Some time ago I reviewed an RFP for Marketing Automation. It included items which immediately signaled to me that the company in question may be headed down a path that would drive them crazy. Here are some of the sample questions from the RFP:
- Must provide the capability to identify all the lists a given contact is on
- Requires list permission management
- Must be able to set time based usage limits for a list. For example, maximum usage is once every 2 months
Let's say you are going to roll out a webinar program. You
will email an invitation to a list, have the webinar, and update your database.
In the process you create a production list for folks you want to invite, a
seed list of internal people, and an exclusion list of people you always want
to exclude (all competitors, leads marked as junk or disqualified etc). The
list segmentation to build these lists only has to draw on contact records for
all the information needed to build lists. And if you want to set up a fatigue
rule to control how often someone can be emailed, you simply build a dynamic
exclusion list that excludes everyone in a chosen segment who got a alternative offer in
the past 10 days.
Ineffective Marketing Automation System structure:
For the same webinar, you had to create new static lists containing
the people who registered or attended. This is where their behavioral
information is stored for this event, instead of in the contact record itself.
As a result, when you need to make production lists for new programs you have
to segment based on the demographic data in the contact record and know all the
static lists (data pockets) that need to be invoked to see what behaviors they include.
Pretty soon you are going to have thousands of lists. What happens if someone
accidentally deletes a list? How do you organize and maintain all these lists so you can
find them? Is there any way to know what lists a contact is in? How do new people in the organization know which existing lists to add new registrants to when they have a new response?
What the Marketing Automation RFP should have said:
The headaches would be much less for this company if the RFP
read:
- Must be able to see all contact activity in the contact record including web visits, registrations, attendance etc
- Must include data entitlement to restrict marketers in one division from marketing to contacts from another division
- Must provide facility for fatigue rules so that contacts are not "over marketed"
-Kevin

