Magento is the leading platform for open commerce innovation, handling over $100 billion in gross merchandise volume annually. After spending four years at Magento previously, I boomeranged back to be the Marketing Automation Lead. This time around, I rebuilt demand generation engines including revamped form anatomy, a new lead scoring matrix, more fluid lifecycle campaigns, and campaigns to nurture early-stage leads.

 

More High Qualified Leads

 

 

Revamped Form Anatomy - Much like love & hate, there's a thin line between needing data to qualify leads & asking too many questions. At Magento, the primary source of conversions was the demo request form and in addition to requiring too many fields, the questions it asked were unclear, often leading to misguided responses.

While brain-storming solutions, I had an"AHA" moment when I decided to make the form dynamic based on our user personas. Certain personas were deemed more valuable than others and some questions we asked were not relevant to certain types of prospective customers. Everything hinged on this one question and by making it conditional I was able to:

• Tailor the questions to each user type.
• Trim the length of the form overall for each of the different users.
• Reduce confusion, and improved the accuracy of responses.

 
Finally, I implemented the data enrichment tool Clearbit, which allowed me to hide several more fields and collect that data on the backend.

New Lead Score Matrix - I spent several weeks sitting down with the Head of Business Development, digging deep into customer data, and together we:

• Analyzed ideal customers as well as bad leads and created campaign attribution reports.
• Looked for common patterns in the ways they interacted with Magento and in the data we gathered from them.
• Created a lead score model that identified our ideal customers through demographic data captured by forms and recognized the intent to buy via behavioral actions.
• Continued to monitor and tweak the model over the next few months until it was effective and able to scale with Magento's growth.

 

Through these efforts and the hire of a few additional business development reps, we saw the conversion rate from MQL to SQL nearly double.

 

Nurture Campaigns for Less Mature Leads

 

The demand generation team and I committed to adding more, soft conversion opportunities, with things like educational content assets, and so it was also my job to nurture early-stage leads through the buyer's journey.  The team decided to base the campaign around the topical relevance of our prospective customers and we sent out a survey to ascertain the biggest barriers to success in the industry.

Background - The Marketo nurture campaign I built combined four strategic email streams, addressing the most common eCommerce challenge for merchants that we revealed in our survey (Sales and Conversion, International Expansion, Site Performance, and Site Customization). The emails primarily promoted educational content and case studies.

Segmentation  Method - Campaign members were placed into a challenge stream based on their behavioral actions. Members who had not identified their biggest challenge were entered into a default path, where we made several attempts to discover the ideal stream for them. If members weren’t converted by the end of a stream, they would waterfall into the next challenge stream.

Conversion Method - Members added points to their lead score by interacting with emails. They were qualified once they'd accumulated a lead score above the threshold or by interacting with the right hook emails (think jab jab jab...RIGHT HOOK) that I peppered in throughout the campaign.

VIEW FULL CAMPAIGN FLOW CHART»

 

 

[ess_grid alias="david"]