What marketing automation vendor provides the most flexible custom fields?

Hi Stephen,

As Kevin Miller and Colin Goldberg both point out, CRM systems are usually much more open to custom tables than marketing automation systems. This is because most marketing automation systems are designed to treat the CRM as the primary "system of record", so the marketing automation vendors have not invested heavily in their own database manipulation features.

That said, pretty much any marketing automation vendor will let you add custom fields to the contact table. You may have less control over the other tables (for example, campaign attributes).

The real issue is adding entirely new custom tables, especially if these are not added first in the CRM system. Aprimo, Neolane, Eloqua and Marketbright allow clients to do this for themselves through the regular system interface. Marketo has some support for custom tables but there are limits: it's best to go over this with them directly if you want to explore further.

In fact, if you have a specific approach in mind, you'll need to define it in a scenario and go into the details with any vendor. What will catch you are the details, such as:

- whether the custom table can be connected to something other than the contact table
- how custom data gets loaded (CSV file? API call? CRM synch process?)
- how much control you have over data types and formatting
- how accessible the data is for different tasks such as reporting, personalization, lead scoring, campaign rules, etc.

Questions about custom fields and custom tables are included in the free RFP Scoring Matrix available at www.raabguide.com. I've sent the matrix to many marketing automation vendors and expect to publish a report with the results in a few weeks. I'd be delighted if vendors also published their answers on their own Web sites, but that will only happen if many people ask them to do it.

Hi Stephen
SalesFUSION is a marketing automation vendor that is actually built from the ground up on a traditional CRM Database. What this means is that it has all of the tables and fields that you find in something like SFDC/MSCRM. Because of this, there exists the capability of putting thousands of custom fields into the various tables. In my experience, it is the only marketing automation system architected this away...and I have seen a lot of them.
Disclaimer - I work for SalesFUSION

In my experience with Salesforce.com, creating and manipulating custom fields is the most powerful and flexible capability that I have ever seen. In so many respects, Salesforce is ultimately configurable.

I do not work for Salesforce, but as an ISV who's app is deeply integrated with Salesforce, I rate it as a 10.

Stephen, what's your product ?

Adding custom fields of almost any sort within NetSuite is easy. It also has a built-in grapical workflow engine to create drip marketing tracks very easily and any other workflow paths you might want to create. People have built functional MRP systems on top of NetSuite's platform so adding custom fields is pretty basic.

Rob

Marketbright has impressed me with its customization of data fields. Certainly, I agree that it is the integration with Salesforce or SugarCRM that is important, so that your sales department always has the most accurate marketing data you can provide them. That said, there may be occasions when you really need a flexible MA product like Marketbright. I used and sold that platform earlier this year, but now I am using LeadFormix.

Stephen, I'm currently using Eloqua, but let me provide a platform-agnostic view of the MA solutions and point out some experiences and what you should expect.

In general, the solutions I've used/evaluated will be able to provide you with a contact table and company table. These can contain standard fields and custom fields. Field limits may vary (some vendors limit the number of columns in a table). You'll want to consider any limitations on the types of fields you can create (text, large text, date, etc). There may be limits on how many large text fields you can have, for example. Depending on your data needs, you'll want to consider this.

Field changes - how easy is it to change a field type (or manipulate data in general)? In the past I've worked in systems that had a free-form country field that we wanted to convert to a drop-down of 2-character ISO codes. How easy a change is this in the systems you are validating?

CRUD considerations - Beyond just storing data, what opportunities does the solution provide for you to create, read, update and delete the data? Think of the types of campaigns you'll run and where you need access to data. And think of the back-end data manipulations you'll want with the data.

Data Validation and Cleansing - You may have a solution that handles this; if not consider the matching, validation, and cleansing options with the solutions.

Overall, we've used our Contact table to store:
Fairly static data - this would include any demographic data and preferences.
Preference data - we will take transactional data (either from custom objects or a data mart) and distill this data into specific data points that the MA solution can leverage as part of the automation.

Custom Objects
Great for storing point-in-time transactional data (survey submits, point-in-time responses that you want to store). Understand how you can query these objects - try querying object for data ranges for example and see what responses you get. I've had experience against a controlled set where results aren't what you expect.

Behavioral Data
This is big for us; what options do you have for adding to the behavioral data/web profile, and how easy is it to set parameters (example: large scale page groupings targeted to a product segment)

Like salesforce, know what the solution is good for. We've found that the CRM and MA are no replacement for a good data analytics mart for BI. This is often the missing piece in many solutions and where we distill our data to push into the MA system.

Hope that helps