Guest Post by Kathy Lamphier, Marketing Programs Manager, Demand Generation

If you are using product data, for example, from a freemium or free trial, to trigger a lead nurture program, and you have a multi-step registration process, watch out for data delays. Check to see how long it takes for all of the required data to appear in the marketing automation software (MAS).

For example, say you have a two part registration process for a free tool that offers an assessment. Step one of the process is submitting your contact information. Step two involves attaching your Bing account to the free tool to run the assessment – and the larger your account, the longer the assessment will take. As a result, the prospect’s contact information will enter the MAS before the assessment data.

Now say you run a triggered nurture campaign that uses the assessment data as the trigger – if there’s no assessment data (the fields used to trigger the email are blank) then the prospect does not qualify for the nurture program.

If the nurture campaign does not have a wait step (the time the application waits before checking the prospect record to see if it qualifies for the nurture email) that is long enough for the assessment data to populate the prospect record then the prospect won’t qualify for the nurture campaign. But once the assessment data has been populated in the record, the prospect will look like they should have qualified for the nurture campaign.

And if the length of time it takes for the assessment data to populate the prospect’s record is not consistent (for example the time could be dependent on the size of the prospect’s Bing account) then some prospects could qualify for the nurture program and others might not – even though they ALL completed an assessment.

For example, if a prospect had a small Bing account (maybe 200 keywords) their assessment could run very quickly and the data would quickly be passed to the MAS – quickly enough that when the MAS checks for the assessment data it has been added to the prospect’s record. If the prospect had a large account (maybe 2,000 keywords) the assessment would take longer to run. In fact, it could take so long that when the MAS checks the prospect record for the assessment data it has not yet been added to the record so the prospect does not qualify for the nurture program.

Consider this. You’re not aware of this timing delay and you see that some prospects are qualifying for the nurture program and others are not – even though the entire group looks like they should qualify. Trying to figure the reason for this inconsistency can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Lead nurture is a great tool for moving leads through the conversion funnel. But make sure you know how the data you need gets into the MAS before you start programming the MAS to execute the nurture program.