Marketing Automation and Lead Management Blog

Why is supporting duplicate contacts based on email address important?

Recently, in a conversation with Marketing Automation analyst David Raab, we discussed why anyone would actually want to support multiple prospect records with the same email address in their marketing automation system. This may be a religious war right up there with Captain Kirk vs Captain Picard or Emacs versus VI (ok, maybe I'm a nerd...).

Some marketing automation systems do not support multiple contacts with the same email address.  As a marketing purest I agree with the concept, but unfortunately the buying public does not! Here are three reasons why you will benefit from supporting multiple contacts with the same email address in you marketing automation system.

3 reasons why marketing automation systems should support duplicate email addresses

1. Salesforce.com is notorious for permitting duplicates. Sales people simply add new contacts and leads without hitting the link to check to see if the person already exists in the database. Why is this a problem? Consider this scenario.
   Lead exists in database, synched between Marketing Automation and CRM. Sales gal adds a duplicate contact, same email address.Marketing automation system that only supports one contact per email address cannot synch the duplicate over. Marketing continues to record interactions with the original contact whilst sales records their interactions in the duplicate copy. At some point thecontact tells the rep they want to unsubscribe. Sales gal unsubscribes the non-synching duplicate in CRM.Trouble looms.
2. Many companies think of Leads, not as people, but as early stage opportunities for products. So one person, may represent several leads (interested in several products). In my naive marketing state some years ago I attempted to tell customers what abad idea this was. Telling billion dollar firms to rewire their sales process and CRM, and re-train the global sales team, to accommodate purest marketing concepts...ahhh not such a good idea. This is one of the leading reasons marketing automation systems that cannot support multiple contacts with same email address are often not integrated with a CRM!
3. A slightly different twist on #2 is when different divisions of the same firm, may have contacts who are interested in different products, and have different contact owners. If a person expresses a different product interest by registering for a document or event for a different product, the marketing automation system should be able to create a new contact record for that person, because the CRM will assign ownership to a different individual in a different division. You can still create "fatigue" rules to ensure that the person doesn't get overloaded with email from multiple divisions, but their contact records for each division can be unique. This is considered a very cool feature by some of our Market2Lead enterprise accounts.

Bottom line, life is much better, and data quality is higher if you have a marketing automation system that lets you deduplicate on any combination of fields you choose, but still maintains a separate master opt-out database so that if any of the duplicate contacts opts out at a global level, no email goes to any of the contacts with that email address. It goes without saying that our global customers drove us to develop Market2Lead this way, and we thank them for it! Marketing listening to Sales.

-Kevin

PS sorry I neglected my blogging for a few weeks we were finishing up our new website. Check it out! Lots of lovely new short video demos of the application.

Website tracking from Web Analytics vendors vs. Marketing Automation vendors

I get asked by many Prospects during the sales process about the difference between web tracking functionality offered by web analytics vendors like Google Analytics and Marketing Automation solutions like Market2Lead. There is a definitely an overlap between the two types of solutions, but at the same time there is a significant difference too. Let me elaborate.

Traditional Web Analytics tools like Google, Omniture or Coremetrics do a great job in tracking and reporting on overall traffic trends on the corporate website.

• You get to understand where traffic is coming from – Direct Traffic, Referring Sites or Search Engines
• You can track popularity of content on your site – page views per page, bounce rates
• Monitor overall metrics - Visits, Pages/Visit, Bounce Rate, Avg. time on site

Web Analytics vendors do a great job in helping you understand how your corporate website is contributing towards overall Marketing goals like awareness, brand building and demand generation.

You can get some of these metrics from the current generation Marketing Automation solutions that do offer website tracking as a feature (including Market2Lead). But this should not be the key criteria for you to evaluate MA solutions for this feature.

There are 2 key aspects that are unique to MA solutions. 

1.    Web tracking by user/company profile: Marketing Automation solutions give you the ability to track usage patterns by profile of your Contacts or the companies they work for. Marketing Automation systems are the record keeper of your house database and have rich profile information like Demographic, Firmographic, Needs Insights etc. Now, imagine the power you have at your disposal if you can combine a person’s information with his web activity information. You can conduct all sorts of interesting analysis like:

• What % of my traffic is executives/VPs/Directors/Managers/IT
• What % of my offers are being picked up by people with different roles and managing different functions within their companies
• What % of my content is appealing to SMB companies/Midsize companies/large enterprises
• Is my contact’s online behavior validating the interest he/she expressed in filling out a form

2.    Notifications to sales reps: You can now alert your sales staff based on key web activities that are recorded within your MA solution. Sales reps are always looking for the right reason to pick up the phone and call their Leads or Opportunities. Some of the scenarios where MA solutions can help are:

• A key opportunity that went dark during the negotiation phase is reviewing case studies on the website. Such information gives reps the assurance that the Opportunity is still active and is evaluating risk by looking for relevant case studies

• A Lead that stopped responding to phone calls was spotted on the website. This is a great opportunity for the rep to call the Lead and hope to connect with him/her while he/she is still at his/her desk

• Give reps a better qualified Lead that has not just filled a form but has demonstrated interest by invested an appropriate amount of time reading relevant content

• Assist Leads who are trying to understand your value proposition by sending them follow up offers based on what they are reading on your website

In my opinion, web tracking functionality from Marketing Automation solution is complimentary to web tracking from the standard Web analytics tools.

-Sundeep

Numeric Scoring Pros and Cons

I recently read a blog post by Laura Ramos from Forrester on the subject of Lead Scoring methodologies. In the article Laura outlines the key benefits of a "Numeric Scoring Model". I agree with Laura about the need for Marketers to remove the subjectivity about the quality of a Lead. I also agree with her about some of the best practices to help Marketing and Sales bring more clarity to this topic.

1. Sales & Marketing should have quarterly meetings to review the scoring model and tune it based on results from the previous quarter.

2. Implement a scoring scheme that is easy to understand and manage. One of the methods is to use Numeric scoring. In this method a Marketer would assign points to each key Contact attribute and a weight (both self reported data and behavioral data) and compute a weighted sum of the points to arrive at  the overall Score of a Contact. This method has its pros and cons. Laura already outlined the benefits of the Numeric model that I don't want to repeat here. Here are 2 challenges with this method that I have seen:

a. Chances of sending False Positives to Sales: With a scoring model that does not support a rules engine Marketers don't have the capability to check for data completeness and authenticity for key pieces of information without which a Lead is of little value to Sales. Let's look at a sample scoring scheme (to keep this example simple I have not added any weights to each attribute):

Here is a sample Lead based on this model:

In the above example  Bob gets a score of 95, which is a very high score, and needs immediate follow up from sales. But, from the data it is fairly obvious that the phone number is bogus and we have a hotmail address. Let's take an extreme case where  Bob's  information comes into the system without an email or a phone number. In this case the Lead will still have a score of 80 points (I subtracted 5 points for email and 10 points for phone number from the original score of 95 points). In both these cases the scoring model instantly loses credibility with the sales team and we all know what happens next. 

b. How is the Lead with a score of '68' different from a Lead with a score of '77'? We all know that sales people like to spend their time selling and not learning and understanding internal processes. The last thing we want to do with a sales guy is to open a spreadsheet with 100 items and a complex formula that spits out a number. The critical thing for Marketing is to prioritize the Leads for sales and set some thresholds for follow up. For example, Leads with 80 points and more need to be followed up within 4 hours; Leads with a score between 60 and 80 points need to be followed up within 8 hours and so on. A tiered scoring method (A, B, C, D) serves the same purpose.

In my view the scoring scheme (either points based or tiered) needs to be augmented with a robust data completeness and data validation process to ensure that sales gets to work on Leads that have a high chance of conversion.  One way to augment the scoring process is to add 2 pre-processing stages:

1. Data validity check: In this step we need to check for common junk data that people enter like 'test', 'aaa', 'asdf' etc. for Name, '111-1111', '1234567890' for phone numbers, 'a@a.com' for emails etc.

2. Data Suppression: Sometimes there are legitimate Leads that are generated from Marketing campaigns that are not necessarily sales Leads. We need to suppress such Leads. For example, emails have a '.edu' extension, the Lead belongs to a partner organization or an analyst firm etc.

I would love to hear your comments.