Refer to the case study.
UNICORN FINTECH COMPANY PROFILE
Unicorn Fintech is a mobile-only financial-servicesstartup created by a consortium of consumer banks to resell
savings, checking, loan, transfer/remittance, and other services from a secure smartphone app. The company is
venture-funded, and plans to reach profitability before a planned IPO in two years.
Business issues and requirements
Marketing is responsible for acquiring new customers 0 through online, television advertising, and email
campaigns, and for cross-selling new services to customers through IM, email, and in-app campaigns.
Evaluating the success of these campaigns has been a persistent problem: although the company can track
revenue by product line, it can't attribute those revenues to campaigns: for example, did a new loan come from
onboarding a new customer, or by cross-selling a savings-account customer? Marketing currently uses
crude, manual tools and guesswork to evaluate the quality and lifespan of new leads, and even the
deliverability of emails in its external campaigns. As a result, the department can't allocate spending to the
most productive campaigns, or decide how much different touchpoints in multi-stage campaigns contribute to
revenue. Operational processes to connect lead data to CRM and other databases are entirely manual.
Staffing and leadership
Unicorn has fewer than 200 employees, and roles aren't always defined in traditional ways. Since customer
acquisition and cross-selling are primarily through electronic channels, Marketing and IT roles especially often
overlap. The traditional Sales role falls entirely to Marketing, and IT is responsible for the Salesforce CRM
system, Google Analytics, and a handful of third-party integrations. The CMO and CIO work closely together
on most initiatives, and budgets are typically project-driven rather than fixed annually. Individual contributors
to Marketing campaigns include the Marketing Operations Manager, responsible for lead scoring and
analytics. Key IT contacts include the CRM Administrator and WebDeveloper. Incidental contributors are the
Corporate Attorney, who signs off on opt-in/out and DMARC policies.
Revenue sources
Unicorn earns commissions on financial services delivered by the banking consortium through its apps,
including fixed finders' fees for what the company calls "skips"-customers who initially engage with Unicorn,
but then "skip" to receive services directly from a consortium bank. Unicorn needs to attribute revenue from
these customers to its own campaigns; currently, it's impossible to attribute ROI to individual campaigns, or
provide documentation to claim commissions on "skips."
Current and aspirational marketing technology
Current Marketing technology consists of Marketable,an open-source lead management solution supported by
a set of spreadsheets and scripts developed in-house. Marketable offers lead tracking and source attribution,
but not multi-touch source attribution. Unicorn Fintech Marketing has difficulty linking the different stages of
customer campaign journeys, and relies on scripts to translate Marketable's "sales alerts" into next steps it
could use in multi-touch campaigns. IT has worked out scripts to input Marketable qualified leads into
Salesforce, but the system is brittle and often requires manual intervention.
Current campaign management processes
A typical email campaign:
• Addresses a purchased (for customer acquisition) or0 in-house (for cross-sell) list. Purchased lists range from
300,000 to 1.5 million addresses
• Is sent from multiple data centers in the US and Canada
• Includes an "unsubscribe" opt-out below the message
• Is static; there are no formula fields
• Uses no deliverability authentication, nor integration 0 with any email management platform.
All campaigns to date direct respondents to a single 0 landing page with the company's "all markets" message.
More sophisticated targeting is a high priority.
Current lead management and attribution
Unicorn's lead-management process follows
Marketable's "out of the box" defaults: lead evaluation levels 1 through 3, lifecycle stages "unqualified" and
"qualified." The qualification processes are manual, and highly subjective: Marketing staff classify leads
according to prospect email responses, including free-form comments. "Sales" followup is by email forms
prompting higher levels of engagement. The company intends to phase out Marketable and replace
spreadsheets and scripts with native features of whatever solution set it adopts.
Attribution processes are binary: response to a campaign email or web visit is rated a success if it results in a
sale: there is no success rating assigned to TV ads that result in web visits, for example. Cost are not allocated
to individual campaigns.
The Marketing department plans to expand outreach to social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, in-house
and third-party financial blogs), and wants to make sure it can assess the ROI of these channels, and the
overall social media program.
Current governance processes
Currently, the Marketing department assigns content development and campaign management duties to team
members on a campaign-by-campaign basis. All team members (and IT) have access to all assets and tools,
which sometimes leads to duplication and conflicts. The CMO realizes that a more specialization will be
necessary to support the social media campaigns, but hasn't decided on the optimal organizational model.
Input of qualified leads from Marketable into
Salesforce is by manual cut-and-paste, assisted by scripts; inconsistency of input practices across Marketing
team members is a known problem; individual members have their own "go-to" fields: where one member
might check "TV ad" as Lead Source, another would put that in the comments field.
CMO
The CMO's most important concerns are:
• The current solution has too many manual steps to scale with anticipated growth
• Without more sophisticated attribution, the company will overinvest in less productive campaigns, and
underinvest in better ones
• In general, analytics integrations are manual, slow, and unreliable
• The current system completely misses "skips"-customers switching from the Unicorn app to consortium
banks-an important source of revenue
• Documenting the value of Unicorn's Marketing processes is essential to the success of the planned IPO, and
millions of dollars in stock valuation hangs in the balance.
CIO
The CIO is concerned primarily with:
• The amount of time his team spends patching up Marketing campaigns and CRM data transfers, at the
expense of other, critical initiatives
• Quality and reliability of the Analytics information his team provides to Marketing
MARKETING STAFF
Marketing Operations staff concerns:
• Campaigns require so much work that they can't run as many of them as they need to
• Multi-touch cross-selling campaigns (for example, savings accounts to loans) with excellent margins, but no
way to know which campaign touches perform best
• Getting swamped with manual record-keeping; for example, spreadsheet mistakes take hours to find and
fix
• Poor integration with third-party tools for preparing, sending, and evaluating campaign materials, for
Example.
o Webhook not firing,
o Reaching API limit
o Synchronization errors with third-party tools and Salesforce
• Inadequate number of lead stages and qualification levels, making it difficult to evaluate lead value,
especially in multi-touch campaigns
Despite the absence of an external Sales team,
Marketing Operations would like to improve the granularity of their lead tracking, including both lifecycle
stages and quality levels, with "no score" and negative levels.
Multiple Unicorn teams are manually placing Sources in multiple areas. A small set of IT members decides to
use an API that triggers when the Source field is not one of a list of 9 values, or is empty. When this is the
case, the API is called via webhook to confirm if there is information in the Comments, Status, or custom field
'Sales update1 and then replaces the Source with what is found in those fields, in the above order of
importance.
These IT team members are ready to switch on the solution after testing successfully in a staging area, but
request feedback from the Marketing team and the Adobe Marketo Engage solution architect.
The larger IT team and Marketing stakeholders are alerted to a wider review to determine if it matches the
current needs across each team.
Which steps should be taken first?
