What is lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a technique that allows us to qualify the leads in our database according to:
- how close the lead is to your buyer persona
- the interaction that this lead has had or has with us (loyalty)
- the stage they are at with respect to the point of purchase or the opportunity to purchase our products/services.
Taking into account these three variables, proximity to the target, loyalty and proximity to the purchase process, we can run more specific and effective automated campaigns.
Lead scoring. Why do it?
Let’s try to explain it in a simple way. If you have been involved in the marketing world either because you have launched acquisition campaigns, in social media or Adwords, I am sure that many times the commercial departments that have contacted these leads have said that they were not qualified leads because they were not interested.
What are the implications? If we do not have a way to qualify our leads, most likely our marketing and commercial actions will not achieve the objective we have set. In fact, we will end up sending irrelevant messages to our audience.
In order to send relevant, more effective and personalised messages. We must have a good strategy for classifying our contacts “lead scoring”. In this way, we will be able to make more specific actions for:
- more specific groups
- you will be able to facilitate the marketing and sales department’s actions
- and work with each customer with the objective of converting them, either to make a sale or to get them to make a repeat purchase.
To give an example:
- A person who has constantly visited one of your products and has even included it in their cart but has abandoned it
- Another has viewed the product but has not interacted with our site other than to view the product
Both are valid behaviours but they are at a different stage of the buying process. In the first one, we could perhaps launch a commercial action of discount to make them decide, while in the second one we may have to launch an informative action about the advantages of it (our product).
¿How does lead scoring work?
Applying this methodology we start from an unstructured database, and without organising it, we have a matrix that allows us to classify our leads by attributes. It may sound strange, but in the end it is about finding a classification of our leads that allows us to take specific actions.
This matrix has three different variables that are classified as static or dynamic variables:
- Affinity with our buyer persona -> static
- the degree of knowledge or relationship they have with our company -> dynamic
- Moment of the buying process in which the lead is at -> dynamic
When we talk about static variables, we are talking about variables that do not usually evolve over time and that we cannot influence them. For example, how similar a lead is to our buyer persona is something rather static. On the other hand, the knowledge that this person has of our company or the buying process in which he/she finds himself/herself can change over time and with our marketing automation actions.
1. Affinity with our buyer persona
This is the affinity that the lead has with our target or ideal client. The more similar it is, the higher the lead scoring score will be.
The score will depend on the specific attributes that you decide are relevant to your buyer persona. You can also make a subclassification according to the most relevant ones, such as: age, gender, hobbies, professional dedication sector with the intention of prioritising them.
Let’s say that in the purchase of cosmetics, a man or woman who likes fashion and is dedicated to marketing could be a target group that is likely to buy these products.
2. Degree of awareness of the company
This has to do with the number of times the lead has interacted with us. From this, we say that it is in some way the knowledge that the potential client has of us.
The level of interaction can be measured in various ways, but each of the strategies includes actions such as:
- Visits to the website
- Clicks on emails or links
- a high open rate, or email opening rate
- Content downloads
- Social media interactions
- Etc.
This information can be obtained with marketing automation software. In particular Hubspot, Active Campaign or mailchimp are the most common ones that have this functionality.
3. The stage of the buying process at which the lead is at
The third variable has to do with the point in the buying process where each lead in the database is:
- Awareness
- Investigation
- Decision
- Action
A person who has visited our website is not the same as a person who has visited our prices page. Or, for example, a person who has abandoned the shopping cart. As you can see, the process in which each one is found is very different and therefore, the corresponding actions that we could take.
What next?
First of all, think that now with a segmented and more ordered base, the different actions to different types of leads will allow you to go from shooting like a shotgun to hitting the target more frequently and more efficiently.
Knowing what the starting point is (lead scoring), it is time to establish a lead nurturing strategy to educate these leads with the aim of interacting with them and reaching the objective you have set yourself (the purchase or repetition).
Think about the following, lead scoring not only allows you to analyse the situation of your database, but it also allows you to track all the marketing automation actions you are taking, and how to improve them. That is to say, you will see which actions are making your leads advance and how many customers are converting.
Closing
I hope that with this short video you have understood a little better:
- What is lead scoring?
- Lead scoring, why do it?
- How does lead scoring work?
- And now what?
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