easy ways to increase data intake in your marketing automation platform

Nearly all marketing organizations use marketing automation platform today. But, having a MAP alone is not enough. It is important to know how to use it and extract value. Optimizing data intake is the first step. Justin Sharaf is vice president of marketing operations for data intelligence company Collibra and shares four simple ways to achieve this.

Sharaf stated, speaking at The MarTech Conference, “The first thing I tell people when optimizing the intake process for them is that garbage in will be garbage out.” The quality of the information coming out is only as good or worse than the information that was in. If your process isn’t good for getting data into marketing automation platforms, it will most likely be garbage that ends up in your sales team, your marketing partners, and everyone else who uses that data.

Here are four ways to fix it.

1. Consolidating web form forms

It is a good idea to have at least three web forms templates that you can reuse across all your forms. These can be used for resource downloads and contact sales requests.

Sharaf stated that using two to three templates with the same information across all forms will allow you to have consistent data across all sources and into your marketing automation system. This allows you to make sure that your team doesn’t have to intervene when your team creates web forms.

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Hidden field values are also suggested by him. He suggested that you create a template and then hide the fields in that form to tell your marketing team about where they came from, what they downloaded, etcetera.

2. Normalization of fields

You want it to be as simple as possible for visitors to provide personal information. Limiting the choices can help you get the information you need.

Sharaf said, “Instead asking someone for a job title that could be used in any of the million job titles they have, ask for job level and job role.”

This way, you won’t get different answers from people with the same position like “director of Marketing”, “director, marketing,” or “DAR marketing,” and instead you will hear “I am a Director and my role in marketing.”

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He said, “This can help you make your data very clear and allows for better segmentation in lead scoring based upon these normalized fields.”

3. Dropdown selection

This is a common irritant everyone has seen: When you are asked where you are from, you will be presented with a dropdown listing every country in alphabetical order. Although it may appear to be comprehensive, it is just one more way of discouraging visitors. This is a bad idea unless you are attracting customers from all corners of the globe.

Sharaf said, “If you’re creating a form for U.S.-based prospects or customers put the United States at top of the form.” If you are certain that the program is North American, place Canada at the top. If it’s a European programme, place the top ten European countries at its top.

This will increase your conversion rate and encourage people to choose the right value.

He said, “I know that when I fill out a form quickly, sometimes if I don’t want people having my information, it’s just because I want to get through it quickly.” “I will just choose the first value on the pick list, even though it isn’t the right value. You can eliminate people who do this by putting the most popular values on the top.

4. Uploads of offline lists

Sharaf said, “Everyone does them.” They can be used for offline events or for webinars. There are many different uses. Sometimes, third-party vendors will provide a list. A template in Excel or Google Sheets that can be used by marketers will help streamline your intake process.

Set the fields names you wish to be used in that spreadsheet. To prevent someone from entering a number in the country field or a phone number, you should set validation rules. If your system allows it, you can also use X or V lookups to convert country names into country code.

He said that marketers can be asked to provide very little information in the list upload template. Then, you as a data analyst, marketing automation expert, or marketing automation expert, can use that information to upload the information into your marketing automation platform.

These steps will allow you to take advantage of clean, enriched data and provide cross-functional value to teams that goes beyond sales. They can also be used with any MAP because they are system-agnostic.

Sharaf stated that although Marketo is my personal favorite, Acoustic, IBM and Acoustic are also good choices. However, Sharaf added, “But this can be applied to any platform , HubSpot, Eloqua, or any other marketing automation platforms .”

The post 4 simple ways to optimize data intake for your marketing automation platform was first published on MarTech.