One of the most frequent questions I get from fellow marketers, prospects and clients has to do with “How to select a Marketing Automation System”.

While there were only a couple of these systems available three or so years ago, today they are much more to select from. Marketers who are new to the concept of lead nurturing and scoring are embarking on a new territory and many times are overwhelmed by the information they are getting through the demos they review.

When you first start your research you will start looking at certain features and prices. The more you look into things the more confusing it will get. I calculated that there are over 125 features you could consider when it comes to these systems. The most common things marketers will consider will be price, reporting, integration, and implementation. However, many of the things that are important when you first look at these systems turns out to be irrelevant as they all have reporting functionality, most will integrate with almost any systems you may have, they will all promise a seamless implementation, and well price is price. If you can afford the more expensive ones you may consider those and if you have no budget you will most likely look at the new comers.

But, after you bought it, integrated it, implemented it you will find that the features that really matter are the SIMPLEST features and the most common sense things that you will miss or appreciate the most. I am fortunate enough to have worked with several marketing automation system and today I recognize what features I would look at if I had to purchase one of these systems today.

NUMBER ONE is customer service. I know what you are thinking “that is such a cliché”. Well, not so much. They all say that they have great customer service they may even show you stats but many in fact do not have good customer service. You will find yourself stranded very quickly when you have no idea why the system does what it does, when you can’t wrap your head around the concept, and when you are in a middle of a campaign that has to go out “yesterday”. It looks so easy when they show it to you but when you have to do it, it suddenly looks different and not so easy. Suddenly you will realize that the lack of customer service and support becomes your number one enemy and the most important thing you should have gotten. So what should you do? Talk to marketers who are currently using the system, ask for the name of the account executive they are happy with and ask for that person to be your support as well, ask how many customers each account executives handle and how they determine the number for the cap, look for complaints, reports, and reviews on the company and its service. I personally do not like mid sized companies. I found that small companies will have the BEST customer service you can get because they do not have the luxury to lose you. Bigger companies are great also because they already went through the growing pain and realized that they must return to their small business roots if they do not want to lose their customers to the new comers. Mid sized marketing automation systems that are no longer small but not yet large enough are the worst when it comes to customer service. Why? Because the great customer service they were known for when they were small brought them a lot of business and they are growing faster than they can invest in employees to support their customers. They do not realize only after the damage had been done that they will not be able to make the leap to be big unless they bring that culture and value back.

NUMBER TWO email creation. I know this is also elementary. Now you are thinking can’t all of them do that? Yes, the key is though how they do that. The action you will find yourself doing the most is creating emails non stop for your campaigns. If the email creator is not design based, if you need to deal with html, if it messes up text you copy from emails, word documents, etc., or it does not render the email correctly, or it gives you issues with images, or it does not support various image file types, or it does not allow you to place bullets or increase or decrease space between lines, or alter columns, or modify paragraphs, etc. you will suffer! You will spend more time on testing, fixing, and figuring than actually doing the work you were suppose to do. I rather scarifies and give up 20 other features but have a system that can format an email like you would format in word or ppt. While it sounds simple it is not.

NUMBER THREE campaign creation. Ok, so you may have thought of this one and it does not surprise you. But let’s talk about it anyway. What you consider a campaign might not be the same what a marketing automation system may consider a campaign. The biggest issue you will realize with ANY of the systems available today is that it becomes hard to stay organized and keep track of your campaigns. This is because a campaign contains, landing pages, forms, images, emails, lists, and the flow info. They are all located somewhere else in the system and most marketing automation systems do not have one area where you can organize all of these pieces and manage them in a less than complicated way. Your best bet is to get a system that has a visual flow feature. Even if you can’t have all of the pieces in one area at least when you are looking for one of the pieces of your campaign or when you are working on the flow you are able to see the campaign and its pieces in one place. I would not commit to any system that does not have a visio type view of a flow. Such view will make your work much easier and you will save a lot of time and pain for yourself.

NUMBER FOUR create, add, and pull from a salesforce campaign. Most companies today have salesforce.com or a similar application they house their leads and customer data in. Most of your reporting will come from the SFDC campaign area because this is where your leads will convert to opportunities and ultimately customers thus this is the area your ROI should be showing up. Therefore, make sure that your marketing automation system can communicate with the campaign area of SFDC. While they will tell you that the system integrates with SFDC that does not mean that you would be able to track a campaign in SFDC where you pull your marketing campaign reporting from. My suggestion would be that you draft a muck campaign and walk through its steps. Gather all of your reporting requirements and let the marketing automation software company show you how that info would come from and go into your SFDC campaign area.

NUMBER FIVE flow and AB testing. Again this may seem elementary to you but you would be surprised how many system do not offer these features. Think about this, you spent hours and days creating your program pieces and flow including the filters, lists, and wait steps. Now you are ready to test it to make sure the flow does what you set it out to do. But then there is no button you could just click on and the system test and deliver those test emails to you in an instance. Instead you have to revise the list and add the wait step to minutes and asking some of your co-workers to click on the email and not to click on the email to see if the flow really does what it supposed to. It is not only time consuming but with a large program with four or more flows you can get very confused and never actually be sure that the program is working properly. Most systems do not offer AB testing either. So if you wanted to test two different subject lines you can’t request the system to randomly split and send A to one half and B to the other. Yes you can create a separate program for both but that is not the same as having an AB feature that does that automatically with the program you already created.

So while you could stress on the number of features and cost what really matters is how user friendly the system is and whether or not the basic things you will do with it are available or simple enough to do. The next five most important features for me would be marketing automation activity profile available in SFDC, ability to change SFDC field values, easy lead scoring capability, attribute, event or activity based actions, and being able to build criteria based lists. In case you have any questions, feel free to contact us at info@generationOmarketing.com or visit us at www.generationOmarketing.com