Marketing Automation For Dummies (2014)

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Scoring on web interactions

Any URL can be tracked. Most web content has to be accessed via a URL regardless of who hosts the content.

To score web interactions and identify sales-ready leads, you should break your web actions down into sales-ready actions and general actions as follows:

· Score any actions not related to a buyer’s journey as a general action that does not increase the sales readiness score. For example, many people attach a score to every URL. But not all URLs visited are indicators of sales readiness in a prospect.

· Score any actions related to a buyer’s journey as a sales-ready action that increases the sales-readiness score. For example, the URL of a pricing page on your site and the URL of your product features and benefits page are good examples of pages that are probably indicators of sales readiness in a prospect.

Scoring on downloads

When you score downloadable content, remember that your goal is to score the person interacting with the content, not the value of the content itself. Scoring the person involves looking at the proximate cause of the download and including that action in the download score. For example, a score for content downloaded from an email should be lower than a score for content downloaded from a landing page after a Google search. That’s because a person who proactively searches for your content is probably more interested than a person who passively receives an email. Your marketing automation system can tell you whether someone was searching through one of your search engine marketing campaigns or one of your email campaigns, and apply your chosen scores accordingly.

Scoring on email engagement

You can break down email engagement into two specific actions:

· Email opens: An email open should never be scored. It is a false indicator of interactions. An email open is marked whenever the email is displayed, not read. This means that it can just pop up in the preview pane and be considered opened by an email tool. Having an email marked as read when it wasn’t occurs because of how email opens are tracked by marketing automation applications, and every application uses the same technology for this tracking. So scoring email opens doesn’t help you determine a sales-ready prospect.

· Email clicks: If you are using email campaigns to build rapport over a long period of time, a person is likely to click many emails. Each score you assign should represent a specific step in the prospect’s journey. For example, clicks on emails sent to keep in touch with inactive prospects should be scored very lightly compared to emails sent to prospects who recently signed up to be contacted.

In addition to clicks and opens, you should consider how each email was sent. For example, score an email triggered by a form submission higher than an email blast to everyone on your list. I discuss working with emails in detail in Chapter 10.

Correctly scoring search terms

Start out with a general score for all search terms and move to a more meaningful scoring model over time. Your general scores tell you which search terms are predictors of sales readiness and which ones are not. For example, you might start out thinking that people searching the term “pricing” are at the end of the buying cycle, only to find through your general scores that they are at the beginning of that cycle. In that case, lowering the score for the pricing term makes sense.

When asking your clients about their buyer’s journey, make sure that you understand how their search terms change over the course of their journey. A recent survey conducted by ExactTarget, an email service provider, shows that people change their search terms two to three times during their buyer’s journey. This means that you will likely need to score many different search terms.

Scoring social media interactions correctly

Proving ROI on social media campaigns can be difficult. That is, it’s difficult until you have marketing automation and it becomes very easy to see who interacts and where in the sales cycle the interaction occurs.

Each social media post, such as a tweet, Facebook post, or LinkedIn post, contains a URL. Figure 12-6 shows a custom URL being used to attach this lead to a campaign. Adding the lead to the campaign will make it very easy to show ROI on the social channel I post this link to.

The URL you should use for scoring is the URL your marketing automation tool gives you, as shown in Figure 12-7. Most tools also let you attach a piece of content to a campaign and a score for future automation. When you copy your social URL and paste it into your messaging application, it will be sent and tracked by your system.

Figure 12-6: Score social posts using the URLs from the posts.

Figure 12-7: Use the URL provided by your marketing automation tool to score social URLs.

Keep in mind that social media Likes, follows, retweets, blog posts, and other non-URL interactions should not be scored as sales-ready actions. They should instead be scored for other types of measurement, such as identifying your happiest customers. For example, score blog posts when your content points to a stage in the buyer’s journey, but not when posts contain content about your company culture.

Advanced Scoring Models

Many people use marketing automation to help determine sales-ready leads, but many advanced lead-scoring models exist as well. I suggest waiting until you are capable with your tool before getting into advanced models. In fact, I suggest waiting until you have been running your tool for a minimum of one year.

Learning to use advanced scoring helps you show a lot more value from your marketing automation tool, and it helps your company drive additional revenue from the same tool. The next sections show you how to leverage more of your marketing automation tools by using scoring models to identify your best customers, your most active people, and your unhappy customers.

Using lead scoring for a net promoter score

A net promoter score is a modern way to identify your best customers and help focus your marketing on the best and worst customer attitudes. By identifying your happiest and unhappiest customers, you can easily focus your time on mitigating churn and encouraging the happiest people to promote your brand.

You can buy special software to help you manage your net promoter scores, or you can use your marketing automation tool for this purpose. To ascertain your net promoter score, use a score field to determine how active someone is with your marketing over a period of time. For example, people who read your blog on a daily basis and read every white paper should score highly.

You can also build a form in your marketing automation tool to ask the standard net promoter score question, which is, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you with our company?” This information can go into a custom field in your lead record to score the happiest and unhappiest clients.

Scoring multiple buyers for sales readiness

If you are selling into a B2B account, multiple buyers may be involved. In these cases, you need to use account-based scoring to score every buyer associated with an account to determine the sales readiness of the whole account.

You have a few different ways to score multiple buyers as one account. If your tool allows for account-based scoring, ask your vendor how to set up multiple-buyer scoring. If your tool does not have account-based scoring out of the box, you can still set it up in your CRM using the following steps:

1. Create a custom field in the account record and name the field Account Score.

2. Populate the custom field with scores.

Use the coding language of your CRM to set up an automation. That way, you can have all individual scores under the account summed together. You may need your CRM admin if you are not familiar with coding in your CRM.

3. Connect to your marketing automation tool.

The field you created in Step 1 needs to be connected to your CRM. I discuss connecting custom fields in Chapter 4.

Using tally fields for scoring

If you have multiple stages in your buyer journey, you can determine the score for each asset in each of your stages using tally fields. Tally fields are a type of number field that increases only by a single number each time, as in keeping a tally. You have to guess at first, but you can eventually count how many interactions a person has in each stage. That way, you can easily determine the correct lead score for each interaction within a stage, as shown in Figure 12-8.

When you have a sizeable set of data, you can look for trends. For example, if you use 100 as your sales-ready score and the average person engages with five pieces of content in stage one, three pieces of content in stage two, and four pieces of content in stage three, you can break your scoring model into 12 equal parts. That way, you can easily score each action with a score of eight points. You can then move the score up or down depending on the suggestion from your sales team as to the importance of the action.

Figure 12-8: Add a tally field to track multiple buying-cycle stages.

Monitoring Your Scoring Model

Scoring models are living and constantly changing. If you set up scoring once and never touch it again, the results will be only as good as your first guess. So, you should plan a schedule of evaluation and reconfiguration. I suggest looking back 60 days from your first attempt. After that, look back every 90 days.

The next sections show you how to monitor your scoring models over time so that you can continually improve them and maintain accurate scoring.

Learning to use the multiple-column approach

When your scoring model changes, use a spreadsheet with multiple columns to keep track. The spreadsheet is your living document to help you track your changes and make sure that you have all your items together. Figure 12-9 shows a scoring model that changed with notes from salespeople.

Figure 12-9: Use a spreadsheet with multiple columns to monitor your scoring model.

When reviewing your scoring model, add a new column for any revisions. This column helps you keep up with changes in your scores and is particularly useful when you’re involved in future revisions and need to remember where you started, and why your scores are where they are.

Making use of score degradation

Score degradation is the process of lowering someone’s score, which helps you to make sure that your current score is an accurate reflection of a prospect’s sales readiness.

Score degradation is based on unseen behavior rather than direct action. For example, lack of activity is a reason to degrade a score. Score degradation also happens when a prospect visits specific pages. The most common page for score degradation is the careers page on your website, because someone visiting your careers page is more likely to be looking for a job than to make a purchase.

When degrading a score, you should do it over a period of time. Some tools allow you to degrade a score over time by a percentage of the total score, or by a specific number. I suggest refraining from ever degrading a score to zero. A zero score removes all past interest, which makes it hard to segment based on past activity. Instead of degrading to zero, create a minimum equal to 50 percent of the total sales-ready score as a starting point. That way, you can still show activity while keeping leads out of the hands of your salespeople.

Using a checklist for refining your scoring model

When you refine your scoring model, use the following checklist to ensure that you’re evaluating the correct people, the correct amount of time, and the right assets:

· Look at the ratio of sales-ready leads being converted to opportunities. A low ratio of sales-assigned leads to closed deals can be an indicator of a bad scoring model.

· Ask your salespeople how they feel the leads are doing. If the sales reps don’t like their leads, it can be an indicator of a bad scoring model.

· Ask salespeople how they feel about the actions the leads are exhibiting. Do they see a trend with specific actions? Salespeople can usually identify trends in leads, and they can become aware of new actions that need to be included or excluded from a scoring model faster than marketing in most cases.

Your salespeople are a key to helping you to refine your scoring model. Marketers often pass leads to sales based on activity alone, but salespeople know which leads are the most sales ready. Salespeople can help you confirm or deny your activity-based assumptions.