Lisa’s App of the Week – Stack Moxie

Summary

This app of the week features Stack Moxie—automated monitoring for your marketing and sales technology stack.

By Lisa Heay, Marketing Planning Manager at Heinz Marketing

How many times have you discovered a campaign wasn’t working the way you thought, and it’d been failing for months, not routing engaged leads, or not awarding them a lead score that would have pushed them over to sales? 

How many hours have you spent on a Sunday during platform migration weekend, manually testing every single form and smart campaign in your instance to ensure everything is connected and working as it should?  

How many times has Sales lost confidence in Marketing’s ability to deliver what they say they will because of a system error? Anyone else have PTSD from all these situations, or is it just me?? 

If you are in MOPs, you understand. I’ve given up many weekend days manually testing lead flow through forms, workflows, and campaigns. And we all know that when humans are in charge of doing something manually, mistakes are likely to happen no matter how hard we try. I’ve been in MOPs my entire career and still have fails—it’s inevitable.

We recently implemented a tool at Heinz Marketing called Stack Moxie for automated monitoring of our technology stack. Let me just say, I would have given my first born (not really, don’t tell him I said that!) for a tool like this many times over my career.

What is it and why do I need it?

Created by a team of marketing operations rockstars, Stack Moxie continuously monitors and tests marketing automation campaigns, forms, websites, and more to ensure your leads are flowing through your marketing and sales tech stack as intended, and it alerts you if it’s not.

In order to test out the functionality, I started adding some different monitors to our own website, checking our contact form, content downloads, and lead data mapping. After just a few days, I started receiving different fail alerts—our Contact Us scenario was showing several errors, either preventing them from syncing or taking up to a day to sync. And this was for a simple webform!

I started testing more and more and learned that we had a myriad of problems: Marketo programs that were overwriting other programs. Data augmentation rules that were firing after the lead went to Salesforce. And our Marketo instance seemed to lag more than I remembered. “I’m a Marketo Certified Expert,” I thought. How on Earth have I not caught these issues?? And worse yet…am I missing these issues with clients, too?

A lot of these problems weren’t difficult to fix, but I never would have realized they were there in the first place without a tool to call them to my attention. And now, with the monitors set, I feel confident that things won’t fall through the cracks again. At least not too much. 

Just think of the business impact. Lost leads because they weren’t routed to the right person. Interested buyers unable to click links on your site. Your target audience unsubscribes from email because your preference center doesn’t work the way it should. You can’t afford not to invest in tech stack monitoring.

Finally, if you are an agency like us, this tool is a must. Think of the impact of a marketing automation platform migration project. Your team has spent months working with the client, and it’s cutover weekend. Don’t rely on manual testing like I have many times over. There is a better, more efficient and thorough way.

How does it work?

In short, you set up test scenarios in the platform which then send test leads through the process at the cadence you choose in order to verify that what you’ve mapped out is actually happening.

You can build and customize a scenario from scratch, or pull in some pre-built, common scenarios to get you up and running and familiar with the tool in a snap. You’ll have access to a library of Scenario Starters, including:

• Form Scenario Test
• Lead Data Mapping
• Web Page is Up
• Marketo: Form to Lead
• Google Analytics: Check Pageview

There are several more, and each walks you through a set of fields to fill in to customize and build the scenario that will work for you.

Some common testing scenarios that I’ve found to be valuable for us:

• Lead scoring – Confirming the correct number of points are given to leads meeting certain criteria.
• Forms – Does the data map to the right fields in our database? Is an alert triggered to the correct person for follow-up? Have these leads been routed to the correct nurture cadence?
• Website – Are there broken links?
• Data sync to SFDC – Is it happening in an acceptable time frame? Are leads routing appropriately?

If it sounds complicated to set up, it’s not, and you don’t have to go it alone. Stack Moxie has a talented staff of customer success reps ready to help you get up and running flawlessly. 

In addition, once your scenarios are set, the Stack Moxie dashboard will show you, at a glance, how your scenarios have performed over the previous 60 days.

Integrations

No matter what makes up your organization’s technology stack, you’ll be able to use this platform. Stack Moxie integrates with many major marketing and sales technology platforms through their standard or custom integrations. Click here for a full list, but here are some highlights:

• Marketo, Pardot, Hubspot, Eloqua
• Salesforce, Pipedrive, Dynamics, Outreach, SalesLoft
• Bizible, Google Analytics, InsightSquared, Tableau, SEMRush, Full Circle Insights, Moz
• ON24, Bright Talk, Eventbrite, GoToWebinar, ReadyTalk  
• AdRoll, Bing Ads, Demandbase, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, WordPress, Terminus

Pricing and resources

If you’re not sure if Stack Moxie is right for you, give it a try with their free version. You can set up a free account and all features are included, with up to 25 tests. From there, choose a plan that’s right for your organization.

For additional help with the platform, Stack Moxie has a help center, YouTube channel with training videos, and a support team, ready to jump in and answer questions. They’ve adopted Radical Hospitality as a core value, and they’ve certainly lived up to that in getting Heinz Marketing up and running with ease.

If I haven’t sold you on Stack Moxie yet, their team certainly will. They are a group of smart and all around lovely people who will ensure you get the most out of the platform.

Check out https://www.stackmoxie.com/ for more information, request a demo, follow them on Twitter, and read user reviews here. Happy testing!