LeadScoring

When are your customers ready to buy? LeadScoring can actually help answer that question by following your customers’ journey from being an entirely unknown quantity, engaging with your content for the first time, to becoming a named and known individual.

LeadScoring

MarktingPlatform offers LeadScoring as part of its subscription packages. The LeadScoring feature works in tandem with the Tracking functionality of the platform. With LeadScoring, you can assign a score to a contact depending on the actions and activity of that contact.

Perhaps your company sells cars? In this case, you will be very familiar with an often lengthy sales and decision-making process. Or maybe, on the other hand, your company sells pencils – with an accordingly ultra-short customer decision-making process? Of course, these two are at the extremes of the decision-making spectrum, but nonetheless they do reflect buying realities.

At MarketingPlatform we understand this reality, and as a result, we have developed a LeadScoring functionality that can easily be adapted to any industry. The value of the lead can be adjusted and specifically defined, from points awarded for clicks in newsletters, to points given for viewing product lists, the products themselves, and steps in the purchase flow. All the point values can be individually adjusted and customised, and multiple flows can be set up.

Bear in mind that over and over again, research from all over the world demonstrates that marketing campaigns targeting the right recipient with the right content at exactly the right time are likely to perform at least 5-6 times better than one-to-many or so-called “one-size-fits-all” broadcasts.

 

Tracking everything, whether it is clicks, downloads or product purchases

Imagine if you could follow a prospect before they actually become a paying customer, across platforms, be it a smartphone, tablet and/or computer, and so do all the time with the ability to provide them with genuinely personalised and targeted communications.

We have developed this feature to enable exactly this – and we’ve made it available to all our customers at no extra cost. The tracking feature is designed to work across most CMS solutions and webshop systems. The MarketingPlatform tracking function identifies and records actions such as how and when a customer on your webshop adds or removes a product from their basket and similar kinds of actions.

Our Tracking function can record, for example, the “add to basket” action, and collect all the information associated with this action that is normally only communicated internally in your webshop. Many webshop owners then create a kind of “invisible profile” on the person who buys by sending information about the item with the click that adds it to the shopping cart.

Any action can be recorded and used

Any action that comes from a contact, a recipient, a lead or a customer – however you choose to define them – can be recorded by the Tracking feature in MarketingPlatform.

An event could be, for instance, the example from earlier where a webshop wants to profile their goods by the “Add to Cart” action. For example, an online company that sells children’s clothing can increase their knowledge through profiling by including the gender and age of the item in the purchase action. In this way, the information can be used for segmentation, providing increasingly precise targeting, all without the need to directly ask customers about their preferences.

It could also be a car dealership with a plethora of brochures available for download on their website. The brochures are for different car models and therefore naturally collect and collate the different behaviours and potential customer needs on each and every download. Cars are, after all, available in many brands, models, styles and of course price ranges. 

As an Event in MarketingPlatform, each download can be recorded and used to profile each visitor and recipient. So by gathering knowledge about the visitor’s preferences about style, type and model of car, that information can be directly translated into specifically-tailored, highly-relevant marketing campaigns.

And if the customer visits the company’s website or webshop from multiple devices, such as smartphone, tablet and computer, these devices will be combined into one single customer profile together with the corresponding LeadScore.

 

LeadScoring in the context of Marketing Automation

To get the most out of the knowledge gained with Tracking and LeadScoring, Marketing Automation flows would be a great place to start.

The Abandoned Shopping Cart is one of the best-known flows based on the most common behaviours exhibited in a webshop.

With the abandoned shopping cart function, data about the products in the cart is collected and collated, including the products that were both added to the basket and those that were subsequently removed. With just a few clicks, MarketingPlatform can automatically send the shopper a follow-up email, whatever the situation, whether a shopping cart is abandoned completely, the purchase is partially completed or any and all combinations of these parameters.

Another example flow could be a follow-up triggered by a particular LeadScore, perhaps collated through many months during which time the customer has visited the company’s website, made one or more purchases, left a number of shopping baskets and other such behaviours. All the actions will generate a LeadScore that paints a clear picture of that visitor’s specific and individual level of activity. Marketing campaigns can then be automated, created and targeted at people with a certain score, specific actions and particular patterns of behaviour – or again, a mix of these and many other parameters.

 

LeadScoring as a B2B tool

One of the strongest attributes of LeadScoring is the ability to help qualify contacts. How much do you really know about the behaviour of your contacts and when they are in a state of readiness to buy?

By using the LeadScoring feature, you can assign relevant scores to your contacts. If they have visited your pricing page or made use of trial offers, read the terms and conditions of the website or visited your About Us page, these may well be signs that a contact is maturing to the point of being ready to buy your product or service.

In this case, we are talking about moving a contact from being a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). Here you will be able to tailor your communication with the contact according to the stage of their purchasing journey and the associated LeadScore, and then forward these qualified contacts to the sales department so that they can take over the relationship at the appropriate time.

Do you want to see how LeadScoring can be used and what it can do for your business? Book a demo with one of our talented colleagues, or try us for free for 14 days.