Migrating to Marketo? Don’t Leave Lead Scoring Behind with these 4 Tips.

June 5, 2023 Stan

Making the big move from Oracle Eloqua to Adobe Marketo Engage? There are so many things to consider, remember, and make decisions on to make sure that making this change is successful and the least disruptive as possible. As you work through the migration process there are certain elements that will be a pretty simple lift and shift like emails and landing pages. But your process based items in Eloqua like campaigns, programs, and lead scoring will take some extra consideration to get them working as expected in Marketo. Today we’re going to focus on tips for migrating your lead scoring program.

Tip 1

Documentation is your friend. Start off with mapping out your profile and engagement rules as they are in Eloqua. This will a) help you to streamline and add as needed and b) not only be a reference when you go to build the lead scoring program in Marketo, but also help in identifying any elements that need to be migrated that potentially could be forgotten in the move such as custom person fields, high value web pages to include your munchkin code (Marketo’s version of tracking scripts) on, external activities, custom objects, and any third party integrations.

FYI: Custom objects are not used the same way in Marketo as they are in Eloqua. If you use CDOs extensively in Eloqua and that data is an element of your lead scoring, make a plan early on where and how that data will be housed in Marketo.

In your mapping document, make sure to include a column for the score for each element. Marketo lead scoring does not have weighting like Eloqua’s does (if using the native lead score model) and also adds up to a predetermined total threshold rather than 100%, so you will need to realign how much each element is worth in Marketo.

After you have documented the profile and engagement fits from Eloqua, you can cross reference into Marketo’s implicit (digital online behavior) and explicit (known demographic and firmographic data points) scoring types.

Tip 2

Get that data CLEAN! You are being provided a unique opportunity to clean up shop during this migration process. Take the time to review your data, clean up any fields where possible, and remove any contacts that are not worth migrating to Marketo. This will help you to start off with a win in your pocket, having valuable and viable leads to market to and ultimately score. Since Marketo, like Eloqua, relies on data points like title, company, and the like to score, those fields should take priority in cleansing. As a reminder, marketing activities can not be migrated from Eloqua to Marketo, so you will need to start fresh on scoring your migrating leads for engagement criteria like email clicks and form submissions.

Tip 3

Keep it simple to start. You are moving to a brand new marketing automation platform where you will have a large learning curve. To be successful, keep your lead scoring model simple, evaluate over the next 6 months, and then build from there. By including limited elements in your scoring program initially, it will help you to easily identify what is having an impact on generating warm, quality leads and what is not. Since lead scoring is built through a smart campaign, and scores can be increased and decreased within flows of any lead generating programs, keeping a tight reign will make your life infinitely easier as you get up to speed.

As you get more comfortable with the tool, and build out more programs, you can change your lead score program as needed. Working with Sales, determine what elements from your Eloqua model are most impactful and what is not needed right away. Once the factors are identified you can move on to assigning a score to each.

Marketo lead scoring is based on a threshold that identifies a MQL and once that score is reached the campaign is triggered to send the lead over to CRM. Each factor will have a positive or negative score assigned to it. For example, if a person fills out a form and has ‘student’ as their title, and you do not market to students, that would have a negative score applied programmatically. Conversely, if someone attends a webinar, they would have a positive score applied.

All score values add and subtract from the Person field ‘Lead Score’ that is pre-built in Marketo. You don’t have to worry about creating the lead score fields you are used to from Eloqua, but you will have to keep in mind that the traditional combined score (A1, B4, etc.) no longer exists visually in Marketo.

Tip 4

Resources are available to help you. Marketo offers a ‘Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring’ and we are here to help you if needed. Feel free to reach out!

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