Here’s our thoughts on the topic of deployment to production environments in Marketing Cloud.

Thoughts on Marketing Cloud deployment

Tip #1: Invest in a test instance in Marketing Cloud
It’s an extra expense and more importantly a serious commitment from a time and tech debt standpoint but in the end totally worth it. Can you build and test effectively with only a PROD environment in Marketing Cloud, yes. Are there limited resources to synch the two environments, yes. Is it worth the effort to manually align TEST to PROD in SFMC, yes.

Tip #2: Migrate to PROD manually first
Package manager is a very cool tool and it is wonderful that Marketing Cloud has this option to facilitate deployment. Unfortunately you’ll find some inconsistencies with the tool that will limit the use to only certain types of deployment.

Before you look for solutions to simplify your process, understand your deployment process by manually migrating access. By manually we mean build in PROD from scratch using TEST as a template. Understand the nuances of each asset or combinations of assets that need to be moved over before you look to simplify with package manager.

Tip #3: Utilize documentation to drive your Deployment
Spend the time to create detailed documentation for your builds for not only deployment but to support each solution ongoing. The goal is that you should be able to build the asset in your PROD environment utilizing the documentation alone.

Thank you to Matt Cameron and the SFMC Developer Group for sharing this wonderful topic and look forward to hearing different approaches from others in the community.