Lead scoring 101: Converting email engagement to actionable insights
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In this competitive business environment, where email marketing has become such a major channel for marketing communication, understanding the behavior of your audience, is key. Lead scoring is a way to determine the quality of a lead, usually based on their interaction through an email channel. Establishing a clear hand-off process from marketing to sales allows teams to prioritize hot leads while giving marketing teams the insights they need to implement their strategies for success.
In this article, we’ll be looking into the basics of lead scoring, why it matters, and how monitoring email engagement can surface actionable insights to help you drive business growth.
Lead scoring means entering a numerical value or score to potential (leads, customers) depending upon their behavior; engagement and suitability on your ideal customer profiles. These scores help companies prioritize leads and focus sales teams on those who offer the greatest potential
The process of lead scoring generally includes:
Behavioral Tracking: Tracking actions including opening emails, clicking, visiting websites, and downloading content.
Demographic and Firmographic Data: Assessing factors such as industry, job title, or company size to gauge lead quality.
Engagement: How much a lead interacts with your brand, mostly via the emails.
The aim is to flag leads that are most likely to convert and give them the appropriate level of attention.
Lead scoring is an essential tool for refining marketing and sales efforts that will help you focus on the most valuable leads. Teams can filter through scores based on if the lead will likely convert, therefore allowing them to only pay attention to high-value prospects and make sure time and effort are not spent on leads that are not qualified. Such an approach encourages alignment between marketing and sales, as both teams become aligned on what constitutes a “sales-ready” lead. It also facilitates personalized engagement by recognizing which leads are prepared for targeted communications or promotions, enhancing the overall customer experience.
Lead scoring helps move the sales cycle along more quickly. Using measurable criteria such as demographic fit or behavioral actions to rank leads takes away the guesswork so you can make data-driven decisions. This increases conversion rates and improves ROI as resources focus on the most desirable buyers.
Sales efficiency improves through lead scoring since the teams can invest less time and resources on prospects that may not be qualified. Scoring leads based on the factors such as engagement behavior and demographic fit enables sales teams to determine, almost instantly, which leads are best suited for outreach and to prioritize accordingly. This ensures that sales professionals are not wasting their time on leads that have the least likelihood to convert, accelerating the sales cycle while improving productivity.
Lead scoring also helps align sales and marketing by ensuring a shared definition of a “sales-ready” lead. That means less miscommunication, and a smoother handoff between teams. It also allows sales teams to reach out to leads with personalized, pertinent messaging, in line with lead interests and stages in the customer journey, which further improves the customer experience and increases opportunity closing rates. Finally, lead scoring makes the sales process more efficient, enabling teams to get better results with less work.
Lead scoring gives you insight into the email campaigns, content, or offers that yield the most engagement. This data gives you an insight into what kind of content or campaign your leads actually value.
Lead scoring enhances the customer experience by enabling personalized communication and tailored interactions When businesses leverage data on a lead’s behaviors, preferences, and demographics, they can obtain a more comprehensive picture of what these leads need and want. This insight enables teams to serve extremely relevant content, offers and solutions at the right moment in the customer journey. When communication is closely aligned with the specific circumstances of a lead, it leads to it being perceived as much more personalized, which leads to increased trust and engagement. For instance if a prospect visits a pricing page or downloads product guides often, being able to follow up with them with a personalized email relating to that can show attunement, and alleviate friction in their engagement journey.
The more you know about the prospect or lead, the more tailored the experience you can create that speaks to their specific needs, maximizing engagement and conversion potential. This not only increases the likelihood of converting those leads into customers, but it also establishes a warm association with the brand, improving loyalty and satisfaction down the line. Lead scoring enhances personalization by ensuring that interactions become significant and provide value to the customer journey.
One of the key touchpoints of a customer journey is how they engage with your emails. They provide a ton of data that will surely give you insights on how to perfect your lead scoring model.
Open Rates: Shows if they are interested in your subject lines and the relevance of your content.
Click-Through Rates (CTR): The measurement of how engaged people are with your email content
Conversion Rates: Measures how many of those leads actually did something, like download a guide or register for a demo.
Unsubscribe rates: Sign of distress or disinterest, which can be damaging for lead scores
Building a lead scoring model requires knowing which actions or behaviors are to be weighted up or down in a lead score.
Analyze the current customers and identify common characteristics to understand who your target user is. This also consists of demographics, industry, and behavioral trends.
Rate actions on email differently according to their hierarchy. For example:
+10 points if you clicked through to see the product demo.
+5 points for opening an email within 24 hours of email sent.
Use marketing and automation platforms such as HubSpot, Marketo, or Salesforce to monitor and score on email engagement in real time. Such tools also integrate with your CRM to dynamically update lead scores.
Scoring leads based on email engagement data doesn’t just help you in that area; it also provides you with insights that can guide your overall strategy.
Spot some trends in email response. If a lead opens your emails, clicks links, or downloads a resource, they’re more likely interested in what you have to offer.
If some email campaigns perform better than others in terms of open rate or other engagement metrics, look into why that is the case; how were they different in structure, subject line, or offer? Let these elements serve as a blueprint for campaigns to come.
Email engagement data can help in revealing when your emails are most successful. So for example if the majority of clicks happen in the morning, run campaigns at that time of the day.
When done right, lead scoring can be very effective. But it can also have consequences if done poorly here are some pitfalls you should try to avoid:
Although positive engagement is the focus, negative activities (such as bouncing emails or unsubscribing from lists at a high rate) also matter when monitoring the quality of leads.
Make lead scoring simple. Too many variables and you get confusion and wrong scores.
As your business and wants change, so should your lead scoring model. Keep it up to date and review periodically for accuracy.
Here are a few tools that can assist in automating and streamlining the lead scoring functionality:
HubSpot offers a variety of powerful features for lead scoring, empowering businesses to effectively identify and focus on quality leads. Predictive lead scoring is one of its standout features, using machine learning to automatically assign scores based on a lead’s historical data and their likelihood to convert. HubSpot’s lead scoring capabilities provide a highly holistic approach, enabling users to construct custom scoring models by defining essential criteria, including behaviors (e.g., email engagement, form submissions, or website visits) and demographic or firmographic attributes (such as job title, company size, or location).
And, because lead scores update dynamically and in real-time as contacts engage with content, they are always up-to-date and indicative of current behavior. These scores are deeply integrated with workflows, allowing for automation: for example, to notify reps, enroll leads in nurturing campaigns, or move lifecycle stages. HubSpot also enables lead score visibility within its CRM alongside sales activity, which gives sales teams contextual insights to action right away.
Marketo offers advanced lead-scoring features designed to meet the needs of complex marketing and sales strategies. One of its standout features are its dual-score model, which independently scores leads based on behavioral data, such as engagement with content and on-site behavior, as well as demographic or firmographic attributes such as job title or industry.. Marketo also offers score decay, which penalizes a lead’s score for not engaging over time, so that teams can focus on those most likely to convert.
The platform’s trigger-based scoring system enables the score to change in real-time if someone does something specific, like visiting a pricing page or attending a specific webinar session, repeatedly. Marketo can score based on specific activities for customization, like product trial usage or specialized content engagement. Because it uses progressive profiling to obtain more lead data over time, demographic scores become increasingly accurate.
Yes, lead scoring is an important principle for a successful sales and marketing system, but having lead scoring in place only works for a bigger principle, and that principle is simply email deliverability. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated your campaigns or scoring models are if your emails never make it to your audience’s inbox. This is where Warmy takes your email marketing game to the next level.
Warmy specializes in optimizing email deliverability, ensuring your messages land in the right place, your prospects’ inboxes, not their spam folders. By functioning as a great email warm up tool, Warmy gradually helps your company to gradually increase the number of emails sent.