What is lead scoring?
The first goal for a company starting to build an inbound marketing strategy is to acquire a sufficient number of potential customers, i.e. lead generation . At the very beginning, when there are relatively few leads, the person responsible for contact usually intuitively knows who to contact first and how to establish this contact.
However, once you have a large number of leads, it is important romania business email list to understand who is truly interested in your product and who is just starting their search. This is where lead scoring comes in, helping you differentiate and classify these leads based on their interest and readiness to buy.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning a value, often in the form of numerical "points," to each lead brought to your business. These values are assigned based on a variety of criteria, such as the professional information provided by the lead, their interactions with your website, their responses to emails, and so on.
This process is crucial for sales and marketing teams because it helps them identify which prospects are more valuable, tailor their activities to their needs, and prioritize contacting them.
How does lead scoring work?
Every company has a different model for assigning points to evaluate prospects, but one of the most common ways is to use past lead data to create this scoring system.
How? First, review your leads that became customers to see what they have in common. Then, look at the characteristics of the leads that didn’t become customers. Once you’ve reviewed the historical data from both sides, you can decide which attributes to give more weight to, depending on how likely they are to indicate that a given lead will buy your product and become a customer.
In the case of a few touchpoints between a customer and a company online, this may seem simple. However, depending on the business model and the number of potential customers in the database, it can quickly become complicated.
How to Create Lead Scoring? 6 Criteria
To make this easier, I’ll list six different lead scoring models, depending on the type of data you can collect from the people who interact with your business.
1. Demographic Information
Do you only sell to a specific demographic, or do you have a well-defined buyer persona and know that the best lead is a marketing director or sales manager?
The question about job title or postal code can be added to the landing page form. With this information, you can remove outliers from the desired values from the sales team queue, subtracting points from people who fall into a category you do not sell.
For example, if you only sell to a specific geographic location, you can give a negative rating to any lead that doesn't fall within the appropriate postal code, country, etc.
If some form fields are optional (e.g. phone number), you can also award extra points to prospects who provide this information.
Marketing Automation HubSpot contact banner
2. Company information
In B2B, what is usually crucial is not so much information about the demographic data (e.g. age) of individual people, but rather data about the companies they work for.
If you run a B2B organization, are you more interested in selling to organizations of a certain size, type, or industry?
You can also ask these questions in forms on your landing page, giving points to prospects who fit your target group. Dropdown ranges are also very common for this purpose.
3. Online Behavior
How a prospect interacts with your website can tell you a lot about how interested they are in buying from you. Read digital body language : Look at your prospects who eventually become customers: What offers did they download? Which pages—and how many—did they visit on your site before they became a customer?
The number and type of forms and pages are both important. You can give higher ratings to prospects who visited high-value pages (e.g. pricing pages) or filled out high-value forms (e.g. requesting a demo). Similarly, you can give higher ratings to prospects who had 20 page views of your site instead of a few.
What about leads who change their behavior over time? If a lead has stopped visiting your site, they may no longer be interested. You can take away points from leads who stop interacting with your site after a certain point. How long—10 days, 30 days, 90 days—depends on your typical sales cycle.
4. Email contact
If someone has opted in to receive emails from your company, such as by filling out a newsletter sign-up form, you have no way of knowing how interested they are in buying from you. However, tracking open and click-through rates can give you a much better idea of interest levels.
For example, if someone consistently opens all of your lead generation emails or frequently clicks on emails promoting your offers, you can assign a higher score to that lead. This means they’re more engaged and may be more likely to make a purchase. You can also highlight those who clicked on higher-value emails, such as demo offers, which may indicate their specific interests and needs.
This way, by using email marketing data , you can better tailor your activities to prospects who seem most active and engaged.
