How To Prioritize And Qualify Leads With Marketing Automation

Lead scoring is one of the most beneficial features of marketing automation. It allows companies to rank their prospects based on various traits, activities, and attributes, so they know who is ready to buy right now, and who is just entering the funnel.

The purpose of lead scoring is to separate the best leads from all the rest by adding and subtracting points, depending on their different attributes or demographics. In a marketing automation system prospects may be ranked against a customized scale established by marketeres to meet the purposes of their company.

Points may be added or subtracted on the basis of demographic (age, geographic location, company) or behavioral data (opened emails, visited websites).

Let’s assume that you want to qualify prospects as sales ready when they have more than 50 scoring points.

In iPresso you can define number of points that would be added or subtracted for any activity or trait of your contacts.

You may, for example, award 15 points for submitting a contact form, 10 points for clicking a given link, and 25 points for downloading an offer from your website. You can also employ negative scoring which will deal with actions that suggest lack of interest in your product, e.g. remove 20 points when the prospect unsubscribes from your newsletter.

Additionally, you may use demographic information that could be crucial in the case of your product or service. You may award, for example, 10 points to people aged 30-40, and 5 points to those who live in London.

If you have thousands or millions of contacts in your iPresso’s database, setting up such criteria will allow you to automatically evaluate who the “hottest” leads are. Then, your sales team will know who they should target first in order to complete purchases. And the prospects who haven’t garnered enough scoring points may automatically enter various lead nurturing scenarios.

The key benefits of a well-prepared lead scoring plan include increased sales and marketing efficiency, better marketing and sales alignment, and increase in company’s revenues. Lead scoring allows you to save time by focusing your efforts on the best leads, while nurturing those who are not yet ready to buy.