Optimizing Your Online Marketing with Lead Scoring

The ultimate goal of your online marketing efforts from SEO and SEM to Facebook marketing is to generate high-quality leads that will visit your website and take the action which you want, usually make a purchase. But how can you be sure that the leads are of high quality? This is what lead scoring can help you with. It is a classic marketing instrument which can be used effectively online. Let’s see how.

The Concept

Lead scoring is about evaluating leads based on a set of criteria which are unique for your business given its pricing model and marketing and sales strategies. By evaluating your leads, you will be able to focus your online marketing efforts, in particular, on the ones which are most likely to convert into customers. This results in higher effectiveness and return on investment.

Here is a simple example. There are two visitors to your e-commerce website who don’t make a purchase. The first one scores highly as a lead while the second one receives a very low score. In this situation, you can target the first visitor more aggressively via remarketing and other available means. It is all about knowing where to direct your resources for getting a greater return.

Building a Lead Scoring System

The simplest way to approach this big online marketing task is to study the visitors to your website. If you use reliable analytics tools, you should have plenty of historic data to work with. You should divide the visitors to your website into two groups – those who have become your customers and those who have not. Then you need to look into the demographics and behaviour of the two groups.

Find out how the two groups differ based on all factors which are important from age and gender to the number of pages viewed on your website. In the following, you will get details on what kinds of online interactions you will benefit from using as criteria for evaluation. Once you’ve got the criteria ready, you can readily assign scores to the leads to evaluate their quality. For example, a visitor who has checked out ten pages on your website should be assigned a higher score than one who has just viewed one page and left.

Evaluating Online Interactions

For effective online lead scoring, you will need to pinpoint factors which evaluate the activity of leads on your website. In addition to the number of pages visited, you can use the time spend on the website, the number of blog posts read and the filling out of an email subscription form. It is also possible for you to assign values to different pages such as product pages, pricing pages and shopping cart ones.

You should definitely include social media interactions in the evaluation of leads. If you use Facebook marketing, for instance, you can assign scores for the number of likes and shares. It is best if you cover lead behaviour associated with email marketing such as email opening and click-through rates.

Adopt lead scoring for improving your online marketing without wasting time. You can readily start on a smaller scale and make your scoring system more detailed and complex over time.