Lead scoring guide

Lead scoring is the practice of giving your leads a 'score' that helps prioritize which of them are most qualified for your product or brand. Utilizing data and marketing automation software, you can create a lead-scoring model that yields interested customers who are highly likely to make a purchase.

So what data can you use to score leads?

Below are some examples of data you can track to help score leads. Calculate the value of any given attribute by comparing its close rate (lead-to-customer conversion) with your overall close rate.

Demographic data

Demographic data include socioeconomic factors like age, sex, job title, marriage status and location.

Ask relevant demographic questions on your lead forms to see how well your leads fit into your target audience. Give positive points to leads who match your target audience, and negative points to leads who don't. This is a great way to remove leads who fall into an irrelevant demographic category for your business.

Company or industry data

If you're running a B2B product, it's likely that you have a target industry or company size in mind. At Autopilot, we provide marketing automation software to companies of any size, and any industry — as long as they have a marketing team. So our selection is pretty wide.

But maybe your B2B product is best suited to small businesses in hospitality. You can go about scoring your leads in a few ways:

Give points to users who declare they are a small hospitality business
Deduct points from users who indicate they are not a small, or a hospitality business
Track user behaviour and award points to leads that take certain actions. More qualified leads will be downloading whitepapers, interacting with pricing pages, and lingering on pages for longer peroids of time. You can track this using analytics software like Heap.

Email performance data

Keep an eye on your open and click-through rates through Autopilot's inbuilt insights feature. This will give you a clear idea of how interested your prospects are in your offers.

Social listening is the monitoring of social media to find mentions of your brand, product, competitors or anything else that's related to your business. It's a great way to ensure your brand is positioned correctly, and it also comes in handy for figuring out what kind of audience is most qualified to be a customer.

Keep an eye on the usual suspects too: click-through rates, shares, retweets likes and any other form of engagement. Engaged leads are warm leads.

Spam data

It's useful to award negative points to leads who are highly likely to be spambots. Some red flags that indicate that a spammer has filled out your form include:

Letters written side-by-side (as they're laid out on the QWERTY keyboard);
Inappropriate email addresses (like non-business emails on a B2B form); and
First, last and/or business names left uncapitalized;

Why implement lead scoring with Autopilot?

Increase sales efficiency by automatically scoring leads

Scoring your leads provides direct insight into prospects' readiness to convert into a customer. When an effective lead scoring journey (like this one) is set-up, sales teams are automatically directed to hot leads. No need to spend time and energy on unqualified or unready prospects.

Maximize marketing effectiveness

Lead scoring allows marketing teams to maximize their effectiveness. Top tier marketers who use marketing automation software point to lead scoring as a primary driver of revenue from content marketing.

Autopilot's automated lead scoring allows marketers to more accurately measure the ROI by analyzing which channels and programs are producing the highest quality leads. In fact, marketers who use lead scoring have a 77% boost in lead generation ROI over those not using lead scoring.

Align sales and marketing

Marketing and sales teams both need to understand what leads are converting at a higher rate. Once they have the 'image' of an ideal lead, marketing teams can use Autopilot to create highly-targeted and personalized customer journeys. Well-crafted journeys allow leads to move seamlessly from the marketing funnel, straight into the sales funnel.