reviewed. You don’t want these hitting Christmas morning. There is enough friction between Marketing and Sales without having reps log in on a holiday morning to prevent uncontacted MQL alerts from firing.
• Leads Not Called. If a Sales rep puts the lead into an active stage such as Attempting Contact stage but fails to log an activity, this alert can trigger depending on how your system is setup.
• Stagnant Leads. Here, leads are sitting in a certain stage for too long which can trigger notifications to management.

How to Put a Hold on Marketo Alerts

Think of this method as the master switch to your lead alert system. Yes, you could get more accurate but here are a few quick and easy ways to make sure alerts don’t go out.

Option 1. Turn off the Alert

Go into the alert campaign in Marketo, Salesforce or your platform of choice and disable it before the holidays. Then reenable it after the holidays.

If you have a simple flow step or workflow that only sends the single alert, this might be your best bet. Obviously, keep a running list of campaigns you adjusted so you can go back later and reenable.

This method can get tricky if other flow steps like Sync to Salesforce, Increase Lead Score, etc are part of the campaign. Additionally, people may already live in the flow step from a few days ago meaning alerts would still fire. That leads to option #2.

Option 2. Create a Vacation Removal Campaign

For many companies, #1 won’t work because their alert system has multiple flow steps timed to occur over several days. In this case, create a campaign that removes members daily. This allows you to keep the original alert system in place but ensures the alerts never get sent during the holiday time period.

Follow the steps below to prevent those alerts from happening.

Have a special trick for your alert system? Let us know.

The post Stocking Stuffer Marketo Tip #1 – Take a Break from Holiday Alerts appeared first on RevEngine Marketing.