Market2Lead User Interface: Attention to Detail Pays Off

Summary: Market2Lead's revised user interface has plenty of refined details. But what's most important is it offers different ways to build simple and complex campaigns. This beats even the best "one size fits all" approach.

Time flies. I saw a demonstration of Market2Lead’s new user interface last December, and they released it in February. But I’m only now getting around to writing about it.

It’s a good thing that Market2Lead moved more quickly than I did, because the new interface is a huge improvement. Their previous offering was a good example of what happens when technicians design a user interface: you get the thinnest possible skin stretched over the underlying components. It’s all perfectly logical and functional, but makes no accommodation for how users actually work.

For the redesign, Market2Lead had the good sense to bring in a usability consultant who focused them rigorously on intuitive navigation, fewer mouse clicks, presenting options only as they are needed, and accommodating both novice and expert users. The results included:

- tabs structured around user activities rather than system tables
- wizards to lead users through creating campaigns, programs and Web forms
- floating menus that show options related to the user’s current activity
- pleasant and consistent color schemes that highlight the commonly-chosen menu options
- searches entered directly into form fields and allowing advanced syntax such as lists and value ranges
- different interfaces for creating simple and complex campaign flows

These are not especially novel concepts, so what really matters is how rigorously they are executed. One objective metric is mouse clicks: Market2Lead reports these were reduced by 300%. The others are largely verifiable by sight – yep, the wizards and floating menus really exist.

But listing these items doesn’t convey their combined effect. The resulting system simply feels less stressful than the original version. Even though you may not know in advance how it works, the next step is usually clear.

The campaign interface is the acid test. Market2Lead offers three versions, each tailored to a different level of complexity.

- The simplest are static campaigns, which use predefined flows and typically present a single marketing program. The program itself represents a single offer, but may contain a sequence of contacts such as an outbound email, landing page, and confirmation email. These elements are predefined for different program types, and users simply fill out forms to specify the details. There is no visual flow chart for the program.

Static campaigns wrap some additional rules around a program, such as which campaign the prospects should enter next. These rules can have some conditional logic, creating the equivalent of a branching workflow. But the structure of the flow is predefined for each campaign type and users cannot change it. As with programs, they use forms to fill in the details.

- A second type of campaign does allow users to build their own workflow. For these, called "workflow campaigns", Market2Lead has provided a Visio-style flow builder but kept it simple. Decisions can only have two results (true or false), branches cannot merge within the flow, and prospects always enter a new campaign at the beginning. This eliminates some options but avoids the complicated paths that can make conventional flow charts so confusing.


In fact, the drag-and-drop interface offers just five icons: send a program, make a decision, wait a specified number of days, send to another campaign, and exit. As in other systems, users can click on each icon to define its parameters. Market2Lead has posted an online demonstration.

- For really complicated projects, Market2Lead provides “adaptive” campaigns. These are designed with standard work flows, but replace the specific programs with rules that select the most appropriate program for each prospect. This allows one simple campaign to deliver different messages to different prospects simultaneously, and to deliver a sequence of messages to the same prospect over time.

Of course, the user must still define the rules used to make the program selections. But Market2Lead argues, and I agree, that this is easier than trying to build the rules within the flow chart itself. It also opens the way for increasingly sophisticated selection capabilities, such as the automated statistical approaches that I described last month.

Choosing from three different campaign types may sound confusing. It certainly will take some time for new users to learn when to select each one. But the Market2Lead interface makes the options readily apparent, which will help to some degree.

More important, each choice makes building its particular type of campaign about as easy as possible. This is a much more effective approach than trying to build a single interface that is good for everything. For marketers who execute a broad variety of campaigns, ranging from simple to complex, this will ultimately make their jobs easier.

Silverpop Engage B2B Adds Visual Campaign Builder

Summary: Silverpop Engage B2B has added an innovative visual campaign builder that supports complexity without the drawbacks of a Visio-style flow chart. Thumbs up.

(This is the first of three planned posts on updated interfaces from demand generation vendors.)

Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz) on Monday released its first visual campaign builder, finally matching a feature offered by nearly all its competitors. The interface takes a creative approach to the conflict between simple presentation and complex campaign flows, using what Silverpop describes as “horizontal video-production-style features” that lay out each contact stream in a separate row on the screen. Movement between streams is handled by objects that list the destinations, but don’t connect to them with lines like a conventional, Visio-style flow chart. (Click here for a video demonstration.)

Silverpop told me that they had originally planned to use a Visio-style approach but found the diagrams became unworkably complex once they expanded beyond a few branches. Since this matches my own oft-stated opinion, I readily agreed.

It also can’t have hurt that the Engage B2B was already organized around contact streams, which it calls “tracks”, and rules to direct movement between streams, which it calls “track routes”. This fits perfectly with the new interface. In fact, “track” is precisely the term that audio, video and film producers use to describe their synchronized inputs. Think “sound track” or “8 track tape”. But I digress.

The ability to explicitly direct leads from one contact stream to another is what separates the Engage B2B approach from simple linear campaign flows. In the new interface, track routes are objects within the contact stream, and can be opened to edit the decision rules that determine where the lead moves next. The stream can also contain decision objects with a single rule that is tested repeatedly during a specified evaluation period. This allows the system to wait for an event (e.g., allow one week for response to an email) and still react immediately if it happens. If the rule is not met by the end of the evaluation period, the lead can move to the end of the track, to another track within the campaign, or to another campaign.

The interface includes a variety of thoughtful details that have a major impact on usability.

- A track can include placeholder objects, letting users design a campaign before its marketing materials are ready. Since this raises its own risks, the system flags incomplete objects so users know which still need work.

- Users can hover over the list of destination tracks within a track route object and then click on a destination to move to it.

- When events are based on fixed dates, as in a Webinar promotion, the objects in the different tracks are vertically aligned by date. This makes it easier to grasp what happens when.

- Once a campaign is under way, the system displays actual metrics on the track objects (responses, leads currently in the object, leads that have passed through, etc.) so users can see the results at a glance.

- The rule definition interface offers a wide variety of pre-formatted, fill-in-the-blanks statements. This lets non-technical users build complex rules, since it spares them from learning about database details or programming syntax.

Of course, no interface is perfect. There is no visual overview of how leads move across tracks and campaigns, which can make the flow hard to grasp. Nor is there an alternative, more concise interface for simple linear campaigns. The system doesn’t seem to adapt to different user skill levels or to adjust which options are exposed, although I might have missed some of these features.

Still, the Engage B2B interface represents a much-needed fresh look at solving some of the basic issues in campaign visualization. It definitely raises the bar for the rest of the industry.