Achieve Better Conversion and More MQLs with these Lead Scoring Best Practices
Lead scoring is an effective process of managing and segmenting marketing leads. This process can enable you to set qualifiers for your leads to determine when prospects are ready to be transferred to the sales funnel. The score value can tell you when a lead transforms from a Marketing Qualified Lead (an MQL) to a Sales Qualified Lead (an SQL).
There are various lead scoring models B2B marketers can choose to set up. The method and combinations of lead scores and values may vary from one organization to another. The most common types of lead scoring models are demographic and behavioral. Many studies have pointed out that though B2B marketers implement both demographic and behavioral lead scoring, many of them are not getting the optimum outcome of their lead scoring systems. Then, which lead scoring models should you choose?
To select the right lead grading model for your business, you need to understand the different lead scoring models.
Different Types of Lead Scoring Models
The following are the six types of lead scoring models that vary based on customer insights you can collect from leads that take any intended action via different marketing channels and assets.
Demographic Information
If your business is marketing to people of a specific demographic, ask your prospects demographic questions in forms on your landing pages. Later, you can use the leads’ information on the landing page to understand how well the leads fit your products or solutions. Share these customer insights with your sales reps and highlight prospects or leads that fall into the segment they can target for sales follow-up. You can give a negative lead score to leads who fall outside the regions, countries, states, cities, or zip codes when marketing leads to a specific geographic location. Additionally, you can also give extra scores to leads who share information for optional form fields such as phone numbers, and job titles.
Online Interactions or Behavior
Another model your business needs is customer behavioral information. This lead scoring model will measure how your leads interact with your website, emails, social media posts, and others. These customer insights can tell you about prospects’ buying intent. To understand them Take note of your leads that have eventually converted into customers: do these leads download your content offers? How many eBooks or whitepapers have they downloaded? Check out the number of web pages your leads had visited before they made the purchase decision. Take a look at the web forms and pages they used to score your leads. You can give higher scores to contacts who navigated high-value web pages such as pricing pages. You can also assign high scores to contacts who have filled out high-value forms such as the product demo form or visitors who crossed more than 30 page views on your website. When a lead is no longer visiting your website or downloading your content, they may no longer be interested. You can reduce points from those leads if they have stopped navigating or engaging with the website, depending on the typical sales cycle, such as ten days, 30 days, or 60 days.
Social Engagement
This lead scoring model gives scores to how engaged your leads are with your social media pages. Their social engagement will tell you how interested your leads are in your brand. Give scores based on the number of times they have clicked or reacted to your brand’s tweets and LinkedIn posts. How many times your leads have retweeted or shared your LinkedIn posts? If your leads actively engage on your social networks, you can give higher points to those profiles.
Company Information
As a B2B marketer, you must be more interested in marketing to organizations of a specific industry, type, or size. If you are more interested in B2B enterprises than B2C brands, then you can place related questions on your landing page forms. Later, you can give scores to leads who match your ideal customer profile. Similarly, you can take points away from companies that do not fit your customer profile.
Email Engagement
A lead opts to receive emails from your brand, but you are not yet sure how interested the contact is to purchase from you. On the other hand, email open and clickthrough rates may not guarantee their buying intent. Your sales team needs to analyze which leads opened all your emails in the lead nurturing series or the contacts who always click through your promotional offers. Thus, sales reps can focus on leads who are genuinely interested and engaged. Assign a higher score to leads who click those high-value emails and product demo emails.
Spam Detection
Finally, you can give negative scores to leads who fill out landing page forms that later prove spam. If the first name, last name, street name, and company names contain random alphabets or fill form fields by typing multiple letters from the “QWERTY” keyword – then you should consider taking points away. Similarly, leads who fill in Gmail or other personal email addresses instead of company email addresses should also get negative points if they are marketing to B2B businesses.
To build a lead scoring model that will convert into MQL, you need to consider the following techniques and practices.
1. Identify your lead criteria
Earlier, we have already shown you how to identify the criteria for MQL that are more likely to convert than other leads based on specific demographic, social, or behavioral data. To build a lead scoring system, you need to give scores or points as a basis. Focus on your brand’s unique attributes such as sales cycle, customer base, and other key differentiators. Make sure you have lead intelligence and analytics in place to extract these insights. When planned and analyzed effectively, you can focus your lead nurturing efforts on high-quality leads, which may generate more conversions.
2. Set up and give scores
By performing MQL analysis and doing meticulous planning with your marketing and sales teams, you can streamline the right threshold of the scores to assign to leads on specific actions and events. Usually, the threshold ranges from 0 to 100, but you can give any point value you want. To figure out the unique lead score, you will have to add up points based on your set criteria. For example, if your targeted lead is an SMB, then businesses with 100 employees, you may assign 8 points to such companies. However, organizations with more than 1,500 employees should get one point. Similarly, to give a behavioral score, you may consider opening your email as positive while unsubscribing from your list is a negative aspect.
3. Assign a sales-ready lead score
Which score will you consider as sales-ready that they are genuinely interested in making a purchase? This is a crucial point in setting up a lead-scoring model. Identify the sales-ready leads, and you can transfer them to sales teams for follow-up. Identifying sales-ready scores will also help you focus on the leads that need further lead nurturing and leads that will not convert, and your team should stop spending time following up.
After building your lead score model and setting it up, it’s time to focus on testing the model. Testing will help you identify the hottest leads where you want to focus your efforts. Thus, you can drive more conversions by taking extra actions. Additionally, we recommend aiming for consistent business growth and improvement while setting up a lead-scoring model. A lead scoring model that is focused on your business growth will lead you to continuous success. Make sure you practice periodical maintenance, tweaking, testing, optimization, and improvement to ensure your lead scoring model works just right.
Do you need our professional assistance with your lead generation, scoring, managing, and increasing lead conversion outcomes? Marrina Decisions can help you. All you have to do is to Contact us anytime or simply say “Hello” at info@marrinadecisions.com. You can also DM us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.