Analyze Audience Data

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Identify data optimization guidelines.
Use Automation Studio for data creation.
Optimize API data.

Data Drives Email

Regardless of the size of your audience or the send method, data drives email. The simplest email, whether audience- or event-driven, requires a subscriber email address at the very least.

But most sends require more than an email address. For example, event-driven sends often pass data via API call to be added to an email. For audience-driven sends, audiences are often segmented into a data extension just before a send.

And data used for personalization within emails can be stored in multiple locations. When an email gets sent, the system has to analyze all of that data before it can leave Marketing Cloud Engagement’s servers. The more complex and more spread out the data is, the slower the processing.

Clean Data Is Fast Data

Do yourself a favor and make a commitment to data hygiene. Remove data that is incorrect, incomplete, improperly formatted, or duplicated in your company’s database of record. If you need to get emails out fast, you don’t want to spend precious time building emails for subscribers who won’t receive them.

The easiest thing you can do to improve the performance of your audience-driven sends is to scrub your list of held and unsubscribed subscribers. It’s simple math—a smaller audience means faster processing.

The same holds true for content testing. Engaged audiences equal better test results. Make it a priority to review your subscriber list regularly and only send campaigns to engaged subscribers. Making regular data quality improvements should be a best practice, no matter how fast your emails need to be sent.

Optimize Data Extensions

Now that your data is clean, how can you improve your audience data for a specific send? In cases where timeliness is important, start by reviewing how you store and prepare data for your campaign. In general, you should front-load data and store it in a single data extension—specifically, the sendable data extension targeted by the send. Why? To avoid slow processing times that can occur when a send is pulling data from many places. Here are some more data extension tips to speed up your send.

Create a dedicated copy of the original data extension and isolate just the data needed for that send into its own data extension. Because in the sendable data extension, all of the data values in a subscriber's row don’t require additional processing time. Not only does organizing the necessary data into a single row help reduce send time, it also helps reduce script complexity. This eliminates slow procedures like Lookup function calls. So it’s a good practice whether you’re sending an audience-driven email or you are creating a new journey in Journey Builder.

Use data retention. How do you manage all those copied data extensions for your email sends? Don’t let your data extensions get out of control. Establish and manage a data retention policy. Also, use local folders to isolate data extensions based on a specific business unit or use a shared data extensions folder for specific analysis and segmentation.

Avoid entry filters in Journey Builder. When a journey includes an entry filter, the speed at which contacts are admitted in the journey is lower. To improve hourly processing, create a filtered audience outside of Journey Builder.

Avoid using the same data extension for multiple activities. If you can’t create a copy, make sure the audience data extension is not being used for another journey or an Automation Studio activity like an import, report, or send log.

For more data optimization tips, check out the Optimizing a SQL Query Activity.

Use Automation Studio

For campaigns that require the fastest sending, try using Automation Studio to create your audience. Using Automation Studio, you can create a daily automation to build your audience based on a Query or Filter activity well in advance of your send. Automation Studio is a powerful tool that can be used for many purposes and it’s important to follow some best practices.

Avoid conflicting processes. Review your automations and identify potential overlap. Do you have send activities that share the same data extension for their audience? Does one send target the data extension and another use it for suppression? If so, ensure these automations do not overlap based upon scheduled start time and typical time to operate. Consider consolidating the two send activities into a single automation where each activity has its own step. This ensures they don’t overlap and they work together efficiently. Also keep an eye out for shared data extensions, since they can be used in automations found in different business units.

Prioritize automations. Some automations have activities that need to occur around a specific time of day. Other automations may be able to run at any time, just as long as they run daily. Avoid clustering automations around the same time each day. Even if these automations do not have directly conflicting processes (as mentioned earlier), the extra workload to the system could cause errors or inefficient performance. By identifying the most critical processes during each time period, it’s easier to identify which lower priority processes can be moved to run at less busy time periods.

Review query activities. Query activities have the greatest ability to manipulate data. This makes them a useful tool, but query activities can cause problems if they aren’t using SQL best practices. As a rule, your SQL should minimize the data being processed. For technical marketers, be aware that SQL code performs best with designated index fields. If possible, isolate fields referenced in function calls (JOIN, WHERE, GROUP BY, and ORDER BY) to indexed fields.

Need help optimizing your query? For best practices and tips, review Optimize the Query Activity.

Segment Audiences with Data Cloud

Another option for creating audiences independent from your email send, is to use Data Cloud. Not only does it offer better data analysis and segmentation capabilities, but Data Cloud audiences can also be activated and used directly in a Marketing Cloud Engagement journey or an Automation Studio send.

Learn more about Data Cloud in the trail, Explore Data Cloud.

Optimize Data Passed by API

Let’s shift our focus to emails using data via an API. You don’t need to be an API developer to understand that API calls can impact send performance. While script-based HTTPGet calls can be used to retrieve data about your customers during a send, this can unnecessarily slow down email builds. If you are passing data via an API request to Salesforce, follow these recommendations.

Recommendation	Why It’s Important	Considerations
Gather all needed data before making the API request.	API-based sending is measured in seconds. While a few seconds is tolerable, valuable time is wasted by gathering data during a send.	HTTPGet or similar procedures used in scripted message content can add many seconds to campaigns. For high-volume campaigns, remote systems may struggle to process their response to the HTTPGet, resulting in errors in both systems.
Avoid large request payloads.	APIs are optimized for quick data exchanges. Large payloads can add significant processing time to each message sent and can cause performance issues.	Subscriber counts in the thousands are best handled using a file-based FTP process. Large attribute payloads (anything above a few kilobytes per subscriber) are better handled by building Content Blocks (for content data like HTML) or preloading to a Data Extension (for attribute or dimension data).
Transfer only what is needed for the send.	All of the data captured from the event that triggers an API request may not be needed for the personalization or decision-making used in the send. Adding unnecessary data increases transit and processing time, exposes unnecessary error potential, and can clutter data stores within Salesforce.	The integrated API application should be aware of those data points needed by Salesforce. Other data values provided to this application, during a form submission for example, could be stored locally or removed from the payload sent to Marketing Cloud Engagement. If that data happens to be useful for other campaigns, only provide it as part of data transfer efforts for those campaigns.

Discuss these topics with your developer to see what can be done to help improve the performance of API-based emails.

Curious about performance improvements specifically in Journey Builder? Review the help article, Optimize Sending in Journey Builder.

That’s a lot of info about data, now let’s look at content improvements.