How to Set Up A Scalable Scoring Program | Nation Talks

[Joe_Reitz]

Setting up and modifying a lead scoring program doesn't have to be a pain. This video provides a brief overview of how to set up a scalable, token-driven scoring campaign for your entire Marketo platform.

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You're probably already familiar with the fundamentals of lead scoring. While scoring leads is a simple flow step you can incorporate into any Smart Campaign, that's not necessarily the most scalable solution.

Say – for example – that you have a litany of white papers, case studies, and articles that you want to score. For the sake of this example, let's also say that you initially decide that an article is worth +25, a case study is +10, and an article is +5. Later, after seeing how leads really interact with your content and how they fit into your lifecycle model, you decide that case studies should also be +25 and articles should really be +10 to paint the most accurate picture of where the lead is at in terms of making a buying decision. If you keep scoring at the the program level and rely on individual Smart Campaigns to control how each piece of content is scored, you'll have to update every single Smart Campaign every time you modify your scoring values.

Hence the "not scalable" comment, right?

The TL;DR about scoring is that attaining accuracy is a process fraught with testing, tweaking, and possibly twerking (read: victory dance). Basically, it involves a lot of guess and check, recheck, and guess again. Because of this process, it's important to find an easy method to modify your scoring behaviors outside of individual smart campaigns within each individual program.

This is one of many places where tokens save your... come into play.

In our instance, we've set up a couple programs for behavioral scoring and demographic scoring. Within each program, there are a variety of Smart Campaigns that are triggered on various criteria, like clicking a link in an email, attending a webinar, visiting 5+ pages  of our site... You get the idea. The way we quickly modify the scores of these actions is within the tokens at the program level. Check out this screenshot:

To create these tokens, you simply drag in the ★ Score token, enter a token name and a value. Now these tokens are ready to be used within any smart campaign in the program.

To use "clicks link in email" as an example, take a look at these screen caps for Smart List and Flow, respectively:

What you see here is that rather than inputting a typical value in to the change field, you can input a token. The more you utilize tokens in your instance, the more this will become your default response... but it's an easy best practice to overlook!

[Anonymous]

Joe Reitz - I agree that having a separate operational folder where the scoring campaigns are kept and using a global score rather than one SC per content is better than keeping them on each individual program (and that's how Marketo comes seeded). I wish you had gone more in depth with why you're using tokens in your scoring rather than just using +5 in the flow step.

I would think that each token is used just once. After all, why would you want to score on the same thing multiple times? If you have a program that scores +2 for clicking a link (except unsubscribe) in *any* email, Marketo is listening across all emails to add that score. You wouldn't want a separate clicks link score in another program to add +4, because then with just one click you now have +6 points. You really only want one program scoring one time (per click, that is).

I suppose that's what confuses me that I don't think was answered in your video - the value of using tokens versus just putting the score within the program. All I can think of is so that you might save a bit of time being able to go into the tokens tab to update the value rather than finding the program in your scoring folder. Am I missing something?

[Dan_Stevens_]

Christina, that's exactly why it's a best practice to use this approach. Not only does it make it easier to edit, but it gives you a birdseye view of your entire scoring framework. 

[Joe_Reitz]

This is exactly right. Why go to 6 places to make edits or wonder how you're scoring something else when you can tuck them all into the same place?

The value of tokens is always going to be to save time.

[Anonymous]

During office hours a few weeks ago we realized that there was a problem with the Program Library import. A few of us had imported the standard advanced scoring program and it was supposed to come with tokens set up in the same way that Joe has them in his video, but there was an error and no tokens came through.

I'm really disappointing that I have to go in and make this fix myself. Our office hours person said that my consultant could re-import at no cost of hours, but I made significant modifications to every single smart campaign to fit my company, so even if she imports a new program, I'll still have to modify the program extensively. Instead I put the project on a post-implementation to do list and I'll get to it when I can.

I imported the program in January and another person in February, so who knows how many other companies lack the proper program token set up. Hopefully this video helps to spread the word that there's a better way than what they received in the import!