Determining existing customers vs. new customers

[Anonymous]

Hello Marketo Community,

we are planning a new campaign that targets

1. Existing customers that own a specific product (and we promote a long awaited update)
2. New customers that do not own the product (and the recent update is a main reason to convince them)

We do currently not have any sync between our CRM and MKT in place (but we are working on that..) which means that we do not know which lead owns the product and which not. The campaign entry point will be a MKT form on external websites (e.g. journals or articles).

To target everyone with the right content we should now determine if someone owns the product right on the first lead form - e.g. asking directly "Do you already use products of our company?" and if the answer is yes, then a product dropdown appears.

However, is there any better solution than that? How did you solve similar issues in previous campaigns? We never had this issue until now and we do know that the CRM sync is the solution, but that integration will take some time.

Thank you.

Jonas

[David_Gaible · Accepted solution]

I'd caution against including a question like that on the form - if I'm a customer, seeing a question like that on a form signals to me that the company doesn't have a clear view of its customer base.

Simpler solution: can you get a csv file of your customers from your product or billing team? You could then upload those emails as a static list, and then use that static lists as a decision point in your campaigns. Once you've got your CRM sync up, you can just delete the list.

[SanfordWhiteman]

if I'm a customer, seeing a question like that on a form signals to me that the company doesn't have a clear view of its customer base.

But that's a common enough Q that it would be strange to ding a company for it. IMO.

Asking "Do you already use our company's products?" is normal because you can't expect that the lead address that's filling out the form is already in the db. It could be someone whose product license is linked to another, perhaps defunct email address, or someone who's a power user of a product but who has no accounting relationship with the manufacturer, etc.

Don't get me wrong, interpreting that answer as proof-of-purchase would be strange indeed!

[David_Gaible]

Good points Sanford Whiteman​! I'm lucky in that I've got some decent upstream systems that can help me differentiate between accounting relationship and end-users. Not all that info flows into SFDC (we're working on it) but we can do manual pulls when needed for specific campaigns. Working to automate that at well.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Sanford Whiteman & Gaible. I really don't think that customers care if a company has a view of its customer base just because of getting asked that on an external form.

However, we'll upload a csv with our sales data into Mkt and use that as a decision point - still hoping that the crm integration will be accomplished soon.

[Sara_Greaves]

Hi Jonas,

We have this problem in the sense that we don't sync opportunity/purchase data into Marketo (yet). What we do to make sure that we don't email customers to try to sell them a product they already have is we create purchase lists that we can exclude in our individual campaigns. Our sales team will provide a bi-weekly export of purchase data. We then create product-specific lists of accounts that have purchased a product within a time frame that makes sense with the sales cycle for that product. When we create a campaign for a product, we just make sure to exclude the accounts in the relevant list. It's not an ideal process, but it works until we complete our data integration.