Lead scoring is a strategy that is increasingly gaining ground in the world of marketing. The principle is simple. All actions that your prospects, contacts and other relationships undertake are graded. A certain score then leads to a follow-up. Since email marketing thrives on the actions of the reader, this medium is also a perfect base for this technique.
The basic principle is simple. We usually know the contact on the other side of the digital battlefield. Otherwise we couldn’t have sent them an email message. That means that we can associate every click through, reading action, in short, any kind of reaction to a CTA with a profile. A profile that we build up over time.
School report
It all starts with appointing grades to every form of action of course. For example, reading a newsletter gets one point. Clicking on a [Read more] is a little more advanced action, and is certainly worth two points for example. If you extend this line of reasoning, then downloading a whitepaper results in an even higher score. Before you start rating your contacts, you first need to assess the merits of every action.
Report
Of course your contacts won’t get to see these points. But behind the scenes, you could definitely use this evaluation to your advantage. It is well known that a sales department would rather get names of contacts that they know to already have actively sought for information, then a person who just signed up for a newsletter and has a clear history.
Distinguish
An additional benefit is that you can more easily distinguish your active contacts from the less active contacts. Among the latter there are undoubtedly a number of drop-outs. But there will also be contacts who feel that the content you were sending them, didn’t appeal to them. It gives you the opportunity to perform better on both fronts.
Be more relevant
You can make your system even more efficient. Certainly in terms of click through where you’re linking to content. All content can be divided into sections, topics, product ranges and the like. When noting the scores you shouldn’t only keep track of the totals, but also the scores per topic. That way you can instantly spot the topic that interests your contact most.
Adapting newsletters
Obviously, a contact will be clicking on more articles, then just on one single subject. But after a while you’ll start to discover certain favorite areas of interest. And then it is just the art of composing a tailored newsletter for your contact. Allow 60 percent focus on the number one topic. And use the rest of your newsletter, to highlight other relevant interests. The relevance is increased again, your contacts will get higher scores and eventually sales will gladly enter into the conversation with those hot leads. Talk about a win-win!
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