Marketing - Emergency Response

Marketing emergency response

At times GitLab needs to communicate a “breaking” change or details related to a high-priority emergency patch. These emails are transactional and are highly targeted to the impacted audience.

Not an emergency? For important planned customer communications, please use the customer update/announcement process, to enable teams to work together and plan without the urgency of an emergency request.

As soon as an emergency communication is recognized, the Requesting team MUST:

1. Create an incident communication request
2. Review the S1 coverage matrix below and assign the issue and tag the coverage owner closest available per their timezone in the #mktgops Slack channel.
3. If there is not a timely response in Slack, please review the coverage owners’ Slack profile and send them a quick call or text. If no timely response, tag @mktg-ops within the #mktgops Slack channel or use escalation path below.
4. In the template the requesting team will include details including CTA, email body, send date and provide link to Google sheet containing list.
5. If security, make sure to follow instructions

Coverage Matrix

Please review the coverage owner closest available per their timezone when deciding who to reach out to.

MOPs Team Coverage	PT / ET Time Available	Coverage Owner: Monday - Friday	Backup: Monday - Friday	Coverage Owner GEO Time
UTC (EMEA Working)	11pm - 3am PT / 2am - 6am ET	Mihai Conteanu	Gillian Murphy	9am - 1pm EET
UTC (EMEA Working)	3am - 7am PT / 6am - 10am ET	Gillian Murphy	Mihai Conteanu	11am - 3pm UK
UTC (AMER-Morning)	7am - 11am PT / 10am - 2pm ET	Bryce Weatherford	Jameson Burton	10am - 2pm ET
UTC (AMER-Afternoon)	11am - 3pm PT / 2pm - 6pm ET	Bryce Weatherford	Jenny Tiemann	11am - 3pm PT
UTC (AMER-Evening)	3pm - 6pm PT / 6pm - 9pm ET	Bryce Weatherford	Amy Waller	3pm - 6pm PT

Typical Team Timezones:

• Amy: PST Pacific Standard Time UTC:-8:00
• Jenny: PST Pacific Standard Time UTC:-8:00
• Nikki: MST Mountain Time UTC:-7:00
• Bryce: MST Mountain Time UTC:-7:00
• Jameson: MST Mountain Time UTC: -5:00
• Gillian: GMT Greenwich Mean Time UTC: +1:00
• Mihai: EET Eastern European Time UTC: +2:00

Timezone Converter

Escalation Path:

• #mktgops
• Manager (Amy Waller)
• If still no response, #lifecycle-marketing or #marketing-campaigns team can help

For Marketing Operations - When OOO/PTO please add this to the backup team members calendar for awareness.

Roles and responsibilities

Requestor responsibilities

• Alerting email team as soon as possible that there may be a send (even if it does not move forward)
• Providing FINAL email, landing page, form copy, autoresponder copy, etc.
  • NOTE: The addition of each item will increase scope and potentially delay announcement
• Requesting target list from the Marketing Strategy & Analytics team
• Creating Email request issue
• Providing approval list and who signs off on the email
  • Legal, Customer Service VP and VP of the function who is initiating the communication (i.e., Security, Engineering, Infrastructure) are required to sign off
• Notifying affected field teams (Customer Success, CSM, SAE/AE, SA, Professional Services)
  • Also make sure to notify #sales and #customer-success before email is set to go out
• Approving test email
• Providing any edits to the test email
• Providing send time and date
• Approving all other materials and workflows (landing pages, forms, completion actions)

Email team responsibilities

• Providing a timeline based on the request
• Creating epic and some issues (all except for the target list or email request issues)
• Building the email program and actual emails in Marketo (or sending platform of choice)
• Uploading target list to Marketo (or sending platform of choice)
• Sending test emails to requestors to approve
• Making one round of changes to the emails
• Creating form and Marketo landing page (if needed)
• Building workflows for form completion actions
• Deploying emails
• Providing email performance report, email link click reports, and form/landing page reports
• Creating SFDC campaign if needed (if needed)
• Coordinating SDR routing needs with Marketing Ops

Standard process

This is the process to follow when there is an announcement that is an emergency that will need to be sent by the marketing ops team. The marketing ops team will determine what platform will be used based on the information that is provided to them such as timing, list size and severity.

1. Requesting team notifies that an emergency communication is needed

   • Immediately slack #mktgops and include the incident issue and the incident slack channel. If there is not a prompt response, follow on-call procedures.

2. Issue Creation

   • Request issue utlizing Incident Communications template in the Marketing Operations project.
   • Fill in as many blanks as you can with as much information as you have available - the issue template will walk you through what is needed. Feel free to add any additional context that may be helpful. If you do not have all the information, that is OK, as we know it is an ongoing development.
   • Add Due Date (or best guess)
   • Include googledoc of copy document, even if it is blank. Use this template
     • Please make sure to review the copy for any RED Data.
   • Include approx size of the list - this will determine what email platform we will use and helps immensely in our planning. Over estimate when you are unsure.
   • If you are requesting a list, create an issue with the Marketing Strategy team and relate it to the issue you just created.
   • Include any custom fields you need created for mail-merge in the email. Include field max lengths needed, or best guess. Mktops will determine if they can use an existing field or not.
   • Note if the links should not be trackable.

3. Issue in Process

   • Marketing team will work closely with you to develop a communication plan and cadence. Please continue to addinformation as you receive it and over communicate with us via slack/issue.
   • List size and complexity will determine what email platform we will need to use.

4. Approvals

   The following approvers are needed for the copy and list size:

   • Vice President of Customer Success
   • Vice President of the function who is initiating the communication (i.e., Security, Engineering, Infrastructure)
   • Legal (copy only)
   • Marketing Operations Manager
   • Appropriate field teams driven by the scope of customers receiving the communication (SAE/AE, SA, CSM, Professional Services)
   • Support, if there is any call to action in the communication to contact support

5. Email Ready to Deploy

   • Email team will send a sample to the requestor and approvers for their review - preferably, there is a quick Zoom sync to double check send size, variable fields, email copy and time of send.
   • Requestor and approvers must approve in the issue before the email will be sent.
   • Requestor sends alert to #sales and #customer-success on slack

6. Email Launched

   • The email team will provide stats minutes after launch, and at a cadence determined by the announcement team as necessary. - Note: Full email stats mature at 48 hours.
   • Inbox monitoring will be done by the requesting team, unless otherwise stated.

Lists

1. For most emergency communications the requesting team should be providing a list as a Google Sheet in the issue request.
   • The Marketing Strategy and Perfomance team is able to pull a list from user table if necessary. Please create an issue with them.
   • Often, this is done using the Marketing Contact Mart in DBT. The mark has fields for persons in SFDC marked as GitLab Admins, CustomerDB Owners, and Zoura Admins.
2. General security alerts already have a distro list built in marketo.
3. Seldomly, lists need to be created in Salesforce or Marketo using parameters found within the marketing database.
   • Marketo & Salesforce do not contain all records within the user table

List considerations

• List loads greater than 20k take time. 100k+ may take hours/days.
• Each platform has their own limits as to size of CSV that can be uploaded.
• Lists greater than 100k may be subject to verification, so that we do not risk our sending reputation.
• Avoid listing any RED Data in mail-merge fields

Other considerations and questions for requestors

• Send / Reply-to email
  • Should there be an auto-responder?
  • Will someone be monitoring the email address?
  • If unmonitored, does the email mention that?

Email platform to use

Marketing Operations will decide what the best email platform to send from will be. The decision is based on many factors.

• Marketo
• Gainsight

Marketing Operations Set-Up

• Clone from incident template
  • Ensure that processing requests Do not Route executable campaign
  • Mark Person source for new leads as GitLab DataMart
  • Person Status should be set to Raw if Empty
  • Processing campaign can be set up as a trigger or batch depending on list size
• Set up reports if not using the email program defaults
• Follow remaining steps in the incident issue template

Mops steps and checklist for large sends

For sends over 100k sending from Marketo, there are several steps to follow to decrease processing time - especially when leads being uploaded are mostly net-new

1. Check list over to remove any sanctioned countries and/or GitLab email addresses
2. Identify common processing campaigns to update with list suppression filters. These trigger off of person created which will significantly delay processing time and hold up all other Marketo campaign processes (outside of this program)
   1. Generic Email Trigger
   2. OP-Generic Email Address Scoring
   3. OptOuts after 9.10 - Trigger
   4. 01a ZoomInfo Enrich - non API leads
   5. Add to nurture
   6. Spam catcher
   7. OP-Level/Seniority Segment Scoring
   8. OP-Role/Function Segment Scoring
   9. Generic Email Trigger 2023
   10. OP-Lead Classification - Created/Ongoing
   11. Populate Generic Email Checking Field
3. Set up priority send controller campaign to improve speed of send
4. If send list is over 250,000, you must update the smart campaign limits.
5. Ensure email is marked operational, otherwise you may need to update email communication limits
6. After send, discuss with legal to delete unnecessary records out of Marketo.

Common Troubleshooting

1. Email won’t send
   • Check smart campaign limits, is the send over the limit amount?
   • If email isn’t marked operational, you may have to update email comm limits, or mark the email as operational (if this is the case, make sure to double check your filters)
2. Email needs to send out faster than 15 minutes
   • Set up smart campaign to send the email vs using the email program default settings