Hello everyone, and Happy New Year!
I'm looking for feedback and best practices around weekly customer classification and proper handling of former customers in Marketo. Our current onboarding program is working, but I suspect there's a cleaner, more scalable way to structure it. I'm actively working through a revised setup that we can use until we configure an API integration to our data warehouse.
Current (live) setup:
- One onboarding program that contains:
- Business onboarding email
- Consumer onboarding email
- Smart campaigns that send the appropriate email when someone is added to a list and matches Customer Type = Business or Consumer.
- In addition to the onboarding emails and trigger-based campaigns, we also rely on multiple weekly batch campaigns to reset and reclassify customer fields before the weekly list is uploaded. Specifically:
- A batch campaign that clears the Customer Type field (sets it to NULL) for anyone who Customer Type is currently Business or Consumer.
- After the weekly list upload, batch campaigns then:
- Set Customer Type = Consumer or Business, based on list membership.
- Set Customer = true if a person is a member of either the Business or Consumer list.
- There is also a batch campaign that runs prior to the new list upload that resets the Customer field to false, so that customers are reclassified each week based on the latest lists.
This approach is technically functional, but it's very clunky and spread across multiple folders. This process hasn't been updated in a very long time. The logic is hard to follow and increases the risk of human error, and that's what I'm ultimately trying to improve.
The reason why I'd like to revisit this:
- I think that Program and Smart Campaign organization could be much cleaner.
- Process documentation is harder to follow than it should be.
- We want this to become more automated, scalable, and resilient to human error.
We recently had an incident where a fill-in analyst uploaded the wrong list and contacts were classified as customers and received onboarding emails. That prompted us to rethink not just the logic, but also the guardrails and structure.
Constraints:
- No CRM
- No API or data warehouse integration (in progress, but not available yet)
- All logic is currently list-driven
I'm hoping to get feedback on:
- Best practices for weekly static list uploads
- How others handle former customer classification without a CRM
- When to rely on triggers, batch campaigns, fields, program statuses, etc (the logic involved)
- Ways to better organize programs and campaigns so the logic is clearer and easier to maintain.
Any ideas, examples, feedback would be greatly appreciated. Please let me know if you have any additional questions.
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