Marketing perfection is slowing you down

So many marketing teams are stuck in the same trap: it takes weeks to get anything out the door. Even simple things!

I was talking to a Head of CRM the other day.

She was frustrated: "It took us, essentially, a whole month to get that new campaign live. It wasn’t even that complex. It’s frustrating."

The annoying thing for her was that she didn’t necessarily feel it’d be easier for her team next time. That the process for getting a new campaign live had improved. That they would move faster as a result.

Moving too slowly is a very common gripe based on my conversations with customers. What slows teams down?

Sometimes it’s the tooling but, when you dig into it, it’s often driven by a desire for perfection. Any of these feel familiar?

• Not trusting the data in your engagement platform, so kicking off an audit first, to get confidence before moving forward.
• Asking engineering for a new data property instead of working with the unused data that’s already available.
• Debating naming conventions for new segments or tags before even sending your first test.
• Holding off on shipping a new journey because you’re not 100% confident in one branch’s logic.
• Delaying campaigns for QA rounds that end up catching minor styling inconsistencies, not showstoppers.
• Creating a new segment for every campaign instead of reusing and refining, “just in case” the old one is wrong.

Now, I love perfection (you should see my desk!) but it can sometimes get in the way of progress.

Learning to "ignore small fires" is a critical skill in moving things forward. In this post we frame some suggestions for when it makes sense to invest in perfect and when you can skip perfect in the name of progress.

Demos never show the chaos

MarTech vendors are really good at selling you perfection.

When you’re doing a demo or watching a talk at a conference you’re not going to see the true, messy, step-by-step story that is most business’ marketing infrastructure. Even the best, most successful ones.

Instead, you’re going to see something very polished.

This sets up the idea that this sort of polish is what we must have in order to make progress. It creates a binary idea that things are either organised and successful or they’re chaotic and prone to failure.

Naturally this makes sense to us. And it’s certainly the ideal. But it’s not true.

Instead of hunting perfection we’ve got to train ourselves to not sweat the small stuff and to focus on the bigger picture: progress.

Guardrails not granularity

The real key to doing this is guardrails. We need to have confidence that we’re not going to break things badly, enabling us to try things in relative safety.

Let’s take an example. It’s crucial we can have 100% confidence that we won’t accidentally email any unsubscribed users: a legal requirement.

But is it crucial that the “Paying customers” audience we’ve created is 100% accurate? Or would it be okay if it was 98% accurate, 95% accurate or even 90% accurate?

It depends on the context: if we’re just sending a product announcement regarding new feature releases, 90% accuracy is probably fine. Particularly if it means we can send the campaign today, rather than tomorrow. Or next week. Or next month.

In contrast, if we’re sending an email to users who are not paying customers telling them they can save 10% if they subscribe today, we probably want to be 98% sure our segment is right: so we aren’t offering already-paying customers a discount en masse.

So what is a guardrail? Guardrails are lightweight, proactive, and built into tools.

Contrast this with bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is heavy, reactive, and based on approvals and tickets.

Thinking through the most important areas you must have guardrails and then putting those in place means you can move faster and “be a little messy” without betting the farm.

Systems, systems, systems

Good guardrails come from reusable systems. Here’s a list of fundamental guardrails we recommend customers put in place.

1. Rock-solid unsubscribes. Make sure customers can opt-out forever quickly and efficiently and that you respect this going forward.
   1. Separate messaging use cases into subaccounts. At Vero we use multiple sub-accounts to manage the campaigns we send. This helps us manage user “preferences” with 100% confidence and also ensures we never use the wrong sending configurations (subdomains, etc.) when sending. For example, we have a subaccount for top of funnel (pre-signup) that is separate from bottom of funnel (post-signup).
2. Design systems. There are a couple of approaches here.
   1. Use building blocks. Using well-defined, pre-designed building blocks helps you create messages faster. For example, having predesigned paragraph blocks, carousels, product feature blocks and other elements makes designing emails a breeze.
   2. Build on top of a framework like MJML. If you’re designing emails from scratch, using a system like MJML or React Email will ensure your emails look great across all browsers.
3. Fallbacks. When personalising messages, always design for the “blank case” as the default and then build personalisation on top of that. Use “fallback” values to ensure no blank emails and messages!
4. QA processes that cover 90% of cases. Internally we email a Slack channel a preview of upcoming campaigns and ask for feedback. A few internal team members always review and catch fundamental issues. This is the bulk of our QA.
5. Write today, send tomorrow. It sounds simple but giving any draft a little breathing room can help catch so many mistakes. This is more an attitude than a system but it’s a good one.

These are just a starting point and there’ll be more guardrails you can put in place in your team. Hopefully these examples give you an idea of the sort of lightweight systems we want to put in place to help us move faster without making large errors.

You want to develop a mental model a bit like this:

Mistake type	Impact
Sending to unsubscribed users	High
Broken link in CTA	High
Segment 5% inaccruate	Medium
Imperfect image render	Low
Internal test sent to real customers	Medium

Detecting errors: canaries in the coal mine

I used to be an auditor. True story.

When you’re auditing you’re looking at both preventative and detective controls.

For example, if we want to prevent fires in our house we would both build the house out of something non-flammable, such as bricks rather than wood, as well as install smoke detectors. Building the house of non-flammable materials is a preventative control. It’s designed to prevent the issue in the first place. The smoke detectors are the detective control: if, somehow, a fire has started, they’ll alert you.

The guardrails we’re putting in place are our preventative controls. Systems to help us avoid mistakes in the first place.

But it’s good to have some detective controls too. A couple that we recommend to customers:

1. Batch sending. Sending a message to 100,000 people is daunting. Spreading the send over an hour or two or three can be a really simple way to catch errors: you’ll get replies reporting misinformation or broken links pretty quickly, enabling you to cancel your send, fix it and keep sending. It’s simple but effective.
2. Frequent deliverability tests. Using a seed list to run deliverability tests every week or month is an easy way to get alerted if your emails are suddenly landing in the inbox at a reduced rate. If they are, it likely means something you’ve done has caused this and you should review what you’ve sent recently.

Keep it simple

My final piece of advice is to think about keeping it simple. It’s very easy—and fun—to get inspired and think about the best or grandest way we can achieve something.

But these grand visions are rarely easy to achieve. Stepping towards them is the way to go.

Keeping things simple can really help you move work forward and avoid the search for perfectionism which can hold campaigns back.

So, ask yourself if you can de-scope your current idea. Can descoping help you get something out the door faster? Will the simpler version enable you to achieve 90%+ of your goals and learning?

If so, run with the simpler version to make progress.

Bringing it all together

You don’t need perfect systems. You need systems that keep you from making expensive mistakes. Progress isn’t the opposite of quality: progress earns the right to refine.

Here’s a mindset I suggest to teams:

• Start simple, embrace a little messiness.
• Guard the essentials.
• Learn quickly.
• Improve your guardrails for next time.

Perfect marketing doesn’t exist. But you can build systems that let you ship faster and move your business forward today.