Whether you're new to marketing automation or are familiar with other marketing-automation software, this article will help you identify the:

• resources that you'll have to gather and
• items that you'll have to map out

...before you build your first Persona or set your Scoring metrics in Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional).

These two tools can be used independently or they can work with other marketing-automation tools. In either case, it's important to remember that they can help you build a solid strategy for interacting with your subscribers in a more targeted way.

Personas overview

Personas are used to segment subscribers based on characteristics in Thrive Marketing Professional or in an integrated database.

Personas are a marketing and product-development technique to uncover the attributes associated with your subscribers. These attributes include "head data" usually found in a database and "heart data" that goes more to their goals. For example, one Persona may strongly relate to being able to leave the office by 5:00 pm every day -- whereas another may be interested in educational opportunities that benefit their professional development.

How detailed you get when creating Personas is up to you and your need. In Thrive Marketing Professional, Personas are defined using Target Groups, along with an accompanying narrative.

NOTE: Some integrations automatically create member types as Personas in the system.

Learn more about and start using Personas.

Scoring overview

Scoring enables you to define "levels of engagement" for members, clients, leads, and prospects so that you can better determine whether your subscribers are interacting with your mailings and campaigns in the way you had hoped.

You can use scoring to build target groups for mailings and campaigns.

You can decide how complex or how simple your Scoring is. For example, you might want to keep it simple and use some standard mailing-activity metrics, such as opens and clicks.

If you want to take it to the next level, you can use Target Groups that represent the behaviors that you're basing your grade on. For example, if length of membership, number of committees served on, and total dues paid are criteria you want to use for your Scoring, then create Target Groups with those criteria.

Learn more about and start using Scoring.