Marketing in the Cloud Blog

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“A business rules what?”  We enterprise data geeks have long relied on business rules and business rules engines to define the who, what, where, when and why of data integration. As the marketing cloud has grown, there’s an ever growing need (and opportunity) for marketers to leverage business rules engines for fun and profit.

BREs: Business rules engines are software services trained with your company policies that help you automate the answers to questions like:

Is your email subscriber eligible for a discount? Is that new lead sales ready? Which campaign do we send to which prospect? What step is next in presales nurture process? What data do we need to report to CXOs and when?

A Business Rules Engine Primer:
Given a set of facts (Jenny Customer is 25, has purchased 3 widgets from us, and lives in NY) a business rules engine will answer a given question. Is Jenny eligible for our senior discount? Nope.

Sample Business Rules
“Gold-level customers are eligible for free shipping when order quantity > 10″ and “minimum age for insurance discount = 27”…

What’s Possible?
A few smart marketers we know are integrating business rules engines into their cloud marketing stack and seeing (big) tangible benefits. Here’s a one supremely cool case:

Real-Time Lead Arbitrage
Most B2B marketers buy leads in one form or other. Why pay the same for great and not-so-great leads? With an automated rules engine you have a lead arbitrage opportunity. How? You know your best customers. Take a peek into your customer database and determine the key criteria for leads that convert to sales (geography, size of company, position/title, etc). Define your business rules to match these criteria. Connect your web forms to your rules engine.  Start paying your lead partners more per good lead and less per crappy lead. You’ll see higher ROI (and magically?) your partners will work harder to provide more high-converting leads in the pipeline.

(Update: we’ve been experimenting with Google’s Prediction API to help define the criteria for high-converting leads from existing customer databases with…  intriguing results – contact for a sneak peek).

Get Started with Existing Engines?
Though most business rules may be hard-coded within your app infrastructure (and there’s often really solid reasons for this)  your IT and dev teams may already have a formal rules engine you can extend and leverage.    Might be worth shooting an email to see what’s already in your infrastructure.

If not, there are amazing open source options ready for cloud integration today.

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About ROI Studios

We help marketers connect and integrate cloud-based marketing services like Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, Twitter and 100s more. Result? Our customers get a more agile marketing department with real-time, 360 degree control of campaigns, customers, content and KPIs.