Marketing automation requires a certain amount of trust.

You create the rules, connect your data, build the emails and switch everything on. After that, much of the work happens quietly in the background.

The difficulty comes when you start wondering whether everything is actually happening the way you think it is.

Perhaps contacts are being added from another system. Different subscribers enter different automations. Emails have been changed, new journeys added and old ones adapted.

Nothing looks obviously broken, but can you confidently say that every person is entering the right journey and receiving the right communications?

Once you stop trusting the answer, improving anything else becomes much harder.

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That’s where Mornington Screening Service found themselves

Mornington Screening Service had built a deliberate process for finding and nurturing potential customers.

The team identified Australian businesses advertising jobs on SEEK, contacted them to find the person responsible for recruitment and added consenting prospects to Mornington’s own database.

From there, their details should pass into Mailchimp, where new prospects received an introductory communication followed by a series of emails explaining Mornington’s screening services.

Around 300 new contacts could enter the process each week, making it an important part of Mornington’s customer acquisition activity.

The problem was that owner Russ Clarke had stopped trusting what happened after those contacts entered the database.

Were they transferring into Mailchimp correctly? Were they entering the right automations? Had they received every email they were supposed to receive?

When we later asked Russ what wasn’t working before we started working together, his answer was simple:

“Lost confidence in the settings with Mailchimp.”

And the biggest challenge he wanted to solve?

“Missed subscribers.”

Before we worried about improving Mornington’s emails, we needed to establish whether the system underneath them could be trusted.

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You can’t optimise what you don’t understand

When something isn’t quite working in email marketing, it’s tempting to start changing the things you can see.

Rewrite an email. Change an automation. Tweak a subject line.

But none of those things mattered very much if we couldn’t first answer a more basic question: was the existing system doing what Mornington thought it was doing?

So we started by understanding the whole process, from how Mornington found prospects and added them to its own database through to what should happen once that information reached Mailchimp.

The initial Health Check didn’t uncover one enormous mistake that explained everything. In fact, the overall intent of the account was reasonably sound.

What we found instead was a collection of smaller problems and historical decisions that had made the system increasingly difficult to understand.

There were duplicated journeys for different relationship managers. Naming wasn’t always clear. Some automation logic could potentially send or exclude people incorrectly. There had also been a previous problem with data moving between Mornington’s own system and Mailchimp.

Individually, these things could be dealt with. Collectively, they’d created uncertainty about whether the system could be relied upon.

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Sometimes you have to understand the business before you can fix the marketing

One of Russ’s comments about the project particularly stood out:

“You slowly gained knowledge about our business and marketing challenges and that has helped.”

Mailchimp could show us the automations. It couldn’t tell us how Mornington’s business was supposed to work.

There were different types of prospects entering the system, different introductory communications and different nurture journeys that should follow.

Before deciding how Mailchimp should be organised, we needed to understand those business rules. Where had a contact come from? What should they receive first? What should happen next?

As those answers became clearer, we could make the Mailchimp setup clearer too.

We agreed terminology for different stages of the customer journey. Campaigns and automations were given clearer names. Duplicated sequences were consolidated, with dynamic content used where communications needed to change depending on the relationship manager.

This wasn’t about making the Mailchimp account look tidier. It was about making the logic behind it easier to understand, because an understandable system is much easier to check and trust.

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Being in Mailchimp doesn’t mean everything is fine

One group of prospects became a particularly useful example of this.

Mornington believed around 1,300 contacts had been affected by an earlier software problem.

This mattered because generating those prospects had taken considerable time. Russ told us one member of his team had spent around 90 hours identifying them.

Understandably, he wanted to know what had happened.

The obvious assumption was that those contacts had simply failed to reach Mailchimp.

Our investigation suggested something more complicated.

A large group of contacts had reached Mailchimp, and checks indicated that people within it had received some of the intended communications.

But some had entered older sequences. Some had received initial communications. Others had progressed part of the way through a nurture journey before becoming paused when an old automation was stopped.

They weren’t simply missing. Their journeys were incomplete.

That’s an important distinction because it’s easy to check whether someone appears in your Mailchimp audience and assume the job is done.

A contact can exist in your audience, have the correct data and even have received an email. The more useful question is whether they’ve experienced the communication journey you intended.

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Fixing a journey doesn’t always mean starting again

Once we’d established what had happened, we needed to decide what Mornington should do with those historical contacts.

Putting everybody back through the entire sequence risked sending people communications they’d already received and creating another problem.

Instead, we looked at what different groups had already experienced and considered what they actually needed next.

For some, that meant continuing an existing journey. Others didn’t need further automated communications. Some could move into Mornington’s regular newsletter programme.

It’s a useful lesson whenever an automation goes wrong.

Before asking, “How do we send these emails again?”, ask, “What has this person already experienced?”

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Once the foundations worked, the conversation changed

Over the following months, the questions Mornington asked us began to change.

Initially, we were talking about data, automation rules and whether subscribers were receiving the right emails.

Once the underlying system became more dependable, we could start talking about the marketing itself.

We reviewed engagement and automation performance. Existing nurture emails were improved. New templates were introduced. Subject and preview lines were considered more carefully, and Mornington developed a more structured newsletter programme.

Reporting evolved too. Russ wanted information that he and his team could understand and use, rather than simply another collection of Mailchimp statistics.

Gradually, the conversation moved away from “Is Mailchimp doing what it’s supposed to do?” towards “How can we make our email marketing work harder?”

That’s a much more useful question to be asking.

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The biggest result wasn’t a marketing metric

There are plenty of numbers we could use to judge an email marketing programme.

But the most striking outcome from this project isn’t a number.

When we asked Russ about the biggest difference now, his answer was:

“Total confidence in Mailchimp.”

Asked what he can do today that he couldn’t do before, he said:

“Certainty that Mailchimp will deliver.”

And the biggest day-to-day impact?

“The confidence that all is well.”

Confidence can sound like a soft outcome until you’ve experienced the alternative.

If you don’t trust your marketing system, every unexpected result makes you wonder whether the problem is the message, the data or the technology underneath it. It’s difficult to make good marketing decisions when you’re not sure whether the evidence in front of you can be trusted.

Mornington is now in a very different position.

As Russ put it:

“Our messaging is consistent and well delivered.”

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Before you add more, make sure what you’ve got works

Improving email marketing often means doing more: another automation, another campaign, better copy or more sophisticated segmentation.

Sometimes that’s exactly what you need.

But the Mornington project is a useful reminder that sometimes the best thing you can do is stop adding things and understand what’s already there.

Can you explain how someone enters your marketing system, what determines the communications they receive and what happens next?

More importantly, do you trust the answers?

If not, improving your next subject line probably isn’t the place to start.

Once the foundations are clear and dependable, you can spend less time worrying about the machinery and more time communicating well with the people on the other end.