This document is meant to provide you with sample content and structure for your own Marketing Automation Requirements Document, and includes clear, simple articulation of the most common business and technical requirements a marketing team will need to articulate.

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Marketing Automation Requirements Document
HOW TO USE THIS DOCUMENT
Many marketing teams are in the process of building the case for implementing a
marketing automation solution, and one of the biggest challenges is securing internal
buy-in from IT, the web team, and other stakeholders.
This document is meant to provide you with sample content and structure for your own
Marketing Automation Requirements Document, and includes clear, simple articulation
of the most common business and technical requirements a marketing team will need
to articulate.
Click here to download a free copy of this template.
You are welcome to copy and repurpose as much of this document as you like. If you
have questions along the way, please contact Brainrider so that we can help.
Introduction
Implementing a marketing automation solution is a key element of
accomplishing current marketing and company objectives. The ability to
effectively engage in and track interactive relationships is essential to
successfully attracting new qualified prospects, nurturing leads, and
determining sales readiness. The capability to measure and optimize
content engagement and marketing program performance is essential.
Business Requirements
From a business perspective, there are a number of important requirements
that a marketing automation solution must satisfy:
Automation
 Visibility into when particular prospects are active
 Nurturing of prospects that aren’t sales-ready
 An easy way to assign qualified leads to sales
Email
 Fast, easy, autonomous creation of branded emails without needing
to write HTML code
 Personalization of outbound messages from sales team
Marketing Automation Requirements Document 1

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Forms & Landing Pages
 Fast, easy, autonomous creation of landing pages that match the
website without help from IT/Web team
 Progressive collection of data in forms so as not to overwhelm
prospects with too many fields at once
 Data validation at the time of form submission
Activity Tracking
 Know every action that a prospect takes on the website
 Track anonymous visitor activity on the website
 Measure engagement with off-page content like file downloads
Sales CRM Integration
 Pass sales-ready leads over to sales team
 Keep garbage leads out of the sales CRM
 Give sales team access to activity tracking info without leaving the
sales CRM
 Connect marketing data with sales opportunity and conversion data
To view a more detailed document that discusses these and more, take
a look at the Marketing Automation Success Kit PDF from one of our
partners, and the solution we use internally, Pardot.
Technical Requirements
The above-mentioned business requirements translate into some key
technical requirements and functionality:
Marketing database
 Captures name, company, title, contact, and other custom field data
for marketing prospects.
 Captures activity data for identified prospects including website visit
details (time/date, pages viewed, number of visits), search history
(paid, organic, and site queries), content file access history, form
submission history, emails sent to prospect, email campaign
response history (opens, clicks).
 Assigns quality score to prospect based on activities tracked.
 Integrates with salesforce.com to enable marketing to assign leads to
sales when qualified.
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Email marketing
 Ability to send multi-type email campaigns to lists, with full tracking of
opens and clicks with visibility at the individual level.
 Automated drip nurturing or auto-responder emails trigged by a time
interval or a prospect’s actions.
 Message personalization in blasts so that your emails appear to
come from the recipient’s assigned sales rep.
 Syncing of emails with your sales CRM so that reps can see what
marketing communications are touching their prospects.
Reporting
 Measurement of how often content tools/assets are being viewed,
downloaded, or accessed, when, in which order, and by whom.
 Measurement of how many visitors, prospects, and customers are
being generated by each marketing tactic (search marketing,
advertising, sponsorships, events, organic search optimization, email
marketing, telemarketing, social media marketing, etc.)
Solution Options
There are quite a few options in the market for marketing automation tools.
Some of the more popular ones include (in no particular order) Silverpop
Engage, Eloqua, Pardot, Genius.com, and Marketo. They have widely
varying price points and levels of complexity when it comes to implementing
and using.
For a business group that`s starting from scratch, we recommend looking at
one of the lighter tools that will deliver the core features needed without too
many bells and whistles. Once you get a feel for how you want to use the
tool, you will be able to decide if you want to stick with your original choice
or move up to something more complex and expensive.
WHAT NEXT?
Explore the Brainrider Resource Center (http://brainrider.com/resources), which
includes a wide variety of tools and better practice advice just like what you’re reading
now, organized into four practical categories:
Better Marketing Better Content Better Websites Better Programs
Marketing Automation Requirements Document 3