Scaling Targeted Email Recipient Lists

[Alex_Firtl]

Hey Nation,

I'm helping out my team with a couple of targeted email sends. They want to target possible prospects of one our product lines, and want to include as many people as possible that have interacted with anything that might be related to that Product. This could include: visted that product's pricing page, visited product-specific blogs, attended specific webinars, attended specific tradeshows, interacted with specific trade publication ads, etc.

My question is how do you all deal with scaling requests like this. At this point, I'm building about 16 different smart lists. I'm trying to build them so that I only need to add new product-specific blogs/webinars/tradeshows/etc as we execute them, but it still seems....tedious.

Any ideas on how best to manage the scalability of this?

Thanks!

[Michael_Florin]

Well, I think this is exactly the challenge in a multi-product environment. No easy outs here.

You - or all your Marketo users - need to agree on the definition of a prospect for a product line. What are your criteria and do you accept overlap, and if so how much of it? I mean, can one person be a prospect for x products and therefore be emailed x times. If you don't allow overlap, you could use a field like "Product Interest" and stamp that with your product line whenever these interactions - web site visits, webinar registrations and so on - happen. If you have that in place, your Smart List setup will be rather easy. 

Or do your web site visits or asset downloads create memberships in your CRM or program memberships in Marketo? If that is the case you can use "is member of program where name contains "productA" (Naming Convention of programs matter!) or Salesforce campaign memberships to identify prospects. That would be a scenario that accepts overlap.

We are using both of these methods, but when we set up our Marketo instance three years ago, we knew that exactly this would be a problem we had to solve.