Summary

This article begins by introducing the concept of scoring. We'll look at the most common scenario for which scoring is used, before going on to mention a few alternative use cases. This will hopefully provide you with some food for thought, inspiring you to use our scoring functionality to innovate and propel your marketing and sales efforts - and ultimately boost your ROI.

We'll also explain how to enable and set up our scoring functionality, whilst providing advice on how best to get up and running with it and modify it as you go along.

After all, we appreciate that you may feel a bit all at sea if you're using scoring for the very first time! In which case, we want to make sure you can move forward with it confidently, and encourage you to be iterative with it, so you can ultimately discover what works best for you and your business.

Good to know

Contact scoring is a purchasable add-on. To buy Contact scoring, go to Contacts > Contact scoring and follow the steps.

What is 'Contact scoring'?

Contact scoring enables you to score and rank your contacts against a scale that you create, based on their engagement with you and the general data you hold on them. This gives you and your business a way to manage and prioritize your most promising prospects for further engagement.

The key benefits are:

• Improved sales efficiency and effectiveness - focusing your sales team's time and effort on only those contacts that are rated as most valuable
• Improved marketing effectiveness - intelligence gained from ranking the types of contacts or the characteristics of contacts that matter the most will ensure your marketing team know where to concentrate their efforts
• Enable marketing and sales to work more in tandem - contacts scoring will provide a common quantifiable framework with which your marketing and sales departments can discuss generated leads; they'll be able to talk the same language
• Improved ROI - attune your efforts across your business as you target your most promising prospects in the most effective way

Lead scoring has become integral to modern lead management, and, when done well, it can produce great revenue results and increase your sales team's efficiency and productivity.

As mentioned above, lead scoring tends to make use of two metrics:

• Contact engagement - representing your prospect's behaviors in terms of tracked interaction with your marketing communications and material, as well as their tracked activity on your website. This is known as 'implicit' information. It's also useful to think of this score as their interest in you. Our lead scoring calls this 'Engagement'.
  
• Data - this is 'explicit' information that you're likely to already have recorded against your prospect, such as their job title, industry sector, company size, location and so on. This sort of profiling enables you to score a prospect against the type of customers you usually sell to and thus rank their suitability. Think of this as your interest in them. Our lead scoring calls this 'Suitability'.

And combining these two metrics, or scores, into an overall lead score, is the best way to generate accurately qualified leads that you can pass on, with confidence, to your sales team to follow up. 

A typical lead scoring scenario

A typical scenario is pretty straightforward: you'll want to gauge who your hottest leads are and then, when they become 'red hot', pass them to your sales team at their optimum conversion point. 

At the outset, you'll typically make a decision upon a score threshold qualifying a prospect as a 'red hot' lead. No need to worry if you have no idea what this score should be; this figure can always be tweaked. As mentioned, this will be a 'suck-it-and-see' process if you're using lead scoring for the first time.

Prospects will build their score by regularly opening emails sent to them, routinely clicking links in emails, frequently visiting pages of your website, as well as downloading whitepapers, product information and/or signing up for conferences, etc. If they're doing this, they're displaying a very high level of interest in what's being offered by you, and this is reflected in their score and ranking.

Your lead scoring system will therefore be designed to highlight the contacts that you have the best chance of selling too, as brought to the boil by your marketing efforts. It's now over to your sales department to try to seal the deal!

Other scenarios

There's no reason though that you can't 'think out of the box', as they say, with lead scoring. By using it in tandem with marketing automation, there's plenty of scope to be inventive with it and employ some real ingenuity, should you want to. Here are some ideas to inspire you (and if they really fire you up, then please search our support and resources area for even more information).

You could...

• engage low scorers by using marketing automation to make a tailored program that warms them up
• reward your most engaged contacts with discounts, discounts, content to share, etc., and turn then into brand advocates; they'll start shouting about you!
• use a contact's high suitability score to raise a low engagement score by using a program to really mix up your email marketing to them
• use a program to re-target previously hot leads who received certain campaigns but then cooled
• use scoring's flexibility and get creative; try something different like measuring customer happiness - complaints could lower a score which in turn triggers incentives to stay loyal, whilst positive reviews increase scores and trigger rewards for custom

To do any of this, though, you need the functionality - and it's at your disposal! Time to set it up...

Getting started - Enabling lead scoring

If you have purchased lead scoring and you are the the main account holder, you will need to enable lead scoring in your account settings. This is done by mousing over the person-and-cog icon in the top right corner of the application, selecting Account from the settings menu, selecting the Account settings tab and then ticking Enable lead scoring from underneath 'Features'.

Don't forget to click Save settings to ensure the enablement registers.  

A message will confirm that your account details have been changed successfully, and it will also ask you whether you'd like to set up lead scoring now.

Click on the set this up link to take you straight through to setting up lead scoring labels - something we recommend doing if you want to make the most of your new lead scoring capabilities. 

Otherwise, if lead scoring is already enabled in your account, you can access it via Contacts > Lead scoring.

Creating lead scoring labels

It's a good idea to use lead scoring labels. This will help you, and anyone else you work with, to easily understand the status of a contact, as opposed to relying on your colleagues to correctly interpret the numeric score generated. If a contact is marked as 'Red hot', then, straightaway, everyone understands that this is an extremely promising lead!

Labels can be set for the overall score (calculated from the average of the engagement and suitability scores), or they can instead be set for when the engagement score reaches n and the suitability score reaches n.

You can decide the wording of these labels, if you wish, as well as set the score threshold that needs to be reached for the label to be applied.

If you haven't come straight through to this page from enabling lead scoring, as outlined above, then you can instead click on Contacts > Lead scoring and then click on the Labels tab to start setting these up.

Click on Engagement and suitability to toggle over to setting up labels based on both of those scores.

You'll notice how we've already applied the following labels and scores to both 'Overall' mode and 'Engagement and suitability' mode:

• Cold when a contact's score is 0
• Cool when a contact's score is 20-39
• Warm when a contact's score is 40-59
• Hot when a contact's score is 60-79
• Red hot when a contact's score is 80 or above

These are typical labels and score ranges used by businesses when lead scoring. We'd advise starting out with them if you're using lead scoring for the first time, certainly until you start to get more of a feel for the mechanics and workings of it. It could well be the case that you'll want to tweak things as you iterate the process, which is of course possible via the 'Labels' tab. 

Note that a score can't be set above 100, nor is it possible to set a label with a higher score than the label that is above it.

For a label to be active, check the box next to it. Uncheck a label to make it inactive.

If you do wish to edit a label, simply type the new label into the field. This could of course be anything, as long as it's meaningful to you and your colleagues (e.g. 'Promising' instead of 'Warm', or 'Poor' instead of 'Cold').

To change the scoring range for labels, use either the increment/decrement buttons or simply type the desired number into the field. Only integers (whole numbers) can be used.

After making any changes, ensure you click Save.

Please note: After saving a change, a confirmation message will inform you that your changes may take up to 24 hours to take effect. This is because lead scores are automatically re-evaluated once every day. Therefore, a change will not take place immediately but will take effect at the next scheduled evaluation. Evaluations happen 24 hours after your first rule is set as active, so a change could be a maximum of 24 hours away from taking effect if it was made just after your last evaluation.

There are further benefits to using labels, of course. You can segment by labels (useful when, for example, you're looking to create a segment that gathers up all of your 'red hot' leads to pass to your sales team),  plus they can be used as criteria for enrolling contacts into programs (such as when wanting to warm up 'cool' and 'cold' contacts, as mentioned above) and making decisions. They can even be used for dynamic content variations.

Creating lead scoring rules

For contact scores to build, you'll need to create lead scoring rules and activate them.

To create a lead scoring rule, click on New rule from under the Rules tab (any existing rules will be listed here).

The 'Add rule' configuration panel will slide in from the right, which consists of three components - 'Condition', 'Scoring' and 'State':

1. Condition - This sets the condition which a contact must meet in order to be scored against this rule. A new segment can be created or an existing segment can be chosen, and the contact will be scored when they are present in the segment.

Clicking on New segment will open up the segment builder to allow for a new segment to be created (e.g. a contact has opened any campaign they have been sent at least two times). Once created, click Apply. You will be taken back to the 'Add rule' panel, which will list your segment.

From here you have the ability to either delete the segment using the red cross alongside it, or edit it by clicking on Edit segment.

2. Scoring - Provided the contact is in the segment, scoring options can be set for suitability and engagement.

Clicking on Set scoring options will bring the 'Set scoring options' panel sliding in.

Here you can either set the increment or decrement applicable to either the suitability or engagement score (decrementing is available as, of course, you may want inclusion in a certain segment to have a negative impact on a contact's lead score). Once happy, click Apply.

3. State - Set the rule as active or inactive.

Once you've set all three of these components, you can click Apply.  

Your new rule will then appear under the 'Rules' tab.

Every lead scoring rule you create will be listed in this area, whether active or not, and all the main details of your rules will be confirmed along with it.

From here, you can do the usual things you'd expect to be able to do; search for a rule, select a rule for deletion, copy a rule, edit a rule, as well as being able to change the display of the listing of your rules, if you wish.

There are no limits to the amount of rules you can create. What's more, given the flexibility of our rule making, it means you can set scores based not only on email opens, clicks, ROI, survey completions, job title, company turnover, etc., but if you have WebInsight then you can leverage it to set scores based on page views, downloads, etc.

Pro tip: We'd recommend avoiding rules that are based upon sending, opening or clicking specific campaigns or clicking specific links. Why? It leads to a lot of rule maintenance, as you'll need to create, manage and update these rules, especially when certain campaign or links are no longer relevant and may affect your contact's scores in a way that's no longer desirable. A better idea would be to make use of link groups, meaning you can make one rule covering a range of links. You'd only need to assign a link to a link group, as opposed to creating or editing a lead score rule to incorporate it.

Please note: After saving or editing a rule, just as with label changes, a confirmation message will inform you that your changes may take up to 24 hours to take effect.

Automatic updating of lead scores

Lead scores are updated automatically once a day, every day. 

From the moment you set your first rule as active, it will be 24 hours until your rules are evaluated and the scores are calculated. So, if you set your first lead scoring rule as active at 9:00am on a Monday morning, your scores will have updated after 9:00am on Tuesday morning.

To underline what this can mean for scores, here's an example. Let's say you have a rule that assigns a score of 20 points to contacts who click any link in any campaign at least five times in the last 30 days, and the contact has met the rule. They have their 20 points for it. However, on the 31st day they no longer meet the rule because some of those clicks now fall outside of the current 30 day period, and re-evaluation on this 31st day would see them lose those 20 points.

Viewing your contacts' lead scores 

There are two simple ways you can keep abreast of your contact's lead score details:

1. On the 'List Contacts' page
When clicking into an address book, your contacts are listed and the data you store on them is displayed under headed columns.

With lead scoring enabled, these columns will now include 'Lead scoring: Engagement', 'Lead scoring: Suitability', 'Lead scoring: Lead score' and 'Lead scoring: label'. This means you can easily look up a contact's or list of contacts' scores.

These columns will also be included in any export, of course.

2. When editing a contact
Editing a contact's record provides you with their lead scoring details. Click on Contacts, click on the address book you require, and then click on the Edit pencil icon next to the contact you wish to see the lead score details for.

Their overall lead score, plus suitability and engagement scores, are displayed underneath their email address. A trending icon will also indicate whether their score has increased, decreased or remained the same since the previous score evaluation.

Using lead scoring to create segments

The great thing about having lead scoring labels and scores attributed to contacts means you're able to segment upon them easily. This allows you to effortlessly gather up your 'red hot' leads into one address book to provide to your sales team. 

To do this, select Contacts > Segments, click New segment, name it appropriately - such as 'Red hot leads' - and then drag in and drop Data fields from the side panel into 'Include contacts that match all the rules in the group' in the segment builder. Next click on [click to select a datafield] and set the rule, for example, to be 'Data field 'Lead scoring: Label' must be equal to Cold'.

Click OK, save the segment and then click Generate count to create your segment of red hot leads.

This segment can then be converted into an address book via the 'Segments' tab's More actions menu. 

Or you could of course segment on your 'cold' and 'cool' leads, with an eye on targeting them with campaigns to warm them up.

Perhaps you want to add another condition though? How about 'Red hot' leads living in the country or city where your next conference is, because you want to target them with a special emailed invite? Alternatively, how about colder leads live in the country of city where your next conference is, because you want to send them an incentivising campaign to tempt them to attend in the hope of warming them up? All of this can of course easily be done via our segmentation tool.

Using lead scoring in programs

And how about automating the above? By setting up lead nurturing programs to automatically cultivate and generate promising leads, you can free yourself up to concentrate on other things. 

You can use lead scoring as enrolment criteria for a program designed to warm contacts up, by creating a segment such as 'Lead scoring: Label' must be equal to Cold or Cool':

Plus you can use lead scoring to make decisions in programs, so as to send your contacts down a different route depending upon their suitability, engagement or overall score, or their label.

You can also use lead scoring for exit conditions, meaning that when a contact reaches a certain score and matures within a lead nurturing program, they will exit it. They'll receive no more campaigns and will be ready to pass to your sales team for conversion.

Using lead scoring to drive dynamic content 

You can also use lead scoring to drive dynamic content in campaigns and landing pages, so your recipients or visitors are seeing relevant content according to their ranking, and you can nurture them in this way.

FAQs

What does suitability mean?

This element allows you to score a contact based on their profile type - their demographic. For instance, this will be such details as their job title, the company they work for, the type of industry they're in, their age, etc. It's likely that you know the profile of the type of customer that you most commonly sell to and thus, based on these details, you can ensure your rules segment on contact data fields that contain this information, contributing towards ranking leads accordingly.

If you don't already capture this type of information about your contacts, then it's probably time to think about starting to do so!

What does engagement mean?

This element will relate to the behavioural data you store on your contacts, e.g. the amount of opens and clicks for campaigns. The more a contact has engaged with a certain campaign you've sent them, the more you can be sure they are interested in what you have to offer. As a consequence, you will want to ensure your rules segment and score upon these behaviours so it impacts upon a contact's ranking.

How is the overall lead score calculated?

The overall lead score of a contact is the average of their suitability and engagement scores. For example, if a contact has a suitability score of 20 and an engagement score of 50, then their overall lead score will be 35.

Note that the overall lead score will be rounded up to the nearest integer (whole number) if the average happens to fall on a half (e.g. a suitability score of 5 and an engagement score of 10, which has an average of 7.5, will be rounded up to 8 overall).

How regularly do lead scores get updated?

Lead scores are re-calculated automatically once a day, every day (once every 24 hours).

Due to the rolling way the re-calculation process operates across all accounts over this 24 hour period, a fixed time of day can't be given for when re-calculation will be completed on your account. 

Therefore it's best to check for changes in your contacts' lead scores across a minimum 24 hour period. If you last checked your lead scores at 9am on a Monday morning, then check them next after 9am on Tuesday morning if you want to see any difference; any sooner could be too early for any re-calculation to have taken place. 

This is why, after saving a change to a rule, or editing a scoring label, a confirmation message will inform you that your changes may take up to 24 hours to take effect. Changes do not take place immediately. They take effect at the next scheduled evaluation, which could be a maximum of 24 hours away if a change was made immediately after the last evaluation was calculated.

I'm generating a lot of 'hot' leads but sales say they're anything but 'hot'! The 'hot' contacts aren't interested and can't be sold to. What am I getting wrong? 

This is what we mean when we say there's a 'suck-it-and-see' element to lead scoring; an iterative process that can be tweaked by monitoring your scores and keeping them healthy.

If you're generating loads of 'hot' leads, happily passing them over to your sales team but your sales team are coming back and complaining that they're not ready to be sold to, then you need to reassess your score settings. Chances are your doing something like top-loading contacts with disproportionate scores when they're only doing minorly significant things (for instance, simply opening an email, clicking a single link in an email, etc.)

If you begin applying engagement scores of 20-30 for such behaviours, and a contact only needs 60 points to qualify as 'hot', then just two or three opens or clicks of your emails will see you collecting a high number of 'hot' leads in no time, but they won't really be 'hot' at all.

The great thing about our lead scoring tool is that it lets you prioritise what's important to you in terms of engagement actions and suitability characteristics, enabling you to weight  scores appropriately to produce quality of leads over quality of leads. 

Recalibrate your scoring if your lead scoring system is looking top heavy. This can be done in one of two ways:

1. Increase your scoring thresholds, if you can, meaning your contacts need to engage a lot more, or be far more suitable from a 'profile' perspective, in order to warm up as a lead.

2. Recalibrate your score settings for rules. If you were incrementing by 10 for a rule, reduce this considerably so it's not as easy for a lead to attain certain score thresholds and labels that exaggerates their interest.

If your lead scoring system is set up to work correctly and effectively,you should find that the majority of your contacts are in the low scoring categories. Don't despair at that, as it's a good thing really! It means that the scores you have set up are probably right and that only significant levels of engagement and suitability will see contacts rise up the rankings, which will qualify them as genuinely good leads.

Your sales team won't thank you for large amounts of lukewarm (or worse) leads that you're telling them are 'hot'; but they will thank you for one genuine 'hot' lead that they can convert!