Audit Your Account

Learning Objectives

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

• Conduct an audit of your account.
• Identify an action plan for account improvement.

Picture this: It’s Friday afternoon and you’re about to head out the door, when your boss calls you into an emergency meeting. The legal team has asked that you remove one of the emails in your welcome journey immediately. Can it be fixed tonight? Of course! How can you be sure? Because you have an account audit of all your important account communications—helping you quickly find the email you need to remove.

But what if you don't have an account audit? You're in the right place. In this module, we're here to help you become a Marketing Cloud Engagement account emergency prepper. We cover how to audit your account, identify risks, and fine-tune your data and processes to ensure your account is optimized for peak performance—exactly when you need it. 

Start with an Account Assessment

To become a prepper with an emergency action plan, you first need to conduct an account audit and risk assessment. An audit is an inspection of a person’s or organization’s accounts. Not the most appealing task for most people. However, audits are an important step in helping you proactively identify risks and fix issues. So when there is an emergency, your account is ready. A good place to start is in the Setup screen of your Marketing Cloud Engagement account. Here you will find high-level metrics of your account, including journeys, automations, data extensions, content, and users.  

While the Setup screen provides a general overview of volume for these areas, you need to dig further into your account and evaluate these specific areas in more detail. Here are some questions to consider based on account areas like journeys, automations, content, and more. 

Account Area	Questions
Journeys	How many journeys are active vs. drafts? Are there any outdated journeys that can be archived or deleted? Do your journeys have set goals?
Automations and Integrations	How many active automations are running? Do you know what each automation’s purpose is? (Send email, run a report, and so on) What automations are inactive or paused? Are there any common errors or reoccuring query failures? Are you using verification activities? Any outdated automations that can be archived or deleted? Are you using error notifications?
Data Architecture	Are you using Contact Builder? Are you using a common contact key? Are you using lists? How about data extensions? How many? Are there any outdated data extensions that can be archived or deleted? Are you using data retention? What type of data are you storing in Marketing Cloud Engagement? Any sensitive data? Are you using naming conventions for organizing?
Content	What type of content blocks are you using? Templates? HTML? Do your content blocks use a programmatic language like AMPscript or JavaScript? Does anything seem out of place, outdated, or something you want to investigate further? Are you using naming conventions to organize?
Users and Setup	How many active users are in your account? Is there anyone you don’t recognize? Are there any user accounts that should be disabled? What users have API access? How many sender profiles are set up in your account? Have you set up Alert Manager to notify an email address of sending errors?

After answering these questions, you have a good overview of your account’s status and structure. And, if you are an overachiever, you might have a list of changes you want to make or issues you want to investigate. There’s just one more step to complete your account assessment. Let’s talk about automations.

Audit Your Automations

For proper emergency preparedness, we suggest you conduct a more thorough audit of areas key to performance, like Automation Studio. No automations? No problem—feel free to skip this section. Still here? OK, let’s start by listing out all active automations in your account and what they are doing. This helps you know what’s going on in your account and provides documentation for your team (so you can take a vacation and rest easy). Here’s an example of an automation audit.

Automation Name	Automation Type	Email Information	Error Notifications	Team Notes
Campaigns> Daily Email Send	Scheduled (9 AM ET)	DailyEmailSend_Version10	null	Audience is created from a query of master subscribers. Typically 1 hour run time. Do not update DailyEmailDE in the morning.
Transactional> New Account Notifications	File Drop	AccountNotification_Version3	emailalias@example.com	Data team drops a new file into the transactional folder every other day.
Extracts> Monthly Account PerformanceExtract	Scheduled  (12 AM ET on the first day of the month)	n/a	null	Used for company reports.
Extracts> Data Update Extract	Scheduled (2 AM ET weekly on Sundays)	n/a	emailalias@example.com	Automation completes in time for Monday morning operations. Used to update our external data system used or company mailings.

Not only do you have an idea of what is currently going on in your account, your audit can help your team plan and schedule times for new automations. Knowing when your account is processing the most data can help you determine when those ad-hoc, one-time-only sends will perform best, like during a period of lower activity.

Account Red Flags

Once you are familiar with all aspects of your Marketing Cloud Engagement account, start to look for red flags that can cause performance issues, like slower email sends, failures, or even system-wide issues. Here are some common red flags you might find.

• Data risks (storing personal data, user accounts that should be disabled, and so on)
• Complicated email code that writes (insert/upserts) content at send time
• Procedures that interact with external-to-SFMC resources using HTTPGet / HTTPPost
• Data sources that need to be refreshed or validated before use
• Overall bad data or data inconsistencies
• Failing queries
• Reoccurring errors in automation or sends

With these red flags in mind, grab paper and pen or open your favorite note-taking app. It’s time to review the areas you audited, along with any notes you’ve collected, and assign a risk score to each area (think: high, medium, or low). Need some guidance on what a high risk or low risk might look like? Scoring is subjective, but you can use this scorecard to guide you as you assign a score to each account area.

Scorecard

Risk Rating	Description	Look For
High	Already is or can be a threat if not addressed.	Personal data about customers stored in data extensions Reoccurring errors or problematic procedures Multiple automation failures Old or out-of-date emails in automations Enabled Marketing Cloud Engagement users who no longer need access
Medium	Can become high risk if scale increases or if a mitigation strategy fails.	Large number of API calls being made Not following performance best practices Poor deliverability and subscriber retention Inconsistent subscriber or contact keys Data extensions that don’t use data retention Not using Data Designer/Contact Builder High subscriber volume (greater than 1 million) Manual campaign sends versus automations
Low	Not an area to focus on regarding risk mitigation but maybe worth reviewing.	Old data extensions or lists that aren’t being used No personalization in content blocks Email notifications not assigned in automations Not using helpful features in your account like campaign association tagging or Einstein Engagement Scoring No naming conventions, organization of external keys, or folder structure

Now that you’re ready to start scoring. Here’s an assessment template that you can use to document your findings.

Account Area	Specific Areas/Content	Quantity	Notes	Risk Assessment
Journeys	Active journeys
Automations and Integrations	Active automations (including imports, data extracts, file transfers, queries)
	APIs
	Triggered sends
Content	Email templates
	HTML paste emails
	AMPscript blocks
	Dynamic content blocks
	SMS or MobilePush
	Images
	Landing pages or CloudPages
Data Extensions and Data Storage	Lists
	Data extensions
	Shared data extensions
	Synchronized data extensions
	External integrations
Users and Setup	Enabled users
	Reply Mail Management (RMM)
	Sender profiles
	Send classifications

Alert Manager

In addition to assessing your account, it's a great time to also set up a handy feature called Alert Manager. Reach out to your Marketing Cloud Engagement admin to add an email on the Alert Manager Setup page. After configuration, this email receives critical system alerts for email batch sends and email triggered sends. Instead of waiting to find out about an error when it's too late, learn about errors immediately. How's does it work? If any email send stops due to an error, like a triggered send pausing due to an AMPscript errors, an email is sent with a reason for the error. What a great way to prep, in advance, for an issue. 

Emergency Action Plan

Once you have your risk assessment completed, it’s time to create an action plan. Instead of emergency numbers and evacuation routes, your emergency action plan should identify S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Bound) action steps to help reduce issues and risks associated with your Marketing Cloud Engagement account. 

Here’s a sample action plan that shows what specific steps are planned, the risk level and details, and when it needs to be completed.

Priority	Specific Area/Content	Specific Action Steps	Risk Assessment	Reason for Risk	Due Date
1	Enabled users	Disable two users who have left the company.	High	Enabled users who have left the company.	By the end of the week
2	Content	Investigate use of JavaScript in welcome email. Test updating code for better performance.	Medium	Content is causing slow performance.	By the end of the month
3	Active automations	Update automations with email alias (email-issues@cumulus.com). Conduct a full inventory of all active automations. Investigate causes for automations that fail frequently.	Medium	Automation Studio has a few failing automations. Team hasn’t added notification emails.	By the end of the month
4	Data extensions	Complete an inventory of existing data extensions. Determine an archive strategy. Clean up data extensions.	Low	Old data extensions need to be deleted or archived.	By the end of the quarter
5	Email sends	Set up Alert Manager to receive alerts for email batch sends and triggered sends.	Medium to High	Team isn't aware of errors in its email sends	By the end of the week

Once you have a plan in place, start working on those updates and revisit your list regularly. 

Good start prepper. You’ve got your plan in place, now let’s cover another key emergency preparedness topic: Data quality and data processing.

Resources

• Trailhead: Digital Marketing Roadmap Development
• Quip: Marketing Cloud Engagement Data Management, Audit Template
• Salesforce Help: Alert Manager
• Salesforce Knowledge Article: Marketing Cloud Engagement Alert Manager Errors