Wouldn’t it be amazing if there was a way for you to tell who your most engaged clients or prospects are at any given moment? To be able to tell who is exploring your website, email promotions, and content? Who is most likely to purchase from you, or even, dare I say it become an ambassador for your business?

 

Let me introduce you to the wondrous capabilities of lead scoring.

Typically used in B2B environments, which consist of a longer purchase cycle, higher price tags and rely on sales personnel to close the deal; Lead scoring provides sales representatives with a way of determining which prospects to focus their efforts on first. Based on a score that is calculated by the prospect matching certain demographic, geographic, and firmographic parameters as well as the prospects engagement levels with your various marketing and sales touch points through the sales cycle. A prospect or current client will rack up points on their own by visiting pages of your website (some pages such as pricing may be worth more than others), filling out lead generation forms for ebooks as an example or signing up and attending online events such as a webinar (you may even weigh attending a live webinar at a higher point value than an on-demand webinar as the user had to set time apart to ensure attendance rather than watching at their convivence).

 

Marketing Automation & its Role in Enhanced Lead Scoring

By utilizing a marketing automation platform with your lead scoring you are able to include the prospect’s engagement and interaction with all of your digital marketing efforts, such as emails, social posts, ads, landing pages, and other items that are deployed through the marketing automation platform.

Depending on the marketing automation platform, you may not be able to customize the point value per action. This is not ideal, but it can be argued that any lead scoring is better than no lead scoring as even the basic benefits outweigh not having it at all. If you are able to customize the point value per tracked action, this will give you the chance to review your current marketing practices and give them the hard look so many of us avoid. In theory, we should be analyzing each element within our marketing mix and optimizing our efforts and spend based on the results of our top performing promotions/channels. It is easy to fall into the trap of “well, we always have done x, so why change it?”.

 

Structuring Your Sales Funnel with Lead Scoring in Mind

By analyzing your various touch points through your sales funnel you will determine which are your top performers (which lead to or contribute to the most conversions), which show potential with some fine tuning and which are not performing and why. You will want to weigh the point value based on the amount each contributes to your conversions. For example, if 40% of all converted leads participated in a live webinar, while only 2% of converted leads engaged with a blog post, you would weigh the live webinar as 4 points and the blog post visit as 1 point.

Say you have chosen a marketing automation platform that assigns the scoring for you automatically, you may ask your self is this still worth using? My answer is yes, as even if the platform is not taking into account your top conversion channels it will be tracking each client or prospects engagement levels as a whole through the channels it provides, which may include website visits, email opens, email clicks throughs, social post interactions, online advertising interactions etc. These metrics will still provide you with insight as to who is engaging the most at this present moment.

Another crucial factor with lead scoring is the depreciation of a prospects or clients score if they stop engaging for a period of time or if they engage in a negative way, such as hiding a Facebook post or the dreaded unsubscribe. This factor is what ensures that the leads your sales team is focussing on are the hottest leads at that moment, and allows them to connect in a meaningful way at a critical point in the decision-making process.

 

Benefits of Lead Scoring in a B2C Environment

You may be sitting there thinking, all of that sounds great but my business isn’t B2B. Well, the benefits of lead scoring don’t stop there. Instead imagine you are finally ready to move forward with that referral program you have been looking to launch, but are concerned with overbearing some customers who may not quite be onboard themselves let alone ready to start recommending you to their friends or colleagues. Instead of blasting every person who is connected to your business with your new referral program, it would be best to focus these efforts on the customers who are most likely to participate, in fact, they are probably already recommending you. Lead scoring helps you to identify your businesses, existing, organic brand ambassadors. These are the clients you want to approach first for:

• referrals
• new product/service testing
• feedback for improvement
• requests for new offerings

 

The options outlined in this post are only a few of the benefits and applications made possible by implementing lead scoring, all of which are amplified through the use of a marketing automation.

 

You can find the next post in this series here: Have You Mastered The Fine Art Of The Pop-up?