When marketing automation goes awry

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

Do you recognize the pain this company will face if they go down this road? What they want is data entitlement and fatigue management functionality, but they are going after it by looking for a vendor that accomplishes this via static lists. "That's gonna hurt!"  An example will help explain why (or perhaps you already know the pain). Let's start with how it should work.

Effective Marketing Automation System:

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.

The registrations for the webinar automatically update the contact record, so a reminder email to registrants, and a last minute 2nd invitation to non-registrants can be sent automatically. After the webinar the attendees are flagged as having attended in the contact record. And you are ready to start all over again in another program! This is how Market2Lead works for instance. There is NO behavioral data (such as attended or registered) stored in static lists, because that would create pockets of behavioral data outside the contact record in static lists that have to be searched every time you build a new production list.

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"

Behavioral data, such as campaign responses,  belongs in the contact’s record, not in static lists or data cards or anywhere else. One database please. One place to look for data! FYI Market2Lead's contact record looks like this:

-Kevin