Marketing Automation and The End of Segmentation as You Know It

A few days ago I read Scott Brinker's interesting post about "Marketing Automation and Jurassic Park".
In his post Scott points out the irony that many Marketing Automation vendors claim to simplify marketing but he perceives that in fact this software can add to the complexity of marketing. Echoing Jurassic Park's Dr Malcolm but referring to Marketing Automation Scott suggests that "trying to force an overly simple management structure upon such a complex system is a recipe for disaster."

Analyzing Lead Nurturing campaigns with many offers
Coincidentally I spent an hour yesterday with Sundeep, our VP of client services here, poring over the analysis of a client's lead nurturing campaign results. The campaign has been running for over a year, has 15 programs (unique offers) in it, and more than half a million participants. Complexity is emergent!

Is Marketing Automation adding complexity?
The great thing about marketing automation is that it can help you accomplish things that are not otherwise feasible. But the software has to help you tame the complexity otherwise you are in Jurassic Park.  Here is an example.

Let's say you roll-out a marketing automation system and immediately build three nurturing campaigns. The on-ramps to the various nurturing campaigns are different activities. You have a nurturing campaign with 5 offers for people whom you met at a trade show, and another campaign for people who filled in a web form, and another for people who came in from a Pay-Per-Click ad. 

So what happens if I do two of these activities? Should the system allow me to enter more than one nurturing campaign? If you say "no" then how about cases where the prospect has a genuine interest in two different product lines and deserves to be in two separate nurturing tracks?  What happens if the prospect is in the middle of a campaign and then does some behavior that really makes them a better candidate for a different campaign, such as engaging the sales person with a $1m deal? Is there a way to move them to a different campaign immediately? 

Mature Marketing Automation Systems Can Handle the Complexity
One of the limitations of the simple marketing automation solutions is that they take a campaign centric approach. "I have a series of offers, let me build a list of likely people to dribble them out to over the coming months, come what may". As a result of being campaign centric the number of different paths through the campaign can be limited to a handful.  Most prospects will get exactly the same treatment.

The alternative is "person centric" campaign design. In this situation the system arbitrates what is the next best campaign, and what is the next best offer for each individual based on information that is completely current as the decision is made. For example our client with the 15 offers in one nurturing campaign has 2 to the power of 15 possible traversal paths through the campaign. ie 32768 people could go through this campaign differently!

This is not your father's List Segmentation
By allowing the system to arbitrate what the next best offer is to each individual, we have obliterated the traditional method of direct marketing by defining segments and sets, overlapping them and coming up with a final list. Instead you build rules into the system that allows it to build lists with as few as one person in them, and then direct offers their way. This Jurassic complexity has been tamed by the mature marketing automation vendors. So perhaps we have entered Cretaceous Park! The greater challenge is in analyzing data that shows 32768 possible traversal paths, so that firms can understand what is working and not working in their lead nurturing campaigns!

If you want to share your bad dinosaur puns or have novel ways of depicting 32000 traversal paths in a chart, send them my way!
-Kevin

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