Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

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

The #1 Factor in Executing Effective Campaigns

It’s the data stupid! Segmentation of your database, and the quality of the data therein, is the most important factor in determining the outcome of marketing campaigns. I read two items this week that reminded me of this important concept. First I read an ancient article on the 50 year old practice of RFM segmentation. No, that is not “Read The…Manual”, it is Recency, Frequency, and Monetary segmentation, something the direct mail business has practiced successfully for 50 years. The parallels to our B2B marketing automation supported lead nurturing world are amazing. We tend to consider recency and frequency of prospect interaction in determining a lead score for instance, and use that lead score in segmentation (to which campaign should I add or delete them?).

The second document I read was Ian Michiel’s document on Lead Lifecycle Management published in July 2009. In it Ian explains Aberdeen’s findings that best in class companies who improve their lead management (and thereby get better business results) are also substantially better at segmenting and targeting and have formal lead nurturing programs.  The important thing to remember about the data in your segmented list is that it is the first in a chain of variables that affect your campaign performance, and being first it can have a huge ripple effect on all the other variables (“Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”).

If you are serious about improving the effectiveness of your outbound lead nurturing campaigns you are best served by improving the variables starting at the left and working to the right! Attempting to dial in all 6 variables at the same time is not going to get you to the best campaign results fastest. But I digress!

What’s wrong with ‘spray and pray’ marketing campaigns?
Back in the old days, prior to email, direct mail was the primary medium for direct communications. And if you didn’t segment you could waste a ton of budget on printing and postage! These days the direct medium of choice is usually email which is practically free. So what’s wrong with spraying and praying? It doesn’t really cost us anything more once the campaign is set up, does it? It does!

• It can be very difficult to determine what messages are resonating and what offers are successful if you send them to broad audiences, mixing industry verticals, titles, geographies, etc. ie you limit your ability to measure effectiveness and improve results by spraying broadly.
• After you send 2 or 3 irrelevant messages to an individual you effectively inoculate them; your chances of getting through to them with the right message later on are diminished. Even if they don’t unsubscribe, chances are good that you will be diverted to their junk folder in the future. You only get one chance at a first impression…
• If you spray, then the chances are that your message and offer will be watered down to the most common denominator. You will likely be sending some “me, me, me, it’s all about me” style documents and offers.  Nurturing emails that work best are in fact the “you, you, you, it’s all about what you need” type, as mentioned in Brian Carroll’s good blog post recently. And you can really only make these offers effectively if you have segmented narrowly!

By not segmenting do I undermine my marketing metrics?
If you want to convince your boss that the offers and email copy you are creating are brilliant, and you are getting much better open rates and clicks than the industry average,  then by all means mix in current customers, competitors,  and employees with your new prospects on that product 101 emailing! All of these people are great for bumping up open rates!  Good luck improving that campaign.

Can poor data hygiene affect my marketing metrics?
Of course! Garbage in Garbage out (GIGO). What if 20% of your list are duplicates, 20% are unsubscribed but fortunately blocked by your email provider, 45% are public domains,  5% have typos in the domain name and so will bounce, 1% have parenthetical sales notes in the first name that you used to personalize the email, and 15% got the default signature and contact info in their email of some guy in service because he is erroneously  assigned as the lead owner. Good luck improving that campaign.

The most important contributor to effective campaigns is the data you begin with, so for heaven’s sake allow only clean data in,  keep it clean, and segment it well!

-Kevin