Growing up, my father used to say, “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, what makes you think you will have time to do it again?” He was an absolute perfectionist. He was also one of those people who would sit down at a restaurant and find the typo on the menu before anyone else had even picked theirs up. One of the greatest lessons I learned from my father was about quality and the impact of quality on my brand.

Today, as part of the Marvel Marketers team of superheroes, our namesake commands quality. After all, a superhero has very little room for error. I find myself being called in to save the day on campaigns where all the information we have is “something isn’t working.” Almost always, I find that a solid quality assurance (QA) process would have caught the problem. The difference between good and great is frequently just the simple step of slowing down and checking it twice.

With these 5 easy steps, you can keep the villains out of your marketing automation campaigns.

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“What time zone is this?”

It’s an important question to know the answer to when you land in a new place, and it’s also important to know the answer to when you send an email to your audience. Time zones can be tricky. Some countries observe daylight savings, while others do not, and the dates are different, too.

In 2018, our team was running a global program from September to November, with several weekly webinars across several regions. We had conventional reminder emails in Marketo that were pre-scheduled to send 30 minutes before the start of the webinar. So for a webinar starting at 10:00 am, we sent out a reminder email at 9:30 am. Everything felt timely until the last week of October, when we thought we made a mistake on the scheduled time of the reminder email. Instead of sending 30 minutes prior to a webinar in Europe, it sent 30 minutes into the webinar.

What happened?

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