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However valuable, personal data as such tell nothing about someone’s likeliness to buy or engagement with your brand and therefore are inadequate for the real touch of relevancy.
Lead scoring originates from the need of being as relevant as possible. Information about someone’s behavior, like page visits, opens, clicks and likes, and even filtered data like recency, frequency and monetary value, add the personal touch.
The disadvantage of behavioral data can be that they are too general to use for personalization purposes. The solution to this is to apply lead scoring to the soft data of an individual.
How to apply lead scoring?
Lead scoring is a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization.
By adding scores to predefined common behavior, like pages visited, forms submitted, social likes, recency, frequency and monetary value, (type of ) information requested, an individual relation is rewarded with a score.
The score ranks the relation, triggering interactions, like lead nurturing campaigns or calls from sales representatives.
Throughout the customer life cycle you could identify various types of lead scores. E.g. for prospects this could be a distinction between Marketing qualified leads (MQL) or Sales qualified leads (SQL). For clients this could be a distinction between engaged and non-engaged clients.
To specify the latter: For example a company that sells shoes, applied the following lead scoring:
- Purchase of a pair of shoes: + 20
- Purchase of accessories (shoe polish, laces, soles): + 5
- Monetary value in last year > $250: +30
- Monetary value in last year
- No purchase in last 6 months: – 15
- Create account on website: +10
- Like on Facebook: + 5
- Visit homepage: + 10
- Open of a newsletter: + 1
- Click on a link: + 10
- Share to social: + 15
- Unsubscribe: -25
- Bounce of an email: – 30
- No open in last three months: – 10
- No click in last 6 months: – 15
- Etc.
Anyone with a positive score is engaged, and the ones with a score of over 45 are the true brand ambassadors. Anyone with a negative score is labeled as non-engaged. For all three segments different marketing tactics apply.
Personal data are useful for personalization, but don’t provide true understanding of an individual’s ‘likeliness to buy’. By using lead scoring as an instrument of targeting relations based on behavior, you will be able to be timely and relevant, with more conversion as a reward.
A visual explanation:
