7 lead scoring best practices to improve your conversion rate

Marketing

by   KEVIN PAYNE

Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics in any business—it is the percentage of your website visitors who take a desired action, such as purchasing your products or services. Conversion rate optimization best practices can also help you to better allocate marketing resources, save money, and predict where your business is headed in the future.

And one way to optimize conversion rates is to use lead scoring best practices.

As a refresher, lead scoring is a methodology where you assign value—often numerical—to different attributes such as visitor interaction with your brand. These points are then used to rank your leads in order to determine which prospects are ready for the next step in your sales process.

Here are seven lead scoring best practices that can help improve your conversion rate.

Lead scoring best practices

Define your buyer persona & journey

Use your existing customer database and research to better understand your market and create a more accurate buyer persona. You can start with customer details, such as age, location, language, occupation, company they work for, interests, and specific goals. Depending on your business, you may need to create more than one buyer persona.

Once you come up with your buyer personas, you’ll have a better grasp on their goals and the journey they take in order to achieve them. You need both buyer personas and customer journey to come up with a personalized marketing strategy tailored to attract your ideal customers.

Increasingly, consumers are only willing to engage with customized marketing messages specific to their interests. So develop personalized content to stand out from your competitors and generate better leads.

Include negative scores

Negative scoring attributes are just as important as positive scoring when deciding who are the qualified prospects in your list. This will not only make your scoring more accurate, but it will help you eliminate those who do not meet your criteria.

For example, you can factor in unrelated job titles (such as “intern” or “college student”) or behaviors such as “unsubscribing from emails” that will remove points from their overall lead score.

There could also be instances where a lead ranks high in your overall matrix, but is not your target customer. For example, a graduate student researching trends in your industry, who has attended all your webinars, signed up for all your lead magnets, etc., but has no intentions of paying for your products or services. This is where negative scores will come in handy.

Align your sales & marketing teams

Lead scoring is a sales and marketing methodology. Therefore, in order for the system to work, both sales and marketing must be in sync. The criteria of what makes up a qualified lead should be relevant to both teams.

Since your sales team are the ones interacting with the customers, they are able to offer unique insights which the marketing team can use to reevaluate and adjust your brand’s lead scoring matrix accordingly.

Without your sales team, your marketing team won’t be able to create a better lead scoring system. And without your marketing team, your sales team will be dealing with many unqualified leads. So be sure these teams operate in sync for most steps of the sales process.

Personalize your emails

Make use of your customer database in personalizing your emails. Information such as their name, location, and their recent transaction with your website might prove useful for your email content. If you are using a unified CRM for sales and marketing, then you have all customer data at your fingertips at all times, with full visibility into prior outreach and interactions.

Improve your response times

Customer response is so crucial, but a Drift study found that 58% of companies never followed up with lead and up to 90% of businesses don’t respond within the first five minutes. Failing to follow up or even respond quickly can immediately lead to lost sales.

In the digital age, where customers have easy access to so many options and can switch brands quickly, it’s crucial to stay in touch with your potential customers while they are researching options and thinking about your brand.

For example, once you’re able to set an appointment for a product demo, follow up with reminders and share relevant and helpful information. You can easily automate these tasks with tools like Insightly and save time for both sales and marketing reps.

Implement a follow-up strategy

As you study your lead scoring system, you will be able to pinpoint cold leads who need a little push or re-engagement with your business, a good follow-up strategy is crucial.

Leads are usually grouped in three categories, based on their attributes and behavior: cold, warm, and hot. A cold lead is someone who has shown any interest in your business, a warm lead has expressed some interest, and a hot lead is someone who matches your ideal profile, and is ready to do business with you.

Use the lead scoring system as a guide when developing a follow-up strategy. Since all leads have different relationships with your brand, you will need to find a different, most appropriate approach for each.

For instance, you can send cold leads basic information about your business, but share more detailed information about the products and services with people who have browsed your website and have specific questions.

Monitor & evaluate your results

If you are new to lead scoring, don’t fret when you are unable to pull it off the first time. Coming up with a lead scoring system is expected to be a series of trials and errors.

Make it a point to always monitor and evaluate your results so that you can continuously improve your lead scoring matrix. The more information you gather about your customers, the better you’ll be able to determine what kind of adjustments you need for a more accurate system.

With a properly implemented lead scoring matrix you’ll start noticing a significant increase in your business’ conversion rate and marketing ROI.

Ready to create a lead scoring matrix and align your sales and marketing all in one place? Request a free consultation and a product demo with an Insightly rep.

 

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