Lead Score Decay question

[James_Glavin]

Hi everyone,

I want to set up scoring campaigns which add to the score when the lead takes various actions, then removes those points after 180 days.

I thought I could do it with a wait step - so the scoring campaign would run:

Lead clicks link in email

Change score +2

Wait 180 days

Change score -2

The question I have is what would happen if a lead undertook this activity while they were already in the wait step? I'd want leads to run through this campaign every single time, but I'm not sure if someone is already in the wait step what would happen. If the above flow won't work, does anyone have any ideas what would?

Thanks and happy holidays!

James

[Geoff_Krajeski1]

What I've implemented in the past are the following criteria for my lead decay program

Run on a schedule (weekly, daily, etc)

Criteria:

- If not clicked on email in last ## days

- If not filled out form in last ## days
- If not visited webpage in last ## days

My decay rate in the flow steps took into account where they stood in my scoring model.

The higher up they were, the faster I wanted them to decay so that they came down at to a level where they were showing no or little engagement at the same rate they could scale up in the scoring.

-Geoff

[Anonymous]

This should work.  You could be more explicit though and do this on a per link basis but that could be very time consuming.

[James_Glavin]

Thanks everyone for your input. I did a test as Grégoire Michel​ suggested, and using a wait step did work. I clicked an email link three times, and all three times a score was added, then removed after the wait step.

So it seems the functionality can work. I'm interested in the issues I might run into if I use the wait step, as Courtney Grimes​ and Rajesh Talele​ mentioned. What are the negatives of doing it this way?

[Alex_Stanton1]

The main issue with wait steps is that once someone is in it, they remain in it even if the campaign is deactivated and then proceed through the rest of the flow steps.

[Casey_Grimes]

As Josh said, the wait step will still run—it's just that sometimes that in and of itself can be the problem if you decide you want to revamp your scoring, need the record to not run for whatever reason due to changes made in processes, etc. I'm very wary of running a wait step for more than a few days as a result and have gotten into the practice of setting up an "emergency override" field of sorts to check against and remove from flow as a manual brake in the event you don't want records to perform the flow set up after the wait step.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi James,

One of the thing that may happen is that the smart campaign is deactivated by Marketo if no lead has triggered it in 90 days. In this case, I do not know what would happen to leads in way step. Retry your test, but deactivate the triggered campaign during the wait

-Greg

[Josh_Hill13]

The Wait Step should still run just as it would if you turned off the campaign or removed the wait step while it was running.

As people suggested, it is far more efficient to keep everything in separate campaigns:

• Clicks Link in Email - every time
• Negative Score - Not Clicked Link in Email in Past X days, run Every X Days.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Josh,

The separates campaigns, which is the Standard Marketo recommendation, have a big drawback : it does not keep the track of how many times the score was initially incremented. As a result, a lead may have been given N times 2 points for repeating an action, and one will never be able to remove these Nx2 points precisely.

I understand, that a given lead may run through the score increment campaign every times and the objective is to exactly decrement the same number 180 days after the event.

-Greg

[Casey_Grimes]

Hi James,

I understand what you're trying to do here, but in reality it's a little difficult. First off, Rajesh is right that you don't want people hanging out in wait steps that long because it winds up causing a variety of issues. At the same time, calculating out decays for 180 days is pretty tricky because you don't have the activity grace period of 90 days. Off the top of my head, the best thing I could think of would be to create a dedicated program for each type of scoring you want to do (e.g., Opens, Clicks, etc.) and create a custom channel for the concept. Set every single channel status to have the same weight value. You then would have each channel status be +0, +2, +4, etc. for whatever your upper limit of communications would be for six months, and your flow steps would check where someone was in the channel status before assigning a score and moving their status.

You'd then have a batch campaign that ran once a week or so to check to see "if 180 days at channel status X (i.e., no movement to suggest keeping lead score due to engagement), subtract score points and set to channel status Y."

It's really wonky, but I'm not sure if there'd be a better fit right now.

[Grégoire_Miche2]

Hi Courtney and all,

If you really want a solid, yet complex, solution that works with a very high reliability level, I suggest using a custom object and a webhook to populate it. Each time the lead does the action, you call the webhook that creates a custom object entry for the lead, with the date (in a custom field, since you will wan to use it in a constraint).

Then you use a daily batch campaign that look for all the leads that have a custom object entry that is exactly 180 days old and substract the score.

It's even possible to sophisticate the model adding a counter field to the custom object to count the number of times the score was added in a given day and adapt the daily smart campaign accordingly. This will require that the webhook that creates the custom object entry can alternatively increment the counter if a custom object entry already exist for that same day.

Finally, you may want to add another webhook that will mark the custom object entry as "deprecated". This second webhook will be called by the daily batch campaign. So that when you look at the custom objects, you know immediately which ones have been deprecated.

Now, it this really worth it ? that is the key question and I am not sure of the answer

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi Gregoire,

I agree that it might not be "worth it", but it sure was fun following your solution concept out. (As a data wonk, I especially dig the custom counter concept!)

Thank you for your posts!

Lynn

[Grégoire_Miche2 · Accepted solution]

Hi James,

a few thoughts :

• I think it would work. Meaning if the person performs the action twice in a couple of days, it will go though the flow twice. This is easy to test with a dummy form, a "fills out form" smart campaign and a 10 minutes wait.
• You may want to limit the number of times a lead can go through your smart campaign. For instance once every hour or once every day. This is to make sure that the leads do not get to quickly to very high scores with repetitive actions. (this applies to various behavioral scoring, not just to this one BTW).

-Greg

[Anonymous]

Hi James,

I would use the 'Lead Score Decay' smart campaigns separate.

Create altogether different smart campaigns that will monitor.

'No clicks in last 180 days'

then

decay score by 2

or

'No form fills' in last 180 days

then

decay score by 10

and so on.

If you have wait steps, and if  a lead clicks on a link say several times in a week, things can be very tricky to add up. Even if you have 'Lead can go through multiple times' set up for that smart campaign.

Hope this helps

Rajesh Talele