I’ve written quite a bit about lead scoring in some of our recent weekly sales tips and blog posts and have received a number of questions about what exactly lead scoring is and why it’s important. Campaign lead scoring used to be some secret tactic only enterprises with big marketing automation systems could do, but that isn’t the case any longer and I wanted to explain it in more detail so you can use it, too.
Whether you’re a marketer running marketing campaigns, or a sales rep doing your own email campaigns, campaign lead scoring helps you identify who the most interested people are to call and begin prospecting. This is the data you need to be monitoring to identify new leads.
It used to be that marketing activities were like shooting in the dark. You’d run ads or send postcards but never know who read them. Now, marketing and sales prospecting strategies use technology like email marketing. When you send an email campaign through software like MailChimp or Infusionsoft you can see how prospects engaged with the email.
Lead Generation: Understanding Prospect Engagement
But lead generation is more than your email open rate that most people measure. It’s about engagement: how contacts you are targeting engage with what you are sharing with them.
From my perspective as we analyze client’s campaign and sales reps’ prospecting data, engagement includes contact actions such as click-throughs and forwarding. As you monitor engagement over time, you can see patterns emerge that demonstrate deeper interest. When we coach business owners and their teams on lead generation, we help them develop lead scoring based on the behaviors of their target market.
These patterns show you how interested people in your target list are in what you are offering, both as a group and individually. That’s what you want for lead scoring.
Prospects who click through to read blog posts, download special content, and sign up for events would be scored higher than those who only click through periodically. Those that continually click through on new content you offer are demonstrating a deeper interest in the topics you’re sharing. By keeping track of that data, you can create a warm list for your sales team to follow up with. While it’s not a guarantee, it’s more likely that these marketing qualified sales leads are prospects who are ready to talk to you and maybe even schedule an appointment.
Keep in mind, your campaign lead scoring can be flexible as you need it. When we run lead generation campaigns for our clients, we score leads very tough if our client’s sales pipelines are full, and loosely if they don’t have enough leads.
Measuring Prospect Interest
Here’s an example of lead scoring in action. Let’s say that you’ve sent 3 emails. (These could be part of a lengthier marketing campaign or a sales prospecting email campaign.) Each email contains a link to a different blog post on the following topics:
- Security risks in your company’s networks
- The risk your employees’ mobile devices create for your networks
- Hackers who hold your data ransom for money (ransomware)
If a contact clicks through to read all three of these blog posts, it’s clear that they’re very interested in security. A sales rep should call and talk with them about their network security to see if there is an opportunity to work together.
On the other hand, if a contact clicks to read one of these three blog posts, you don’t really know if it is a fluke or real interest. Instead of calling, wait and see how the prospect engages over a longer period of the campaign.
Campaign lead scoring helps you generate more ROI from your campaigns. Whether you’re running marketing campaigns, or you’re a sales rep doing your own email prospecting campaigns, lead scoring is the best way to focus your efforts on targeting your most interested contacts and making sure that these hot prospects don’t fall through the cracks.
