Are all engagements created equal?

Ariella Shoham
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

Following my previous post about the future of “push” marketing and the “death” of cold emails, the team and I have been re-evaluating our “engagement scoring” methodology (previously known as “lead scoring”) which lead us to the question — are all engagements created equal? Decision making life cycle methodologies preach “different assets at different stages in the buying cycle” and we read statistics that claim that “80% of the decision is already made from self-education prior to the sales call”. From my experience this means that our customers want to make their own decision regarding what information they consume and when, and that us marketers can’t really conclude that one asset is better than the other (meaning “deserves” a higher score) at a certain stage. Let me give a few examples;

  1. Form fill vs Free — in the past, ALL our assets used to be gated. This meant that if someone wanted access to one of our assets they had to “pay” with their personal details which then gave them a certain score. It made sense pre — marketing automation systems, when we really had no way of understanding customer behavior. But what happened to us was that we ended up sending an email, asking the recipient to click on a link, the link lead them to a form, which then asked them for their email. I mean, we just sent you an email, why are we asking you for your email AGAIN? How’s that for user experience…:)
  2. Try vs Read — in the past, we assumed that if you wanted to try our software it meant you were closer in your decision making process than if you were reading a white paper. So if you requested a trial you received a higher score than if you “just” read something. I don’t think this is true anymore. First — because our audience wants to try AND read simultaneously, and Second because the decision maker may not necessarily be the person playing with the software, it could actually be the person reading the business case that quantifies their pain.
  3. Download vs online — pre-social media, all assets were downloads. There seemed to be a preconception that potential buyers needed something to download, either for their personal review of to easily forward internally. This also catered to item 1 above — download = score. This was a hassle. A downloadable item (white paper?) takes time to write, edit, review and then becomes obsolete pretty quickly when another market approach is identified (or a brand change is required?). Today, content can take so many shapes and forms — blogs, posts, infographics, videos — and is easily created, accessed and forwarded online — there is no need to limit access by download only.

Our conclusion is that all engagements ARE created equal. My goal as a marketer is to ENCOURAGE engagement. I want to make an engagement with my company/product something enjoyable and seamless and memorable. As marketers, we are lucky to have technology that provides us with “behind the scenes” behavior tracking, so that we can see who is engaging with us and how often — we can’t forget measurement, we MUST measure/track/report on marketing generated engagements — but NOT at the price of the user experience. We’re implementing this now — limited forms, equal scoring for every engagement — 2 touch points mean an MQL. Let’s see how we go!

Ariella Shoham

Written by

Marketing expert, ROI evangelist, lead acquisition connoisseur, awareness generation mogul, avid runner, wannabe into Pilates/Yoga, Marketing Exec @ Gemalto

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