Does that ring any bell to you when you see something in the shop window and you want to have a look at it closer, so you go in and just right at the door the shop assistants turn up from a sudden, asking if they can help and persuading you to buy something?
It rings a bell to me and if I can be honest this freaks me out and I just look around then turn out from the shop because I feel like they frightened me away with their talking because it happened the time when it shouldn’t have.
Why don’t they see that I’m not ready for the shopping yet? I just walk into the shop, want to have a look inside, but if they say right after I crossed the threshold that “Hey, can I help?” it frightens me away. Even though I know that it happens with good intentions, most of the times I just walk out without buying anything. When I was studying at the trade school, we have studied the signs of the right time to go to customers without disturbing them with the “Can we help?” question.
Yes, but it doesn’t’ work in the online world, does it? As there is no physical contact possible between the seller and the customer may be that they click on the website. You might think. This supposition could have been right in some years ago, but it doesn’t these days. Thanks to the technology continuous development, in these days customers can be tracked very accurately. We can classify them where are on the buying cycle. So we can really determine from different leads that the time is either right for the question “Can I help?” or not, without frightening them away. This technic is nothing else than the lead scoring.
What does lead scoring mean?
Lead scoring is a scoring system. You can classify the leads based on where they are on the buying cycle.
Why do you need lead scoring?
You don’t just need lead scoring for determining the valuable leads from the several arriving ones, you also need it for saving up time, energy and a lot of money for sales and marketers.
Giving them their desire at the right time.
Let’s see how lead scoring works
There is two type of lead scoring methodology. One is manual, the other is automated. Let’s see them one by one.
Manual or predictive lead scoring
The manual lead scoring as you can assume from its name is when you can determine the scoring value manually.
Firstly for this, you need to know the profile of your leads, so you need to create buyer personas.
Then you are going to need more accurate information, such as
- Position title: important to know what does the lead do, is he a decision-making person or just preparing for decision? This information helps in advance to the sales team to decide the energy they are going to put into the lead.
- Where the lead works: what is the company where he or she works? What the company exactly does on the daily basis?
- How big the company is: it’s good to be known if the leads work at a multinational company.
- Budget: don’t be shy, feel free to ask how big the budget is for marketing. As a result of it you will be able to determine more easily that they can either afford your service or not.
Naturally, you can ask for more information, the above were the essential conditions you definitely need to know to give meaning to the lead scoring.
Beyond the personal information, you need to know more data which will come into being by the lead behavioral based activity.
- Page views: how many pages they visited, what they read there and how long they stayed.
- Downloads: what they downloaded from the landing page, you can infer from this information that how big their interest is, how deep their knowledge is in the theme. In other words where their current place is in the sales funnel.
- Email opens: which and how many emails they opened. You can also infer from this what they are interested in mostly.
- Email clicks: what they clicked on the newsletters. It is a stronger sign of the lead’s interest because they were willing to click on it.
- Ad clicks: which ad they clicked on. It helps you decide what kind of ads worth running and what content should be included on your page.
- Landing pages: which and how many landing pages they visited already. What were they doing there, signed up in the form and downloaded the content what you offered in the landing page or just had a look and left the page.
- Webinars: did they take part of your webinar? If they already did then there is a great chance that they are already marketing qualified leads or just about becoming one, but of course it depends on how big is the value which belongs to this action.
This information is crucial you for scoring and to put the leads in order. So it means that for the above activities and also for personal values you need to assign different scores.
For example: Visiting a page is 1 score, but a download is 5. So if the lead is already visited your page and downloaded something then they have 6 scores. And if they even signing up for your newsletter and opening it then this value certainly will be increasing. Now you just need to figure out what the values of the different activities and what the maximum score is. Here also need to mention that you need to determine the intermediary milestones e.g.: at how many scores you determine someone as a marketing qualified lead and at how many for sales qualified lead.
For those who have no patience to deal with all these, there is another method, the automatic lead scoring.
Automatic lead scoring
The essence of the automatic lead scoring that you don’t have to add the values manually, the leads will be scored by a predefined method. For example, the Automizy lead scoring function works like this. The Automizy marketing automation software considers the following actions in the scoring method:
- campaign openings
- clicking through in the campaign
- subscribing from forms
And it assigns score values according to the following:
- In case of opening a campaign: if someone had 10 or less (but at least 1) then 1 score is given after for each opening another +1 score is given until 100 opening where 10 scores are provided and above that we don’t score further.
- In case of clicking through in a campaign: if the clicking quantity is 10 or less ( but at least 1) then 2 scores are given, and then after each 10 clicking +2 scores until 100 clicks where 20 scores are provided and above that we don’t score further.
- In case of subscribing from forms: if the lead subscribed from less than 10 form 5 scores are given after will be provided other +5 scores with each subscribing until 100 where 50 scores are given and above that, we don’t score further.
And of course, there is one little thing left. You have to assign these values to the visitor`s personal profile that you could get by a newsletter subscription or downloading a hook. Considering the benefits of automation you can clearly see how much time and energy are savable.
In case you would rather choose automatic lead scoring than try Automizy!