Magento is the leading platform for open commerce innovation, handling over $100 billion in gross merchandise volume annually. In the four years I spent working for Magento's demand generation marketing team, I utilized Marketo's automation software to promote campaigns for webinars, content, and events that attracted leads to the database and/or profiled them. In one such campaign, I used Marketo's Engagement Engine to create a dynamic lead nurture infrastructure, which nurtured leads through the stages of the buyer's journey.

 

Finding the Right Match

Many different variations exist, but this beautiful image that I drew with a crayon is the infamous marketing funnel and it is the essence of Inbound Marketing. The steps of the funnel get changed a lot and it often gets overcomplicated is different ways.  I always try to keep it as simple as possible and, as any of my associates would tell you, constantly liken it to dating. Now, if the nice, young, stick figure lady above were to give the cool, stick man her number, there's a sort of unspoken protocol he would probably have to follow in order to avoid scaring her off. He wouldn't, for example, carpet bomb her with lengthy texts detailing the reasons she should choose him, right? They don't even know each other. Most of us know this to be true of the dating world, yet this is how prospects are treated all the time in the marketing world.

A more acceptable approach for the stick man would be to create a back-and-forth, so they could feel each other out and see if there's potential for more. If that went well, they could go on some dates and if they felt like it was a good match they could couple up. This is what we call the buyer's journey or "the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to a purchase."

 

A Nurture Stream for Every Stage of the Buyer Journey

At Magento, we mapped our nurture campaign out onto the buyer's journey. Staying true to the inbound marketing methodology in the Name stream, we sent members educational, top-of-the-funnel content to help them identify and solve their challenges.  We also used this stream as an opportunity to further profile and qualify members.

Once qualified, members were moved to the Prospect steam, where they continued to receive TOF content.  The difference was, in the Prospect stream we provided contacts with plenty of opportunities to show their interest in the Magento product.

When we knew they were qualified and interested, we had members of our sales team reach out to them and moved them over to the MQL stream, where they received bottom-of-the-funnel content like case studies, product videos, and TEI reports.

Finally, when the sales team deemed the leads were indeed qualified opportunities, we moved them into the SQL stream, where they received messaging meant to combat FUD and arm them with all the information they needed to make a sound decision.

 

Content Personalized for Key Industry Verticals

 

Along the way, we utilized Marketo's dynamic email feature to personalize the content and make it more appealing to industry verticals.  A vertical that we were strongly focusing on at the time was the fashion industry and above you can see how we changed the entire look, feel and voice of the emails when speaking to members of the fashion industry as opposed to our default emails.

The personalized, fashion experience didn't stop at email inboxes, it was also carried over to the landing pages and assets contacts and leads were directed to.

 

And Also Personalized to be Topically Relevant

To further personalize the email experience, we curated the content our contacts received based on their job function.  To accomplish this, we created content themes and added the contacts to the content buckets that were most relevant to what their job entails.

 

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