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Advanced Scoring Ideas to Get your Creative Juices Flowing: Spoiler Alert, it’s Not just For Sales

Tori_M_Forte
Marketo Employee
Marketo Employee

Scoring is often an underutilized feature in Marketo. To get your creative juices flowing on how you can use scoring in Marketo to solve for non-traditional needs, I’ve listed three examples that have been implemented and worked successfully with other Marketo customers. If you've implemented a scoring model that’s worked for you, put a description of the model build and business use case it solved for in the comments section!

 

Use Case #1: Build an Onboarding Nurture Program that promotes the Products a person is most interested in

 

How to implement:

  • Work cross functionally to determine what the product categories would be; then create a program naming convention that captures the category and create a Score field for each category.
    • For Example: Within Adobe Experience Cloud, Product Categories are Analytics, Audience Profiles, Content Management, Campaign Management, Advertising, Personalization, Commerce. There would be a score field for each of those categories.

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  • Build scoring programs to look for program status changes that include the product category acronym, to increase/decrease a person’s product specific score

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  • Once a person hits a threshold of a specific product category score, they would move from the default / general content stream to the product category specific stream.

 

Use Case #2: Need to create a rolling score (regardless of score types) so that the score always and only reflects engagement during the last 30 days

 

How to implement:

Set up your scoring program as usual; but create a token for the positive value and negative value for each activity. I.e. If you give +15 points for attending a Webinar, you’d have two tokens: Attends Webinar – Increase (value = +5) and Attends Webinar – Decrease (Value = -5).

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For each smart campaign, the flow is (1) Change Score > Recent Behavior Score = {{my.Attends Event}}; (2) Wait 30 Days; (3) Change Score > Recent Behavior Score = {{my.NEG-Attends Event}}

  • If a person is eligible to go through the campaign multiple times (I.e. web visits, clicks link in emails) the process will capture each activity (even if overlapping)

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Use case #3: Your organization is a Parent company, and you want to be able to measure marketing engagement across the parent org and break down engagement by organization as well (this process also applies to one organization that wants to break down engagement by solution categories, internal segments, etc.)

 

How to implement:

  • Determine the breakdown you are looking to measure. For this article, let’s call it Parent Company, Child Company A, Child Company B and Child Company C. Therefore, we need 4 score fields – one to measure each.
  • Determine how you will measure the different activity across each. The most scalable way to do this is to use a program naming convention that tells Marketo which company to assign the activity to. For example a program name could be: COMPANY ORG | REGION | YY-MM | PROGRAM ID | PROGRAM DESCRIPTIONTori_M_Forte_5-1586815889210.png
  • When creating a program, Company Org will either be PAR, CCA, CCB, CCC. The person building the program must set this correctly, as this tells Marketo where to attribute the activity.
  • Then build a scoring program per Company (i.e. 4 programs for this example). If the values are the same per activity (I.e. if a person fills out a form, it’s +5 across all Companies) create a folder to hold all programs and build your tokens there so they will be inherited across all programs. If they will vary by Company, you can build them in Program > My Tokens
    • The Smart lists will be “Program Status Changed > Program Name contains | CCA | > New Status is X” > Flow = Change Score > Score is CCA Score to X Token
    • I recommend building out one entire program for one Company, then cloning it as most of the steps and smart campaigns will be similar
  • Then you’ve got scores by Company, which you can use for targeting marketing communications, provide as guidance for sales follow up, and more!

 

Here are some other use cases I’ve worked through as well. If you’re interested in hearing more about any of them, let me know!

  • Eloqua Scoring Replacement (alphanumeric Score)
  • Business Unit Scoring to drive the Right Marketing Content
  • Integration Driven Models (i.e. Propensity Scoring + Behavioral to drive Sales FU)
  • Driving a Marketing Focused Funnel: using Engagement Score(s) to drive a more robust Marketing Funnel
  • Cross-Channel Scoring to Determine Where your Audience likes to be engaged with most
  • To Decay, or Not to Decay; Including Reset Best Practices
  • How to Choose the best values for your Activities when first starting out with Scoring
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5 Comments
Phillip_Wild
Level 10 - Community Advisor

Cool! I'm guessing the program level tokens for scoring are simply for reusability / changing scores across orgs / product segments? I haven't used tokens in that way before but I can see how it would be useful.

 

Our scoring works in a similar way - but instead of having a wait step, then "turning off" the score (in effect) after 30 days, we decrease the score by ten points each and every day. So in the "total engagement" model, you can't have more than 1,000 points, and different activities give you different amounts of points. But each day, you will lose ten points. This means that if you take an action which is very closely tied to sales (made phone call) then you will get something like 700 points, and that will remain as engagement on your profile (to various degrees) for 70 days - since 700 / 10 = 70. And then we split our engagement levels up by different point levels (eg. 500-1000 is highly engaged, 100-500 is a little engaged, etc).

 

Would love to make it more data-driven but our attribution model needs to be in a better place first!

Tori_M_Forte
Marketo Employee

Hi Philip,

Re: using tokens for the score values, you're spot on. I've found it makes it easier when cloning, editing and overall scale of use. 

That's a super interesting scoring approach! And I definitely understand. Devil's in the data 🙂

 

Tori

Meesha_Jotshi
Level 2

Hi @Tori_M_Forte these use cases are interesting, thank you for sharing. Is there a blog that talks about this specific use case? --> Eloqua Scoring Replacement (alphanumeric Score)

Melissa_Day
Level 3 - Champion Alumni

Thanks for a very thorough and valuable post! I'd like to hear about another use case you mentioned - Driving a Marketing Focused Funnel: using Engagement Score(s) to drive a more robust Marketing Funnel. Can you please share?

Tori_M_Forte
Marketo Employee

@Melissa_Day and @Meesha_Jotshi I haven't written posts on those yet but have added them to my list! As soon as they're published, I'll tag you in them 🙂