Criteria for implementing a lead scoring strategy

As previously stated, lead scoring is carried out on the basis of certain criteria specific to the main “buyer persona” profile established by the company. These criteria essentially revolve around the information you collect from leads. We include in particular:

• Company information (B2B marketing);
• Prospect demographics;
• The lead's online attitude;
• His commitment by email;
• The interest that the lead has in the company on social networks;
• Spam detection.

For a score between 0 and 100, each of these criteria must guarantee an irrefutable probability of purchase on the part of the prospect.

Socio-demographic data

When we talk about socio-demographic data, we mainly refer to a person's age, gender, region, profession, marital status. In our case, this is information about your leads that you collect through the various forms on your website. If this information allows you to determine your target and personalize your marketing campaign for sales, it should above all serve you in the segmentation of your CRM database.

Assuming that each of your products is geared towards a specific demographic segment, it is all the more important that you rule out any prospect who does not meet this target profile with a negative score. If, on the other hand, the information collected on a lead matches, rate it with positive points. You can even award extra points to prospects who fill out optional form fields.

Firmographic data

If your sales activity is categorized as b2b marketing, your target is undoubtedly a company like yours. Firmographic data can then be considered as the equivalent of socio-demographic data in b2c marketing. In order to qualify your target as a potential customer or not and to help you in your lead scoring process, you can include questions in your forms to collect as much information as possible. Whether in terms of size, type of activity, turnover, location... Enough to allow you to award points to leads who correspond to your target and exclude those who do not. not.

Online lead behavior

It has been proven more than once that the attitude of a prospect on a site is very significant in terms of his purchasing decision. It would therefore be ideal to study the behavioral history of former prospects who became customers, that is to say how they behaved when faced with the different content on the site. For example, the offers that may have interested them, those they downloaded, the type and number of pages they visited or even the type of form filled out. All of this could help you in lead scoring. It would indeed be wise to award more points to prospects visiting high-yield pages and forms (price page, demo request, etc.). The same as for leads who visit your website 15 times while others 5 times in the same time.

However, for a lead who ceases all activity on your platform for a certain period of time, you should possibly consider deducting points from them. This behavior could be defined as a sudden disinterest of the prospect in your company.

The lead's interest in your business through email

Just like your content, email is a crucial point of your inbound marketing strategy; the interest your leads have in it is significant. However, simply subscribing to your newsletter is also not conclusive on the part of the lead in terms of purchase. It is above all through the email opening and click rate that one’s intentions become clear. Knowing who opens and reads the contents of each email and then clicks on the offer links should make it easier for all of your salespeople to choose qualified leads. They certainly won't have to waste time on false lead nurturing leads. This commitment is therefore a valid pretext for assigning prospects a positive rating score.

Lead engagement with your social media strategy

If a lead has the habit of liking and then sharing your tweet and Facebook post content, it means that they are really interested in your brand on social networks. This is obviously a huge commitment to your business. Quantitative metrics (number of positive reactions from the prospect, shares, comments, etc.) above all represent good indicators for lead scoring. The score would be relatively higher for a qualified prospect who also has a strong influence on social networks. He could even later become an ambassador for your brand.

Leads in the spam category

To top it all off, watch out for leads classified as “spam”. Makes you wonder how this is possible. There are indeed these prospects to whom you will systematically have to give a negative score. Those whose responses to forms do not fit with the established convention are the typical example. Prospect's first and last names without capital letters, the same for company names or other fields containing a succession of at least 4 letters according to the AZERTY provision.

The newly entered email addresses should also be compared to those of your customers. For example, if your inbound strategy targets a company as a lead, it's obvious to expect a business address like example@company.com. However, when you are faced with Gmail and Yahoo addresses, it will be enough to reduce the number of score points compared to that of the others.