Engagement Score --- Factoring out Audience

[Anonymous]

In Evaluating the results of the Engagement Score accross tons of leads for my clients, I realized that there is an inherent bias in the engagement score and the segment the nurture is against.  So for example, the average engagement score for late stage or lost nurture is always much lower than the engagement score for new lead nurture.  This is a function of the segment and not  ... at least fully .. the content.  So my question is ..

1.  How do you use the engagement score accounting for this
2.  What is the best way for me to weigh the significance of my results knowing this?

If I group emails within stages, for example if I say show me all emails in late stage,   I can compare them to eachother, but they all fall under 50, industry average.  So do we have any averages for different stages? When we say industry average is 50, does that take segment into consideration?  My guess is no, but I request Marketo give me some insight on this part of the question!
 

Thanks

Maneeza 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hi Maneeza,

I saw you ask this question on LinkedIn too - has anyone gotten back to you? Have you figured it out on your own?

I have to admit I don't really understand what you're asking.

Are you saying that engagement scores in engagement programs are biased toward early stage nurture streams? And that it makes it difficult to evaluate email performance across the entire nurture cycle?

If so, then one thing to consider is that email performance is only valuable within an appropriate context. The same email could perform great in early stage nurture and do terribly in late stage nurture. With that in mind, it shouldn't matter that Marketo may or may not have a bias towards early stage nurture when scoring content. What matters is the relative score within context (nurture stage + segment).

Hope that makes sense...

[Anonymous]

Hi Grant,

No I received no replies accross of all of Marketo and Linked in 🙂 ... So first of all thanks for the reply.  You are completely correct, and that is how I do the reporting accross the score ..i.e. I manually break it out by stage to make sure we are comparing apples to apples ... but my question is ..
 

Does that mean that an Average of 50 is the right Average accross al of these stages.  My guess is yes, but I want to hear from the folks that built the algorith for confirmation.

Or it is possible that "Industry Average"  will be different for early stage versus late.  Hope that clarifies it a bit.

[Anonymous]

I gotcha.

My vote is for having an "average" that's different by stage.

The rationale for this is that what you're looking for is the best performing email WITHIN that stage - not across the full funnel, because that doesn't make any sense. Customer engagement is not the same during early vs late stage - both in terms of levels of engagement, types of engagements and frequency of engagement - and therefore it doesn't make sense to force it to be evaluated against the same benchmarks.

It makes sense for each stage to have it's own "average" or "benchmark" score, to which you're comparing the email performance.

I hope there are other people who are reading this who'll chime in as well.