How StarfishETL Simplified My List Building & Targeting

We all know personalized marketing works. In fact, 86% of marketers who’ve implemented personalized campaigns see a measurable lift in results. And today’s customers expect that personalization, with 72% stating it’s the only kind of messaging they’ll engage with.

So as marketers, our task is clear: deliver the right message, to the right audience, at the right time to maximize MQL to SQL conversions. But identifying personas and correctly segmenting them for list building requires many accurate data points.

Where can these be found?

Some of those data points already live in our marketing automation system. From it, we’re able to gather contact profile data that includes:

• Form submissions
• Content downloads
• Website engagement activity
• Social media interactions
• Event registrations
• Campaign metrics

These data points provide some of the context necessary to narrow lists, but not all. There are two challenges marketers face when trying to properly segment personas and build accurate lists with marketing automation alone:

1. Limited or nonexistent visibility into the contact’s status within the sales process
2. The inability to build a dynamic list that changes when the contact’s status changes

Even if we can pinpoint most of the criteria, are we ever really sure about how accurate the data points are? The data that lives in the sales system holds demographic information that we’re not privy to, like industry, lead source, and account type; and it’s constantly being updated by sales as the contact progresses through the pipeline.

Here’s an example of how these challenges could play out in a real scenario. Let’s say my marketing team is planning a campaign targeted towards the CIOs of banks. We segment our known contacts by recent engagement with a particular marketing asset that relates to the topic. However, without knowing the status of those contacts in sales’ system, we won’t know:

• If those CIOs all still work at their respective banks
• If the account status of those CIOs is still Active
• If their information on associated company and email address matches with sales
• If sales is already working with them on another project unrelated to the campaign
• That there are deeper details like region, size of bank, etc. from the CRM available to us

How StarfishETL Made This Marketer’s Life Easier

As a marketer forced to deal with these sorts of fragmented experiences in the past, I can tell you first-hand how much frustration and inefficiency it caused.

Email bounce rates were high, the time it took to initiate a campaign was always delayed because I was waiting for a sales rep to confirm my list matched their information, and my ability to create truly personalized and targeted messaging was essentially nonexistent.

Integrating our CRM and marketing automation was life changing. StarfishETL made the data connections I needed to build lists right in my marketing automation that I KNEW were up-to-date and accurate.

We use a lot of tags in our CRM to define contact subtypes and campaign associations. StarfishETL was able to pull those tags into the marketing automation, too, so when I build lists, I can draw from the tags to micro-target.

I no longer have to wait around for sales to confirm the status of contacts in our system. If I add a filter in the marketing automation for Active contacts, I know the integration is checking that every contact populating in that list is reflected as Active in the CRM. Dead leads and archived data are easily filtered out, so email bounces aren’t a problem.

Meanwhile, sales is tickled that their profiles are now populating with all that juicy marketing information. They’re able to see much deeper information about their customer and prospects actions and make better decisions about when to approach these contacts with new opportunities.

If we agree on a campaign based on lead status, they know that every time they mark one of their leads with the set criteria in the CRM, my automated campaign is capturing them. We work much more cohesively and, in the event we need to edit the flow of information, we can use StarfishETL’s low code tools to quickly alter the integration’s parameters.

When the marketing automation was on its own, I had no idea what I was missing. StarfishETL’s scalable connection transfers more detailed contact information and helps us avoid duplicate or incorrect data between the marketing automation and the CRM. List building and targeting is not only simpler, but it’s also far more efficient and accurate, which is a win for everybody.