Marketing Automation Information Architecture: Properties, Segments, Categories

Submitted by jordan on Wed, 02/03/2021 - 15:22

Configuring your marketing automation suite with the right architecture is a matter of organizing your metadata in the right way to maximize insights, stratify segments, and build towards the pinnacle: personalized communications and engagement management.

Architecting your marketing automation suite is not a one-size-fits-all venture. You often need to tailor the following steps to your organization's internal nomenclature and conventions. While many B2B sales teams are structured similarly, deal flow is often unique to industries. I encourage you to take the following blue print and modify some of these lists to your heart's content in a spreadsheet until you have clear—but concise—buckets.

**** This guide was originally written for Mautic but the strategies therein can be leveraged for any marketing automation technology. Enjoy. ****

Mautic Properties Setup

Start where you want to end up! Your segments allow you to think about how your customers want to be communicated with: both based on warmth and the type of relationship (topical, persona, etc) that you have with them.

Marketing Automation Segmentation Setup

Segment strategy is critical to every business, to get started you have to ask yourself some questions:

  1. Who are my customers?
  2. If I were to have a conversation with each of my customers, how does my tone and language used change depending on their segment?
  3. Can I feasibly service so many different segments or do I have to lump similar segments together?

At Facet, we use the following segments for our core newsletter audience. There are many ways we can achieve personalization based on the Industry or Persona or Orgonza, however we like to segment our audience based on how familiar and personal our relationship is with that contact. Essentially we have warmth-based segments:

Hot

  • Customers
  • Partners
  • Personal
  • VIPs

Warm

  • Past Clients
  • Vendors

Cool

  • Prospects
  • References
  • Talent
  • everybody else → Subscribers

Do Not Contact

  • DNC
  • Staff NA - people who work at companies who are not targeted buyers of our services, but who get vacuumed up into our marketing engine.

Thanks to tools like Mautic Advanced Email Templates Bundle, we can use Twig in order to ensure our content is relevant based on, say, their interest in Drupal, Mautic, or Analytics. However, we find that the tone widely varies based on whether a contact has become a Client, a personal relationship, or somewhere in between.

Here is a full list of our Mautic segments that detail the above groups:

  • HOT-Customers
  • HOT-Partners
  • HOT-Personal
  • HOT-VIPs
  • HOT-Evangelists
  • WARM-Past Clients
  • WARM-Vendors
  • COOL-Prospects
  • COOL-References
  • COOL-Talent
  • COOL-Subscribers
  • DNC-Manual List
  • DNC-Staff NA
  • DNC-Neverbounced

And then for each warmth we can create a roll up segment:

  • HOT-ALL
  • WARM-ALL
  • COOL-ALL
  • DNC-ALL

There are some exceptions to the broad buckets:

  • COOL-Talent: At some point you will hire talent and they'll turn into Contractors or Staff (not to be confused with the external Staff NA). For these you'll probably want to create a HOT-Staff category and move contacts in here once their Lead Status = CLOSED_WON.
  • As you build tangible relationships with people, over time people become Personal contacts. You quite simply can't address them impersonally. This is good! But just monitor how you manage this via segmentation.
  • For any segment of persona an individual can always become a HOT-Evangelist. Once you build a relationship you may gain a champion. Keep an eye out for it.
    • For instance, we typically treat all registered VENDORS as WARM. However sometimes these vendors become co-selling partners and registering them as an evangelist makes more sense–especially if you're trying to encourage them with a warm tone to get out there and refer you more work.

Marketing Automation Categories Setup

In Mautic, Global Categories are the categories of updates your contacts can manage their Subscription Preferences against. That means, whenever someone clicks unsubscribe, they will see the list of your Global Categories. All of the other Type specific categories (Email, Form, Page, Asset) are meant for internal organization purposes.

At Facet, we really only have two categories:

  • Newsletter. A personalized email newsletter we send out monthly or bi-monthly.
  • #good-read Digest. A digest of the best articles and discussions from our internal Slack #good-read channel.

Mautic Custom Properties

With each deployment of Mautic we have some standard fields we typically add the following custom fields:

  • [ ] Account Source - Where did this Account come from? Lead Form, Apollo, Prospecting, etc.

  • [ ] Birthday

  • [ ] CRM Last Deal Amount

  • [ ] CRM Last Updated Date

  • [ ] CRM Last Contacted

  • [ ] Double Opt-In** - A boolean (TRUE/FALSE) to track whether someone double opted-in after receiving your confirmation sign-up email. Typically requires custom implementation in Mautic.

    ** Mautic does not ship with a Double Opt-in field out-of-the-box, make sure you add one and setup the appropriate campaign workflow to get started. You will need this to be compliant with any email sending service, so it is a good first project to learn how to set up campaigns, segments, and understand the inner workings of Mautic!

  • [ ] Domain - A clean version of the root domain of the contact, we use it for easier management of company relationships.

  • [ ] Industry - An industry specification, typically provided by third-party data enrichment services.

  • [ ] Interests

  • [ ] Lead Source - How did we acquire this contact in our database? CRM, Form, Apollo, etc.

  • [ ] Lead Status - What is the current status of the lead?

    • Facet uses a wide range of Lead Statuses mirroring what is available in HubSpot and other CRMs, but also expanding into unique phases. We encourage you to consider your own unique statuses and do not overburden yourself with this list. Make sure your CRM and Mautic both have the same set of options:

      • Bad Data : BAD_DATA
      • Bad Fit : BAD_FIT
      • Bad Timing: BAD_TIMING
      • Competitor : COMPETITOR
      • Connected : CONNECTED
      • Deal Lost : DEAL_LOST
      • Deal Won : DEAL_WON
      • Do Not Contact : DNC
      • In Progress : IN_PROGRESS
      • New : NEW
      • Not DM/DI : NOT_DMDI
      • Open : OPEN
      • Open Deal : OPEN_DEAL
      • Partner : PARTNER
      • Past Client : PAST_CLIENT
      • Personal : PERSONAL
      • Unqualified : UNQUALIFIED
      • Using Competitor : USING_COMPETITOR
      • Vendor : VENDOR

      *** Set Default to NEW.

  • [ ] LinkedIn

  • [ ] Neverbounce Status - Store the neverbounce responses as you validate email addresses.

  • [ ] Orgonza

    • Facet uses Orgonza in order to group audience members into similar groups and communicate relative content. Our list is based off of areas that we communicate, or areas that we want to signify a group whom we won't communicate with.
      • Aerospace
      • Automotive
      • Cosmetics
      • Digital Agency
      • E-Commerce
      • Engineering
      • Finance
      • Food / Drinks
      • Gaming
      • Government - Federal
      • Government - Local
      • Government - State
      • Higher Education
      • Information Technology
      • Insurance
      • Manufacturing
      • Media / Entertainment
      • Nonprofit
      • Product Dev Agency
      • Professional Services
      • Real Estate / Property Management
      • Retail
      • SaaS
      • Startup
      • Systems Integrator
      • Technical Agency

  • [ ] Persona - Personas are your identified roles of prospective companies you want to engage with.

    • Below is a list of our Personas, a few have special meaning but we generally stick to a combination of Role + Decision Level (DM or DI).
      • DM - A Decision Maker typically has buying and executing power.
      • DI - A Decision Influencer typically has no buying or executing power.
    • In addition to the roles, we also have some special Personas which signify a relationship that is unique to our hiring or events management processes.
      • Hiring Personas:
        • Talent
        • Reference
        • Delineating these personas helps us to communicate or exclude people we may only be talking to through the hiring process.
      • Events Management:
        • Venue DM
        • Sponsor DI
        • Sponsor DM
    • Staff NA - We often work across a full range of individuals at any given company, so many emails make it in for staff whom we have no vested interest in marketing or selling to. These people get a Staff NA.
    • Our full list of Personas:
      • Agency DI
      • Agency DM
      • Analytics DI
      • Analytics DM
      • Connector
      • IT DM
      • Marketing DI
      • Marketing DM
      • Product DI
      • Product DM
      • Reference
      • Sales DI
      • Sales DM
      • Sales Rep
      • Sponsor DI
      • Sponsor DM
      • Staff NA
      • Talent
      • Venue DM
      • Web DM

Getting Started

Once you get started laying out your information architecture, the rest of your campaigns, forms, and landing pages should snap into place. After all, marketing automation is about dripping people through your funnel. Start with the funnel and keep organized to it.

Have questions or comments on how you're rolling out your marketing automation architecture? Drop it in the comments!