Holiday Calendar

National Marketing Operations Appreciation Day

Next celebratedSunday, April 11, 2027

Zapier invented April 11 in 2022, never used the word national, and stopped publishing for the day after 2023. The date kept arriving anyway, for the people running the systems and data every campaign quietly depends on.

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?
YEARLY DATEApril 11
OBSERVED INUnited States
CATEGORYCareers
SUBCATEGORYTech Pros
ORIGIN

Corporate Initiative

FOUNDING ENTITY
Zapier Inc.
FIRST OBSERVED
2022
“An annual celebration of the hardworking professionals that are the backbone of marketing teams everywhere.
HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

A software company wrote a holiday for a job nobody watches.

Zapier Inc., a workflow automation company, put the observance on the calendar in a post on its own blog on April 11, 2022, pairing it with the first Marketing Ops Awards for people working in marketing, CRM, email or revenue operations, or in similar roles. Zapier restated its authorship in a follow-up post on June 1, 2022.

Read Zapier's launch postvia Zapier
INTRO

The holiday its own inventor never called national

The name on this page carries a word the day's inventor never wrote. Zapier put April 11 on the calendar in 2022 and called it Marketing Ops Appreciation Day. No available source says who added the word National.

The rest of the record is short and direct. A software company put the day on its own blog and gave a reason: the work of marketing operations, it wrote, commonly happens behind the scenes.

Then the arrangement came apart. Zapier has published nothing for the day since 2023. The date kept arriving anyway.

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ORIGINS

Marketing Operations Appreciation Day history

CHAPTER 01

A vendor invents a holiday

The founding document is a single blog post. It went up on April 11, 2022, under the byline of the Zapier Editorial Team, and it did not build up to the announcement. Marketing operations professionals, it said, are the unsung heroes of marketing teams.

Then came the sentence that made the day exist. Zapier wrote that it had officially launched the observance on April 11 as an annual celebration. A competition went up in the same post, open to people working in marketing, CRM, email or revenue operations, or in similar roles, with nominations closing on May 11.

CHAPTER 02

The receipts they handed in

The winners arrived on June 1, 2022, and the post announcing them repeated the claim of authorship in plain language: we at Zapier created Marketing Ops Appreciation Day. Two separate pages on the same site now carried the origin.

What the citations described was not sentiment. One winner was credited with a single workflow that was saving each sales rep 50 hours per week. Another had built a re-engagement tracking process her team credited with an additional $4M in marketing-driven revenue.

CHAPTER 03

Year two opened the door wider

On April 5, 2023, Zapier brought the day back and quietly rewrote it. The abbreviation went first, in a post titled Zapier's Marketing Operations Appreciation Day is back, spelled out. So the fuller half of the name on this page came from the founder after all, though the word National still did not.

The scope moved too. This time, the company wrote, it wanted to spread the love to all operations professionals, from across marketing operations and revenue operations. The award was renamed the Marketing Operations MVP Award, and the winners were profiled that June.

CHAPTER 04

The date outlasted the campaign

Nothing followed. A sweep of Zapier's own blog index for the words behind this day returns four posts, all of them from 2022 and 2023. That index was current to September 2026.

What happened instead is that other people kept the date. On April 11, 2024, a civil engineering and surveying firm in Tennessee published a team feature for the day, calling it a national holiday. It is not one, and by then the day had drifted loose from its author and picked up a title on the way.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why National Marketing Operations Appreciation Day Matters

Sprawl

A flat total hid 1,488 arrivals and 1,367 departures in a single year.

The marketing technology landscape has grown over 100X since 2011, when it held 150 products. Its 2026 total barely moved, but that flat number hides the churn underneath it: 1,488 products were added while 1,367 were removed. Somebody has to notice which of those a company is paying for, and that somebody is the person this date is about.

Staffing

The role became standard equipment fast

A 2022 report by MarketingOps.com with Knak and Adobe, drawn from a survey of more than 550 marketing operations professionals, found that only 65% of organizations had a marketing ops professional in house in 2021, against over 80% a year later. Read it as what practitioners reported about their own employers rather than a census. The day arrived in the same year that shift did.

Scope

Four jobs wearing one title

Zapier's own guide sets out what a marketing operations team oversees, and the list is wider than the name suggests: the automation systems and software behind campaigns, the data that decides who gets reached, the email and CRM infrastructure, and the documented processes everyone else follows. None of it is visible in the campaign a customer sees. That invisibility is the entire argument for putting a date next to it.

TIMELINE

Timeline

A blog post starts a holiday

Zapier announces that it has officially launched Marketing Ops Appreciation Day on April 11, and opens the first Marketing Ops Awards on the same page.

The first winners are named

Zapier profiles the inaugural award winners and states plainly that it created the day, giving the origin a second written record on a separate page.

Year two writes the name out

The day returns as Marketing Operations Appreciation Day, widened to cover revenue operations as well as marketing, with the prize renamed the Marketing Operations MVP Award.

The last edition its founder ran

Zapier publishes the 2023 MVP winners. No further edition of the day has appeared on the company's blog since.

Observed without its founder

A Tennessee engineering firm runs a team feature for the day, a year after the last Zapier campaign, describing it as a national holiday it is not.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Marketing Operations Appreciation Day by the Numbers

9
Winners in the first Marketing Ops Awards, 2022
3
Winners of the 2023 Marketing Operations MVP Award
0
Federal Register documents naming the day
15,505
Products on the 2026 marketing technology landscape

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Marketing Operations Appreciation Day

One winning workflow ends in a cake

Greg Ah Sue, a 2023 MVP winner at Entrata, jokes that his goal is to automate himself out of a job. His favourite workflow watches for a Salesforce opportunity changing stage, checks the customer's mailing address against the Google Places API, then fires a webhook that has Sendoso deliver a literal cake.

Half of them did not know HTML

The State of the MO Pro 2022 report asked marketing operations professionals about their own work. Half of the marketers surveyed reported not knowing HTML.

A 270 percent overshoot

Alek Flekel of EngageSmart was cited in 2023 for data management and targeting work that contributed to over a third of the marketing pipeline, surpassing the 2022 goal by 270 percent. His team also recorded a 49 percent rise in email engagement rates.

Three mergers, 75 tools, $1.5M

Stephanie Pounders was cited in 2022 for leading three mergers that together covered over 75 martech tools, each of which had to be optimized, merged or transformed. The work saved $1.5M.

A young field, by generation

The same 2022 industry survey found that marketing operations professionals skew on the younger side, with Millennials and Gen Z the most heavily represented generations in the field.

Last year, we learned a lot about the Marketing Ops field, like that Marketing Ops professionals are open to adopting new tech, and that they are often solely responsible for the admin of their marketing automation platforms.
Mike RizzoFounder of MarketingOps.com, an independent community for marketing operations professionals

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe National Marketing Operations Appreciation Day

EDITOR'S PICK

Thank someone for a specific system

Generic gratitude bounces off this job. Name the thing: the routing rule that stopped leads going cold, the naming convention that made a report trustworthy, the integration that quietly stopped breaking. The award citations Zapier published are built exactly this way, and they are a good template.

READ

Read the post that started it

The original announcement settles most of the arguments about where this day came from. It is short, written in the first person, and dated the same day as the observance it created.

WRITE

Write the nomination anyway

The Marketing Operations MVP Award has not run since 2023, but its format still works inside a company. Describe what a colleague built, what it replaced, and what it saved in hours or errors. Send it to their manager rather than to a competition.

COUNT

Count the tools you are actually using

The martech landscape adds and sheds well over a thousand products a year, and every one your company buys becomes somebody's maintenance job. Sit with your marketing operations lead and walk the list. Cancelling one unused subscription is a more useful tribute than a card.

ASK

Ask what breaks when they are away

Most marketing operations work is invisible until it stops. Ask which systems have exactly one person who understands them, then write that answer down. Documenting a single point of failure is the kind of observance this particular job can actually use.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Marketing Operations Appreciation?

1 / 7

Which company created this day?

Answer

No. The Federal Register carries no document naming it under any of its three names, and no official status was found elsewhere, so April 11 is an ordinary working day.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

10sources
9primary records
9independently dated
Primary records
ZapierApril 11, 2022
Introducing the first-ever Marketing Ops Appreciation Day
The founding record. Zapier states that it has officially launched Marketing Ops Appreciation Day on April 11 as an annual celebration, and opens the first Marketing Ops Awards on the same page, with eligibility, a May 11 nomination deadline and a June announcement window.
View source
ZapierJune 1, 2022
Introducing Zapier's 2022 Marketing Ops Awards winners
A second, independent statement that Zapier created the day, alongside profiles of the nine inaugural award winners and the specific automation results credited to each of them.
View source
ZapierApril 5, 2023
Zapier's Marketing Operations Appreciation Day is back
The second edition of the day, in which the company spells Operations out in full, widens the observance to revenue operations, and renames the competition the Marketing Operations MVP Award.
View source
ZapierJune 14, 2023
Meet our 2023 Marketing Operations MVP Award winners
The three 2023 winners and their work, including the Salesforce workflow that ends by having a cake delivered. This is the last edition of the day the company has published.
View source
ZapierSeptember 2, 2026
Zapier blog sitemap
The company's complete blog index, 4,251 pages and current to September 2026, which is the evidence that only four posts exist for this day and its awards and that none appeared after 2023.
View source
ZapierMarch 3, 2022
The ultimate guide to marketing operations
Published five weeks before the day existed, this sets out what a marketing operations team oversees: the automation systems, the data, the email and CRM infrastructure, and the documented processes other teams follow.
View source
Business WireSeptember 8, 2022
New Report From MarketingOps.com, Knak, and Adobe Shows That More Than 80% of Companies Have a Dedicated Marketing Operations Individual or Team In 2022
The State of the MO Pro 2022 survey of over 550 marketing operations professionals, covering in-house adoption of the role, the share of respondents who did not know HTML, the generational profile of the field, and on-record comments from MarketingOps.com and Knak. Read through the Internet Archive because the live page refuses scripted clients.
View source
chiefmartecMay 5, 2026
2026 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic: Peak Martech Achieved! (Maybe)
Scott Brinker's annual count of the marketing technology market, giving the 2026 total, the net growth over the previous year, the additions and removals underneath that total, and the long arc from 150 products in 2011.
View source
Federal Register
Documents search API, exact-phrase query
Returns zero federal documents for the day's name.
View source
Additional coverage
L.I. Smith and AssociatesApril 11, 2024
Tips from the Team on National Marketing Operations Appreciation Day
A Tennessee engineering and surveying firm marking the day on April 11, 2024, a year after the founder's last edition, and describing it in its own words as a national holiday.
View source
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