How Is Lead Scoring Important In Singapore Digital Marketing?

What Is Lead Scoring

Lead scoring can be defined as the process of assigning numerical values to the leads that you’re generating. You score leads based on the information you have about them. You could also score leads based on the manner in which they’ve interacted with your website or brand.

Why Is Lead Scoring Important

The process of scoring leads is important because it helps you prioritize the leads that you generated. It also allows you to figure out how to respond to them more appropriately, and in the end, get to increase the rate at which you’re able to convert those leads into active customers.

Not every person on your radar qualifies as a prospect. While some may be interested in what you’re offering, a good number of them are just looking around.

You want to sort out your site’s visitors and find out who to pitch to and who to lay aside for a while. Failure to do this can lead you into losing a good chunk of your valuable time — the time you could have directed elsewhere for more guaranteed results.

Is There A System For Lead Scoring

Almost all the big companies you see floating around have a devised system that they use to assign numerical scores to their leads. The most common of these strategies is using the lead data that they’ve been accumulating in the past.

They simply revisit this data and use their intelligence to sort them out and find out which among them converted with so much ease. They then project this data to the leads coming in and make meaningful conclusions.

There’s nothing complicated about this process. The first thing you can do is revisit your contact list. Next, try sorting out all the leads that became customers and find out what they have in common.

The next thing you’d want to do after this is to look at the leads that didn’t take action and find out what attributes do they have in common. Go through the entire history of sales and find out which group responded immediately and which group only responded after being nudged for a while.

In the first group of contacts, those who became customers, find out who among them had already made up their mind. This is the group that took action within minutes of landing on your website. Now sort this group again based on the amount of time they took to take action and find out what’s common with each group.

All you have to do at this point is project the result you get to your current contact list. Use it to group the list, and assign them scores based on which group is more likely to take action first, and exponentially so, until you’re done with the entire list.

Explicit and Implicit Lead Scoring

There are so many ways to score your leads. Broadly, all the lead scoring methods can be grouped into two: explicit and implicit lead scoring.

Explicit scoring is the process of assigning values to your leads based on the information you’ve collected or the information they provided by filling up one of your forms. For instance, if your site’s users are from different industries, you can rank them differently depending on what strikes you to be more valuable or less valuable.

Again, if their job titles hint that they’re the decision-maker in the industry they’re in, that’s another element you’d want to factor into your lead scoring procedure.

Implicit scoring, on the other hand, is more about behavior than gleaned information. It’s more concerned about how your leads are reacting to your website rather than the information they provided or what you’ve gathered about them.

For instance, if the first page a site’s visitor heads to after landing is your product page, that shows they have heightened interest in buying one of your products or services. If the past data backs this claim up, then that’s enough reason to rank this group of leads higher than the rest.

The point is to figure out how to differentiate casual interest and someone with real buying intention. The more you operate, the more you’re likely to develop a deeper understanding of your leads to be able to group them more appropriately.

Different Lead Scoring Models

By scoring leads, the first thing you’d want to know is if there’s any compatibility between your leads and products. The scores you assign to each lead can range anywhere from 0 to 100, and here are the attributes you can use in assigning values to these leads.

Demographic Information

Are your products or services more suited for a certain demographic, or are they spread out? This should be among the first questions that you ask yourself. Find out if your products appeal more to adults, children, or teenagers.

Where you can’t come up with clear answers for this, don’t be afraid to ask your leads.

Find out if there’s a group that you don’t sell to. For instance, if your product is meant to be used by people within a certain region, you might want to remove any outlier lead that you’re certain won’t be purchasing your products or services.

Another trick would be to assign them a negative score. Assign this value to all the outlier groups hailing from another zip code, state, or country, and which you’re certain, have absolutely no use for your products or services.

You may also consider including optional form fields (like an email address or phone number), and award extra points to any lead that fills any of these fields.

Company Information

This applies to B2B marketers. There must be an organization that you’re more interested in selling to. It could be due to size, the industry they’re in, or the organization they represent.

Or perhaps you’re more interested in selling to other B2B organizations more than you’re interested in selling to B2C organizations.

Find out more about the leads that snugly fit into your target audience and find out more about the organizations they represent. You might want to assign extra points to leads that are within that type of organization and take points from leads that are completely different from what you’re looking for.

Online Behaviour

This has everything to do with how your leads interact with your website. Which pages are they visiting the most? Which page are they most likely to take action on after visiting? Which page nudges them the most?

By observing your client’s behavior, you should be able to gauge their level of interest in your products or services and appropriately assign them a score. Shift your focus to the leads that take action. What is so common about their behavior? Which character trait do they exhibit?

How many pages do they visit before taking action? Which offer are they interested in the most?

Also, look at the sources of your traffic. Where are the leads coming from? Compare the different platforms and find out which one among them is likely to generate leads with stronger intend to complete an order?

On your website, there should be pages that you perceive to be of higher value. Any lead that opens any of these pages should be awarded a point.

Your leads behavior is also bound to change over time. Some of your leads may even stop engaging with your site, and when this happens, that means you have to take some points away from them.

The same case applies to leads whose interest grows with time. Give them extra points that will see to it that their score improves with time.

Email Engagement

Not everyone who opts into your email list qualifies as a hot lead. You have to gauge their level of interest first and group them afterward.

Find out who among them are interested enough to consider going through with an action. Here’s the thing: consider sending all your email subscribers an email with a Call to Action, and find out how many of them will open the email and click through it.

Every lead that opens the email and clicks through it is somehow interested in what you’re offering, and must, therefore, be awarded some extra points.

Once done, you can go slowly on the other leads that are still playing shy with your emails and products, and direct more of your effort to the leads that have made an effort to engage with your business.

Social Engagement

Leads that make an effort to engage you on social media should earn an extra point for it. Bonus point if they’re always engaging you.

Plus you can easily gauge their level of interest based on their interactions with you. How many times did they click on your Facebook posts? How often do they retweet or share your posts?

Find out how many of your followers are active on social media and award them points based on their Klout score or the number of followers that they have. 

Spam Detection

Look out for leads that appear to have filled your forms in a hurry or in a manner that communicates no interest. Reward them with a negative score that nullifies all their effort.

This could be other developers who are just testing out your site or some random bots that are up to no good.

For instance, where a lead didn’t bother to capitalize the first letter of their name; that alone is enough reason to raise eyebrows and question their level of interest.

Did the lead randomly type in letters that made no sense? Well, that spam leads to award a negative score.

A Real-Time Analogy of How Lead Scoring Works

Let’s assume you run a boutique somewhere in the heart of the city. Two customers walk in. You approach them to offer them any necessary assistance, but the first one turns you away by telling you she’s just checking out what you have.

The other one walks in and heads straight to a blouse aisle. There’s a good chance the second customer is more likely to purchase your product. That’s because their approach is more specific and they’re not walking around your store with no purpose like the first lead.

Based on their behavior, you should be able to tell that the second customer has the intention to buy. She has a purpose and specific goal in mind, and all she needs to make up her mind and go through with a purchase is some little bit of nudging or convincing from you.

As a salesperson, the bulk of your attention should be directed to the second customer and very little towards the first customer until she makes up their mind.

Lead Scoring Software

The good thing with lead scoring is that there are tools that you could use to automate the whole process. All you have to do is set the parameters determining what qualifies as a good lead and let the software handle the rest.

Lead generation software can aggregate different elements, including engagement rate, browsing behavior, and so on to determine the leads that are more likely to convert.

The software will then sort out the lead and place the hottest of these leads at the top of your follow-up list. The more your leads move through your sales funnel, the more their score increases.

Why You Should Consider Using Lead Generation Software

There are so many ways to generate leads. The good thing with lead scoring is that it’s flexible and can adjust to match any form of lead generation method.

It does this by providing a common anchor that will be tying all the leads in your sales funnel. Just find a lead scoring CRM, and you’d be surprised by how easy it is for you to automate everything.

Lead Scoring Implementation

Lead scoring sounds great to the ear. Implementing it is also so much easier than you think.

You can do it manually, but where you feel like automating everything you have CRM software such as Leadsquared to help you out. With this tool, you can assign scores to your leads based on the various attributes provided and group them accordingly. In so doing, you should know where to direct the bulk of your marketing effort.

9 Top Sales and Digital Marketing Tools with Lead Scoring Feature

While leading generation and scoring is essential for any business growth, it is vital to determine which leads require a top priority then establish ways to prioritise them.

We previously covered what leading scoring is, different lead scoring models, and their implementation. Various software has in-built functionalities that allow businesses to assign a score to leads based on their importance to the brand and their likelihood of converting. 

Here are top sales digital marketing tools for lead scoring

HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is an all-in-one inbound marketing software. The tool in-bound methodology features three vital elements:

1. Attract: Involves attracting the right audience with the relevant content that resonates with them through ads, social media, blogs, videos, and content strategy. 
2. Engage: entails engaging and building relationships with the audience on the platforms of their preference like emails, lie chats, or messaging.
3. Delight: involves using conversations inbox to align service team and potential customers to keep tabs with your customers. 

The tool provides predictive lead scoring, which essentially uses machine learning to scan thousands of data points to identify the best leads and score them according to their demographic’s elements and behavior.

With the marketing hub, you can grow your traffic, convert leads and monitor your sales funnel all in one place. Build compelling landing pages and email templates with a drag and drop feature. Publish blog posts faster. Obtain real-time SEO suggestions and create optimized content that resonates with your target audience.

Highlights for HubSpot lead scoring tool:

• Establish a scoring process based on machine-learning predictive analysis models.
• Builds up to 25 score sheets for various products and businesses, allowing you to set a variety of qualifying leads.
• Fetch and feed data from Salesforce; this enables the tool to qualify leads based on tracking metrics such as CTA clicks, form submission, and opened emails.

Pipeliner CRM

Lead can be entered into a Pipeliner CRM either automatically by importing from webform or manually through. CSV files. In the Pipeliner CRM’s view, leads have their section in which they are read, assigned, and qualified. Marketers assign leads to sales reps and are then qualified, converted to opportunities, sent to marketing, or archived; this is easily achieved through a drag and drop pipeline CRM feature.

When a lead becomes an opportunity, it is scored and ranked based on its probability of closing. The lead-become-opportunity will be present in Pipeliner reports and opportunity tracking feature until it’s a won or lost deal. Any archived lead maintains its relevant data for easier reactivation with a single click.

The Pipeliner CRM features include:

• Account management.
• Sales reports.
• Contacts management.
• Email integration.
• Opportunity tracking.

Here are some significant highlights for Pipeliner CRM:

• A customizable lead scoring process by defining various scores for various lead features and behaviors in the tool’s administrator.
• Score leads according to various characteristics such as business goals, project budgets, industry, and events.
• Once scored, the leads are ranked from the highest to the lowest, enabling marketers to focus on prospects that are more likely to close.

Sendinblue

Sendinblue provides a built-in scoring system that distinguishes contacts from qualified leads; the scores obtained automatically trigger outreach campaigns. It combines digital marketing automation, sales, email marketing campaigns, CRM, and advertising solutions. 

 

Its features are capable of:

1. Engaging and interacting with leads/customers through email, live chat, and SMS marketing.
2. Curating personalized messages by creating audience segmentation, marketing automation, and transaction emails.
3. Lead conversion through landing pages, Facebook ads, retargeting leads, and signup forms.
4. It allows improved marketing through A/B testing, reporting, and heat maps.

Sendinblue top lead scoring features include;

• Auto-segments leads depending on their scores. The scores and segmentations are dynamic features that enable leads to shift from one segment to another based on their real-time behaviors.
• Easily integrates with third-party applications like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce, to feed behavioral data into the scoring process.
• Custom set-up for lead scoring depending on desired behaviors such as email clicks, interests, and budgets.

Platform.ly  

Platform.ly makes it easier to track interactions across various campaigns and channels throughout your whole marketing funnel. It has a built-in scoring system that ranks and scores contacts based on activities and behaviors. The scores are displayed each time a contact’s profile is open and assists in prioritizing leads. 

The tool offers link tracking, email marketing, integrations, CRM, lead capture, reporting, marketing automation, and a business dashboard. 

Its lead scoring features include;

• Automatically obtains data from most third-party sources such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google for leading scoring and qualifying process.
• Triggers campaigns automatically when a contact reaches a specifically defined lead score.
• Customises lead scores and defines them for various characteristics and behaviors.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an automation tool that tracks personal and behavioral data for leads and customers, such as email opening and site visitors clicking on the CTA button. It combines features of email marketing and customer relationship (CRM) software to provide solutions in four major categories:

1. Reach and engage: precise targeting to reach the right prospects and grow your audience with the right content. (Subscription forms and site tracking for visitors).
2. Nature and educate:  grow your audience relationships by providing tailored guidance to helps them address their challenges. (Dynamic email content and audience segmentation).
3. Convert and close: Provide well-curated and timely call-to-action to take the following steps. (Lead scoring and conversion probability).
4. Support and grow: delight in each customer by understanding their needs to boost customer loyalty. (e-commerce and conversations with customers/leads).

The tool puts lead on a pre-created lead nurturing track where it monitors and tracks the data in real-time, depending on their levels of interest. 

The lead scoring highlights for ActiveCampaign include:

• Auto-start nurturing campaigns when a contact reaches a specific lead score, allowing you to target interested users. 
• Set up scoring rules for different actions such as opening an email, starting a trial, or visiting the website. 
• Trigger and send email notifications to team members on leads’ status to prioritize leads with desired scores.
• Score leads and contacts as well as deals. 

SALESmanago

SALESmanago is the only no-code, AI-driven all-in-one customer data platform and customer experience platform (CDXP). The tool has a predictive lead scoring feature that assigns scores to various prospect/lead behaviors and characteristics. The dynamic score keeps updating based on the interaction of the lead with the business. 

The automation tool provides features of sales tools such as lead generation and contact management. It also has a social proof feature that enables eCommerce businesses to view their social platform’s feedback on their services and products to boost audience interest. The users can perform A/B testing on their content and improve their landing pages and products recommendations.

The tool’s lead scoring features the ability to:

• Gauge the overall prospect’s interests with global lead scoring, with the scores accumulated at multiple stages of the marketing and sales process.
• Breaks down lead interests with the three-level lead scoring mechanism that distinguishes different leads interests.
• Customize scoring rules and assign points to lead behaviors and activities such as live interactions, opening specific emails, and adding items to the shopping cart. 

Freshworks CRM

Freshworks CRM software uses AI for lead scoring, lead prediction, and deal management. Its AI assistance scores new leads with historical data together with predictive scoring. It issues sales forecasting and triggers follow-ups making it an excellent tool for scoring and nurturing lead relationships.

The tools key features highlights include:

• Predictive scoring: identify the contacts and leads that need immediate attention based on customer history and behavior.
• Lead management: the drag-and-drop feature tracks and monitors leads through the sales process.
• AI-driven assistance provides actionable insights for improved engagement.
•  The AI assists the salespeople in driving sales by providing somatic insights from historical data and customer behavior.  

Salesforce Sales cloud

Salesforce sales cloud software automatically scores and redirects lead to the correct reps for faster follow-ups.  You can assign scores to leads based on their behaviors and demographics that are most valuable. Then set assignment rules based on the criteria you will use to distribute prospects/leads, which allows the sales team to gain accurate and automatic lead routing to increase conversions automatically.

 

Its key features include:

• Lead tracking: dynamic timelines show updated activities and customer records.
• Email marketing: the CRM allows the sending and tracking of emails.
• Lead routing: leads are scored and automatically sent to the appropriate salesperson.
• Marketing tracking: showcases the marketing campaigns generating leads.
• Contact management: key details on customers and social data are managed and stored along with activities for easy accessibility. 

 

Copper

Copper manages leads through seamless integration with Google workspace. Lead information is obtained automatically from the Gmail customer database and trigger workflows. The prospects are scored based on activities such as the number of website visits and email engagement.

Its key features include:

• Customizable sales Pipelines to fit your sales process.
• Auto Enrichment: scans social media and websites and auto-populates customer records and lead information.
• Lead Management: Leads are easily scored and automatically moved in the pipeline. Workflow Automation: Creates automatic lead follow-up and sales activities.
• Lead Scoring: The system auto-updates the lead scoring system with activities.

Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM  generates leads from multiple channels and assigns them for further nurturing. Users can obtain leads through emails and social media campaigns and set scoring rules based on their engagements, such as the number of clicks, email addresses, and demographics.

 Zoho CRM key features highlights are;

• Email Marketing: Customizable fields pull customer information into templates for engaging email marketing to generate leads.
• Analytics tool: Turns lead data into insights for salespeople to focus on high-priority deals.
• Lead Management: Scores leads, attaches them to customer records, and monitors the process.
• Task Management: Tracks each lead view history, creates tasks and notes, and tracks conversations.

Frequently Asked Questions About Lead Scoring

What is the purpose of lead scoring?

Lead scoring is an effective model used by sales and marketing teams to identify and establish valuable prospects for the business and its current sales funnel. A lead scoring system efficiently works when it is correctly set up and updated regularly.

How do I improve my lead score?

These are some of the vital steps to improve lead score; 

1. Integrate CRM systems for scoring.
2. Use demographic data to score.
3. Award scores for actions that indicate a high probability of sale.
4. Collaborate with the sales team in defining a lead scoring model.
5. Customize your lead scoring.
6. Set a threshold for marketing qualification.
7. Incorporate automatic qualification.
8. Automate lead alerts to sales for new MQLs.
9. Track and monitor MQL conversion rates.
10. Disqualify dead-end leads.

What factors to consider when scoring a potential lead?

Identify common characteristics of your leads and their demographic information. Demographic aspects include job titles, age group, gender, income levels, etc.

 How is the opportunity score calculated?

The opportunity score can be calculated using the formulas as follows;

Importance+ Max (Importance – Satisfaction, 0) = Opportunity followed by, Importance + (Importance – Satisfaction) = Opportunity.

 What does lead nurturing mean?

Lead nurturing refers to a process of building and reinforcing relationships with customers at every stage of the sales funnel.

What is a lead lifecycle?

Lead lifecycle refers to managing the life of a lead/contact/prospect from the time they show interest to when they finally convert to customers. 

What is lead scoring in CRM?

In most CRM systems, lead scoring refers to the process of assigning a numerical value to each lead to reflect the lead’s probability of becoming a potential customer. Its goal is to indicate which prospects are most likely to buy.

What is lead lifecycle management?

The lead lifecycle is the entire process from lead evaluation, segmentation, qualification on their way to the sales team. The process starts when a prospect interacts with your website until when they become a sales-qualified opportunity.

What is lead generation automation?

Lead generation automation is the process of creating systems and processes that enable you to generate leads without having to source them manually.

 What is a lead generation pipeline?

Lead generation is the procedure of discovering, identifying, and attracting prospects into your sales pipeline so that you can interact with them and inform them about your products and services as you move them through the funnel. You can generate leads online through various channels.

 Can you do lead scoring using Salesforce?

Salesforce offers customizable, automated lead scoring and grading solutions. It integrates into a CRM platform providing an easy and powerful user experience. 

The Final Thought

Hopefully, by now, you have a better idea of what lead scoring is and how to integrate it into your marketing strategy. There’s always more than we can cover in a single article. So why not make an effort to talk to the conversion rate optimization (CRO) consultation team at MediaOne about leading scoring or anything else for that matter, and let’s see how we can combine our experiences to make your project a success.