With Daylight Saving in effect, now’s the perfect time to start thinking about Spring Cleaning. Whether your Marketing Cloud org is a few weeks old or a few years old, keeping your data organized can be a big feat. In this series of posts throughout March, I’ll be sharing some of my favorite ways to keep data, automations, and content organized in Marketing Cloud. Today we’ll start with data extensions!
Tip #1: Foldering
Within Email Studio, you can create new subfolders for data extensions, including Salesforce data extensions and synchronized data extensions.
To create a new folder, right click on the folder you’d like to nest a new subfolder under and click “New Folder.” You can subfolder at least 10 levels deep, however I like to keep my folders no more than 3 levels deep.
When it comes to a strategy for creating your folders, here are some of the common folders that I create:
- Marketing Cloud Standard DEs – I like to place all of the out-of-the-box data extensions used for Einstein or created by the system into their own folder.
- Suppressions – You may need to subfolder if you have a lot of suppression needs. An example of this might be frequency based suppressions, engagement suppressions, geographic suppressions, or other demographic suppressions.
- Journeys – I like to create a folder for all journey data extensions and then subfolder for each journey. The subfolder contains the DEs I use for entries, data driven decision splits, goals, exits, and reporting.
- Target Audiences – Again, this one may need sub-foldering based on how you target your subscribers.
- Reporting – Creating a place to store all the data extensions you have that capture results from data view queries can help keep all your reporting in one place.
- Testing – A test folder is great to have, especially if you collaborate with others in your environment. Having one place for test data helps prevent accidental sends to test data.