PROCLOUDLABS

Best practices · Self-check

Is your Marketing Cloud stack holding up?

The 40 questions we use to score a Salesforce Marketing Cloud stack across eight dimensions. Fifteen minutes, no sign-up.

Self-check

How to use it

These are the 40 questions we score in every Marketing Cloud audit, grouped into eight dimensions. Tick each one you could prove to a sceptical colleague with evidence, not just intent.

A dimension where you can tick fewer than three is usually where the stack is costing you the most. Start there.

01

Customer data foundation

  • One customer profile across known, anonymous, household and multi-product relationships
  • Consent and preferences carried across the whole stack
  • Your customer database is the system of record, not a downstream copy
  • Identity stitched with one Subscriber Key strategy across email, SMS, push, app, web and CRM
  • Offline, partner, sales and service data feed the customer profile

02

Lead and audience capture

  • Sign-up forms are short (seven fields or fewer), mobile-first and use progressive profiling
  • A qualification model is in production and reviewed quarterly with sales
  • Routing to sales runs on an SLA, with alerts when it's missed
  • Sales outcomes flow back to marketing
  • Bot and fraud protection is in place on capture forms

03

Lifecycle and retention programs

  • Welcome and onboarding get new customers to a first-value moment within a week
  • Cross-sell and repurchase timing is personalized by behaviour and lifecycle stage
  • At-risk and churn-prevention journeys are automated and tested
  • A win-back program for lapsed customers exists and is tested
  • Loyalty and advocacy are part of the lifecycle journeys, not a separate silo

04

Activation and sales enablement

  • Hand-off to sales is real-time, with a first-touch SLA
  • Sales enablement assets are current, on-brand and compliance-cleared
  • CRM and partner data flows back to marketing cleanly
  • Field and partner leaders can see a reporting dashboard
  • Marketing, sales and partners plan together every quarter

05

Channel orchestration

  • Email, SMS, push, app, paid and organic are orchestrated together, not in silos
  • Frequency caps and channel-preference rules apply across channels
  • Event-driven activation works, not just batch exports
  • In-app and in-product messages are part of the wider journeys
  • Field and regional channel mix differs from head office where it should

06

Personalization and relevance

  • Dynamic content goes beyond first name: product, location, life stage, behaviour
  • Product or next-best-offer recommendations are in production
  • Send-time optimization is in production
  • Messages vary by lifecycle stage: prospect, new customer, loyal, lapsed
  • Journeys can choose the next best action in real time

07

Measurement and attribution

  • Marketing-to-revenue attribution is documented and trusted by sales and finance
  • Attribution covers paid, owned and earned channels
  • Lifetime and cohort metrics are measured, not only last-touch return
  • Standing dashboards are reviewed weekly by leadership
  • Tests are planned, with holdouts and quarterly retrospectives

08

Compliance, governance and operations

  • Privacy compliance (GDPR, CCPA, CASL or your industry's rules) was audited in the last 12 months
  • Consent capture and propagation can be audited across the stack
  • Data retention policies are documented and enforced
  • Your vendor and sub-processor inventory is current
  • An incident response runbook was tested in the last 12 months