Business Analysis Skills for E-Marketing

Understand business analysis techniques, skills and the questions you should ask when deploying E-Marketing Solutions with our latest blog by Heather Black. These questions are generic to any e-marketing solution you might be appraising or planning to use, whether it’s Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot or third party vendor. 

Join Heather as she shares top tips on Business Analysis techniques more generically and then focussing in on a specific cloud. Sign up to our Weekly Career Boost Bulletin to be notified of each release. 

Over the next 4 weeks, Heather will be sharing top tips on:

• Part 1 – We are giving an introduction to Business Analysis and Sales Cloud
• Part 2 – We are looking at the Business Analysis process and Service Cloud 
• Part 3 – We are looking at how to build a demo and Non Profit Cloud
• Part 4 – We are looking at Business Analysis documentation and E-Marketing 

At Supermums we deliver the Consultancy Skills Course to upskill individuals on Business Analysis, Change Management and Agile Project Management so these skills can be blended and delivered holistically. These skills really are inter-dependent and essential to each other to deliver a project successfully.

Heather Black is the lead trainer on this course and she has overseen over 700+ Salesforce projects whilst running a Salesforce Consultancy for 9 years. During this time she developed a suite of templates and tools to standardise the questions asked on projects to maximise the chance of success of a project and avoid the risk of a question not being asked. Find out more about the Course here. 

We also deliver a Marketing Cloud Course, if you have an interest in learning more. 

How to Document your Business Analysis work 

It’s important to document all of the information you have gathered, to collaborate with stakeholders and to get it signed off. When we talk about documentation it could be a word document, excel or a range of software tools, depending on what’s needed. Here are a list of documents you will typically need from this initial stage of work before you start to design the build and deliver training.

• Business Case – This Business Case provides the justification of the project in the first instance and it should Include a summary of why the solution is needed, the business priorities, the expected ROI and measures of success.
• CRM Strategy – This CRM Strategy summarises the overall strategy that is being planned out. It includes the business strategy and business case, product road map, prioritisation of high level requirements, risk assessment, etc.
• BA Questionnaires – Ask your end-users to complete some questionnaires (BA Scripts) to help you and them prepare for the design workshops.
• Requirements Log – The Requirements Log details of all of the functional and non-functional requirements, priorities with technical solutions referenced.
• Process Maps – Depending on budget you can map out before and after processes using a process mapping tool during the design process and then also use these diagrams to add into your training material.

What Questions do you want to ask about E-Marketing?

The E-Marketing Discovery process could include a whole range of aspects including the following high level requirements:

Within the Supermums Consultancy Skills Skills Course, sponsored by Slalom, we provide a full Business Analysis Questionnaire for Contact Management and E-Marketing requirements with a presentation deck and a training session on how to deliver it alongside the technical considerations. If you are worried about what questions to ask then check out our course here. 

Here are 5 of favourite questions you don’t want to miss but there are loads more functional and non-functional requirement questions that you want to include in your questionnaire. 

• Who are their different stakeholders? What is the volume of these contacts, what information do they collect about them, how do they categorise or segment them in contacts and get them opted into marketing emails? Where are they located and is language a consideration?
• What are the pain points? Also, what are the key benefits they want to derive from Salesforce as a Marketing team from different points of view – as an organisation, a team and individually? 
• How would the company measure the ROI of the Salesforce /E-Marketing investment and how can this be measured? What are the baseline stats now and what do they want it to be in the future. It can be useful to have some example indicators here to share in case they aren’t sure.. For example, increase in subscribers, improved open rates, increase in sales, increase in conversion rate. 
• How is Marketing Performance measured? What are their key reports and dashboard requirements as they will influence how you build the system. Again it can be useful to have some example indicators here to share in case they aren’t sure. e.g. No of subscribers, Open Rates, Subscriber Retention, Volume of Sales. 
• What is their Subscriber Nurture Process? What are the frequency and style of emails being sent to people and how will this be managed centrally by the team. How do people consent and managing their preferences via different subscriber channels and what is the source of truth. 

Assess their current usage of the Contact Management Object

If the customer is currently using Salesforce then you want to assess the current usage of the Contact Management Object against the core fields the client wants to integrate with their e-marketing product to maximise marketing personalisation efforts – with this you are reviewing the product features being used, assessing user adoption, and level of data input and integrity . You can discover this through your BA process by asking the questions in our FREE Health Check Questionnaire and Template and to aid this you can also plug in these two FREE apps and get instant insight into how they are using the product. 

Download Supermums free Health Check Questionnaire Template.

Download Improved Apps free User Adoption Tool to discover who are your high adopters and low adopters.

Be Knowledgeable in the Product and Third Party Apps

• Understand the range of E-Marketing Solutions available and the range of features possible to share scenarios with the client.
• Sign up to the Supermums Marketing Cloud Course to further your knowledge of the Marketing Cloud Solution. 
• Understand the Third Party Apps that you can use to support data capture and data integrity of the Contact Management object. Duplicates are a big challenge for marketing teams. Here are some great ISV apps you should know about:

Capture subscribers and manage preferences using Titan

Send video emails using Native Video

Easily create powerful audience segments, intelligently control marketing communication frequency, and achieve faster Marketing Cloud ROI