Lead Scoring

As previously stated, lead scoring is based on specific criteria related to the main "buyer persona" profile established by the company. These criteria essentially revolve around the information you collect from leads. These include:

• Company information (B2B marketing);
• The prospect's demographic data;
• The lead's online attitude;
• His commitment via email;
• The interest the lead shows in the company on social media;
• Spam detection.

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

Socio-demographic data

When we talk about socio-demographic data, we're mainly referring to a person's age, gender, region, occupation, and marital status. In our case, it's information about your leads that you collect through the various forms on your website. While this information allows you to define your target audience and personalize your sales marketing campaign, its primary purpose should be to segment your CRM database.

Assuming each of your products is geared towards a specific demographic segment, it's even more important to disqualify any prospect who doesn't fit that target profile with a negative score. Conversely, if the information gathered on a lead matches, mark them with positive points. You can even award extra points to prospects who complete optional form fields.

Firmographic data

If your sales activity is categorized as B2B marketing, your target market is almost certainly a company like yours. Firmographic data can then be considered the equivalent of socio-demographic data in B2C marketing. To qualify your target market as potential customers and to help you with your lead scoring process, you can include questions in your forms that collect as much information as possible. This includes questions about company size, type of business, revenue, location, and so on. This will allow you to award points to leads that match your target market and eliminate those that don't.

The behavior of online lead scoring

It has been proven time and again that a prospect's behavior on a website is highly significant in influencing their purchasing decision. Therefore, it would be ideal to study the behavioral history of former prospects who have become customers—that is, how they interacted with the various content on the site. For example, which offers interested them, which ones they downloaded, the type and number of pages they visited, and the types of forms they filled out. All of this information can be used for lead scoring. It would indeed be wise to award more points to prospects who visit high-yield pages and forms (pricing page, demo request, etc.). Similarly, it would be beneficial to differentiate between leads who visit your website 15 times and others who visit only 5 times.

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

The benefits of lead scoring for your business through email

Just like your content, email is a crucial element of your inbound marketing strategy, and the interest your leads show in it is significant. However, simply subscribing to your newsletter isn't enough to convince a lead to make a purchase. Their intentions become clearer when their email open and click-through rates are used. Knowing who opens and reads the content of each email and then clicks on the offer links should make it easier for your sales team to identify qualified leads. They certainly won't waste time on dead-end lead nurturing efforts. This engagement is therefore a valid reason to assign a positive rating to prospects.

The role of lead scoring in relation to your social media strategy

If a lead regularly likes and shares your tweets and Facebook posts, it means they genuinely care about your brand on social media. This is clearly a significant level of engagement with your business. Quantitative metrics (number of positive reactions from the prospect, shares, comments, etc.) are particularly useful indicators for lead scoring. The score will be significantly higher for a qualified lead who also has a strong social media presence. They could even become a brand ambassador later on.

Lead scoring in the spam category

To top it all off, be wary of leads classified as "spam." It's baffling how this is even possible. There are indeed prospects to whom you should systematically assign a negative score. Those whose form responses don't conform to established conventions are a prime example. This includes prospect names without capital letters, company names, or other fields containing a sequence of at least four letters in an AZERTY keyboard layout.

Newly registered email addresses should also be compared to those of your customers. For example, if your inbound strategy targets a business as a prospect, you would naturally expect a professional address like ex ***** @ ******** se.com . However, when you encounter Gmail and Yahoo addresses, simply reduce the score relative to the others.