What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a way of getting your marketing automation system to award ‘points' based on some action your email list subscribers take, either when reading your emails or visiting your website.

Lead Scoring is only available on the Plus and Enterprise Level Plans

I am going to walk you through a lead scoring example using ActiveCampaign.

The example we are going to walk through is similar to the VIP system that Justin Brooke spoke of on Episode 16 of The Active Marketer Podcast. Lots of great nuggets of gold in that podcast, so if you haven't done it already, it is worth a listen (subscribe in iTunes | Stitcher).

In this example, we want to track and identify our most engaged subscribers. Once they have bubbled to the surface I want to tag them as VIPs, get a notification and offer them something special as a reward.

What Do We Want To Track?

Before you do anything, you need to sit down and have a think about what you want to track. What behaviours are you looking for? What actions do you want to reward?

You also want to think about when you want to have those points expire. The idea behind Lead Scoring is that it identifies your hottest prospects. So a lead that was hot 6 months ago, is not as important as a lead who is hot RIGHT NOW. So I would suggest you have those points expire after a certain amount of time.

In this case I am looking for my most engaged subscribers. So, I want to track the following things.

• Who opens an email
• Who clicks on links in my email
• Who downloads my opt in offers or lead magnets

Once I have identified the behaviour I want to track, I need to come up with a point score for each action.

Now not all actions are created equal. For example, downloading one of my lead magnets is more important to me than just opening an email, so that is going to have a higher point value.

The point values I am going to assign in this example are;

• Opening an email = 1 point
• Clicking a link = 2 points
• Downloading a lead magnet = 3 points

You can obviously come up with your own actions and scores depending upon what is important in your business. Other things could include visiting landing pages, product pages, attending webinars, buying products, etc.

Finally, we need to come up with some point threshold that will trigger the the VIP status. In this example, we are going to use 30 points to classify someone as a VIP.

Building It Out

We are using ActiveCampaign in this example, however the process will be similar in other tools.

1. First we need to set up our lead scoring category.

In ActiveCampaign go to your Contacts screen and you will see a button called ‘Contact & Lead Scoring'.

This will take you to a screen with your current (none) lead scoring setup. Click on ‘Add New Score'

The screen will then ask you if you want a Contact score or a Deal score. Choose ‘Contact'. You track either, but in this case we want to assign points to a person / contact instead of a deal.

Create The Scoreboard

Give the Scoreboard a name, in this case ‘Engaged VIPs', ‘Save' it, then click ‘Add New Rule'.

Next we need to nominate our actions and the score they will get (the default is 10 points). Add your first rule, the contact ‘opens any email'.

Next we need to change the default score from 10 to 1.

Next we are going to add some other conditions, some here and some elsewhere. Firstly we want to know if the contact has clicked a link (and give them 2 points), so we will add it here.

Once the scoreboard is built, make sure you save it and set it to ‘Active' in the upper right corner.

The gotcha here is that the actions on the scoreboard only fire once. Meaning that when they open the first email and click the first link AC will award the points and stop tracking.

So we also need some continual tracking. This is done via Automations. You can use Automations to both add points and subtract them.

Below are a few Automations that will add points and set their expiry dates any time someone opens an email, clicks a link, or downloads our lead magnet.

Scoring Email Opens

Start and new automation and set the trigger to be ‘opens any email' and have it run multiple times.

Then we want to award 1 point and set an expiry date for those points, in the case 60 days.

So your Automation should look something like this.

Since  the trigger is set to “multiple times” it will run again and again whenever they open an email.

Scoring Link Clicks

Since clicking a link in an email is a higher level of engagement than just opening the email, we are going to give the contact a higher score. In this case 2 points.

The build out will be very similar to the automation we use to score opens.

So your Automation should look like this.

Scoring Lead Magnet Downloads

I also want to give contacts 3 points if they download our  Ninja Tagging Guide lead magnet.

So I will jump into the automation I have setup to deliver that lead magnet and add a step to assign the person 3 lead scoring points.

Find the point in your automation you would like to add the points and hit the + sign. Choose the ‘Contacts' category and choose ‘Adjust Score' action.

Next make sure you are adding the points to the right scorecard and enter the point value associated with the action.

Save it, and you should then see the new step in your automation.

Create The Notification Automation

Now that our scoreboard is complete and active, and the points are being assigned, we need to create and trigger an automation that makes things happen when somebody reaches our magic 30 point threshold.

Go to ‘Automations' and create a new automation. The trigger we are going to use is ‘Score Changes.'

Then we make sure we choose the correct scoreboard and nominate the point value threshold. In this case, 30 points.

Then simply build out an automation as you normally would to tag those contacts and send them an offer.

Viewing Your Lead Score Points

Now you have your lead scoring machine chugging away in the background automatically. So how and where to we view those points?

You can view it under an individual Contact's profile page.

You can also add it as a column to your List view by using the gear icon.

Summary

So that is a quick walk through of how you can be using Lead Scoring to automatically identify and potentially reward your most engaged subscribers.

• Identify which actions you want to track and reward
• Nominate point values for each action
• Build your scoreboard and automation steps
• Nominate your score threshold level and create your follow up automation

That was just one way to use lead scoring, but the possibilities are only really limited by your imagination.

If you want to give ActiveCampaign a try, you can set up a free trial account here.