4 Unexpected Factors That Can Boost Your Marketing Teamwork

Marketing is an ongoing group project. The success of every campaign, deliverable, and overall marketing plan depends on effective teamwork. Teamwork is about more than people on the team getting along. Data governance, email reputation, and invoice management can make your marketing team efficient.  

Find out 4 moments from Stampli team that will improve your marketing team performance.

Equal Access to Data and Insights

Data and insights are vital for marketing efforts. How else are you supposed to know if your campaigns are paying off? Cooperation within the team and between other departments is needed to understand and use the relevant data. Keeping a whole team on the same page is hard when not everyone can access the data and insights they need to make projects work. 

Giving everyone the access they need means making a point of preventing data silos, investing in data orchestration, and building a culture of sharing data while protecting its security. 

Identify Your Data Silos

Data silos are specific data collections owned, managed, and accessed by one group of users within a business. This group could be one department or, in the worst cases, one person. Though data silos cause obvious problems in companies, they’re surprisingly common. 

Most companies don’t build data silos on purpose. Instead, they often develop over time and aren’t noticeable until they become problematic. Growing diversity of data, using redundant software tools, company culture, and outdated organizational structure can all contribute to building them. 

Here are some ways you can find your data silos before they become a problem:

• Talk to employees about their concerns with poor or inconsistent data
• Check-in with leaders who work together to see who struggles to share data 
• Ask IT for a list of data platforms to see if you’re using any duplicate or similar tools
• Ask IT for the most common complaints about data sourcing or accuracy 

A Culture of Data Governance

Data governance is creating and maintaining standards for effective data management. An effective data governance strategy establishes processes, tools, roles, and metrics that ensure data security, accuracy, availability, and usability. 

Follow these steps to build your data governance strategy:

Create clearly defined policies

Ensuring data is shared with all the parties that need it and maintaining data security starts with setting clear and specific policies about how you will manage and use data in the future and who will be in charge of its management. Ensure these policies account for when the person in charge isn’t around. For example, you wouldn’t want your data work interrupted because the point person is on vacation. 

Set standardization metrics

Keeping your data and insights high-quality is another important aspect of data governance. Decide on metrics you will consistently use to measure your data quality. 

Make a plan for security and integration

Next, you need to plan for keeping your data secure and integrating it between teams and tools. Ensure the different software tools you use are compatible with one another and meet the security needs of your business. When you’re doing this evaluation, it is also a good time to cut software redundancies. 

Read also: The 36 statistics on how chatbot for businesses grow your revenue in 2023

Create a data reporting system

Even the best systems run into problems. Ensure employees working with company data and insights know who to tell when there’s a problem. Whether it’s a problem they can fix on their own or needs help from another team, it’s important to keep records of anything data-related that goes wrong. 

This open line of communication is particularly important when your marketing team is working toward specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), and their success in campaigns is measured by how they do against those KPIs.

Train employees on best practices

Once you’ve established your data governance and management plans, it’s time to train existing and new employees on them. Help employees in all departments understand how to work with the data and apply the insights. 

There’s also a great opportunity for cross-training here — especially between sales and marketing departments. Each department should understand the main metrics the other uses and how those metrics are measured so there’s a common language between departments.

The more empowered your employees feel to do the jobs they’ve been hired to do, the more likely your employee retention stays strong, and the more likely your marketing efforts will be cohesive and consistent.

Conduct reviews for your processes regularly

There’s always room for improvement in any company process. No matter how well thought out your planning was, it’s important to evaluate what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change regularly. This review process could be annually or quarterly, depending on your company’s size and your data needs’ complexity. 

A Good Email Sender Reputation

Email marketing has remained an essential marketing method for good reason. It’s inexpensive, effective, and fairly easy to manage. But those emails must get past spam filters and into your subscribers’ inboxes. Fortunately, you have some control over this. Building and maintaining a good email sender reputation prevents emails from your business from being flagged as spam. 

What is Email Sender Reputation?

Email Sender Reputation is a score that internet service providers assign to businesses from 0 to 100. The lower your score, the more likely the provider will send your emails to spam. You can perform a sender reputation check on sites including, but not limited to, SenderScore, Google Postmaster Tools, and Mail Tester. A score of 70 or higher is good. 

Read also: 17 Zendesk alternative services and 13 live chat alternatives to try this year

What Can Damage Your Email Sender Reputation?

Providers assign an email sender reputation score to an incoming email based on different factors.

These include, but are not limited to: 

• Low open rates
• High bounce rates
• High unsubscribe rates
• Spam complaints
• A high number of invalid email addresses in your list

How Can You Improve Your Email Sender Reputation?

You may not be able to directly control the number of people who open your emails or unsubscribe from your list, but there are actions you can take to create valuable emails that reach people who want to open them, like…

Include the recipient’s name in the subject line

What draws a person’s attention more than their name? Including the recipient’s first name in the subject line raises the open rate by 50%. Even if thousands of people receive the same email, this touch makes it feel personalized. 

Segment your email list

Only some people who subscribe to your email list need to get every email. Making smaller email lists for categories like location, place in the conversion funnel, and specific products or services they already use keeps your emails relevant to the recipient. The more relevant the emails are to subscribers, the less likely they are to unsubscribe. 

Read also:
10 conversion rate optimization tools to enhance your funnel and boost revenue
15 best lead generation services to grow your base in 2023
The secret weapon of your competitors or Why you should focus on customer service first

Send good quality, valuable emails

Don’t send spammy emails if you don’t want your emails to get categorized as spam. It sounds simple, but it’s important!

If your subscribers get an endless thread of promotional emails, they’ll find it annoying and unsubscribe. Find a balance between promotional and informative content. Avoid overly promotional words like “BUY NOW” or “LIMITED TIME OFFER.” All caps and overuse of exclamation points can be spammy. 

Only email people who opted in 

No one wants to get promotional emails that they didn’t sign up for. So don’t buy email lists from other companies for the sake of gaining subscribers. Plenty of legitimate ways to grow your email list include placing subscribe links on your website and in your employees’ email signatures, offering a discount to new customers who subscribe, and promoting it on your social media. 

Use an email verification tool

An email verification tool can delete invalid email addresses from your list. Use it frequently to make sure your emails are going to real people. 

Ask subscribers for feedback 

The best way to determine if your subscribers find your emails valuable is to ask them. Send out a survey to your subscribers to get feedback on what they like, dislike, and want more of from your emails. To get more responses, enter people who complete it into a drawing for a prize. 

Automating Your Invoice Management

Changing a process in another department can directly affect the marketing team’s efficiency. 

For example, the payroll process affects every part of a business. Though effective invoice management is vital for any department, it’s common for companies to work with freelancers instead of in-house employees. This diversity of talent can make payroll less straightforward. Automating your invoice management process can make the process from receiving an invoice to paying it smoother for everyone. You can also choose from professional invoices that best suit your specific requirements. Learning more about payroll automation and how a payroll system can help can also help with invoice management. Onpay’s guide can make the process of calculating payroll taxes so much easier.

Read also: Customer engagement strategy template to create omnichannel campaigns

What is Accounts Payable Automation?

Accounts Payable Automation, or AP Automation, is not a replacement for a human accountant but a tool to handle routine payroll tasks. That way, businesses can save time and money, and accounts payable employees can be freed up for more complex tasks. 

Benefits of AP Automation

Here are some benefits and features that make AP automation a more efficient choice for managing your invoices for employees and freelancers alike:

• A more streamlined purchase order (PO)
• Automatic fraud detection
• Compatibility with various payment options
  • Check
  • Corporate credit card
  • ACH
• Integrations with existing payroll systems 

Boosting your marketing teamwork is bigger than the people who make up the team and even the work of marketing. The examples of data security, email sender reputation, and invoice management show that no department is an island, and other teams making their processes more efficient can help make your marketing team a well-oiled machine.