How do you track marketings influence on Customers?

[Jessica_Ruffalo]

We are turning down the path of what is the best way to attribute marketing's influence on Customers; specifically renewals/cross-sell/up-sell.  There has been thoughts that responding to one Marketing email campaign isn't enough to assign marketing an influence.  There has been thoughts to create a separate scoring structure similar to a lead score, but would be for contacts.  Also, we've thought about concatenating behavior of a customer within campaigns and web visits within a certain time frame could contribute success. What do you do? And does Sales buy it?

[Anonymous]

Hi Jessica:

What you can do is set up success criteria for each Channel.  For the webinar channel success might be attending the webinar or viewing the recording.  For email it might be determined by clicking through to the landing page etc...

This information is then fed into your RCS Program analytics report which will use it to calculate first touch and multi touch attribution.

[Robb_Barrett]

We have a couple of categories: pre-qualified leads (PQLs) and Qualified Leads. A PQL is a lead that scores 100 points, based on BANT questions (Budget, Authority, Need, and Time-to-Purchase). Additional points are given for leads based on Title or leads that request sales follow-up.

When the lead gets that 100 points they're pushed to SFDC along with a Campaign ID to indicate which Marketo campaign sparked their interest to answer the form questions. They're now a Lead in SFDC.

A Lead will (hopefully) turn into an Opportunity for the product they were interested in. Along with a Campaign ID, we push a Product Interest with the lead to SFDC.

So, let's say that you have a piece of gated content. On the form, you ask the lead if they would like follow up from a sales rep. They say yes.  Guess what?  They're a Marketing Generated Lead. 

Now, only items attached to the Opportunity created from the Marketo push qualify for Marketing impact.  If Sales gets on the phone and convinces them to buy add-ons, it's not a Marketing Generated Opportunity....only the original product(s) from the form.

[Jessica_Ruffalo]

Thanks Rob - Does it sound right to say you are looking at first touch (which campaign brought them into the database) as the marketing influenced campagin?

[Josh_Hill13]

Why isn't an email response of some type (which you define) good enough for a Success/Attribution for a customer? Why would you make your customer model different?

If we go with Marketo's model, we can create a separate RCM and lifecycle just for customers. We can continue to use Program attribution and include tags like Audience=Customer to ensure we can sift the data well. I see no reason to have a special model just for customers. Continue using program success as the base part of attribution.

So even if a customer responds to a set of web pages, that could be a success. You certainly get to define what a success is for both leads and customers. If you really want the customer to look at more pages, specific pages, or a form fill, you can do that.

But I wouldn't necessarily use totally separate response and success criteria for Customers vs. Leads. You will get into trouble with complexity and your thinking.

What might be better is focusing on product use, renewals, nurturing related to engagement. But none of those change the Attribution model.

[Josh_Hill13]

More crisply: the same way you track influence on non customer leads.

[Jessica_Ruffalo]

Sales is not convinced that by a customer clicking a link in a renewal campaign that it's worth of attribution.  We have a tough crowd here.