The fact is that marketing works best when it’s highly targeted. Targeted marketing is all about getting your message to the right audience. However, offers need to better match their target audience to be accepted.
This, in turn, leads to a higher potentiality of converting a lead into a purchaser in the near future. A target market usually includes a targeted set of customers for whom a company directs its marketing efforts.
This is why identifying the target market is an essential step in the development of a marketing plan. The same applies whether using direct mail marketing or email subscription services. Here is how lead scoring can work to your advantage.
What is Lead Scoring?
Lead scoring is a sophisticated method that takes a group of potential leads and applies a score to them based on their viability as a future customer. Essentially, a lead begins as a sales prospect that isn’t filtered or quantified.
It’s not known whether they’ll end up being a net income generator for the business or not. Companies can use scoring to segment subscribers on one or more mailing lists. In short, lists can be used to divide subscribers into customers and potential customers.
This means those people who have already made at least one purchase and others interested in a newsletter. Marketing messages could be different for each group based on interest and likelihood to be receptive to new marketing offers.
However, it’s still an approach to online marketing that was extremely linear and limited. By using a new method of lead scoring, subscribers are given an individual score. The scoring system can be devised based on the criteria that the business owner feels is most important. This provides much greater benefits to business owners than the previous, simple two-list approach.
Set up lead scoring for the priorities of a business
Every business is different. What is important with a potential customer is not the same as other businesses. For instance, researches will help you discover that the average customer needs to see several marketing messages from the company before they purchase a product or service.
This is an indication that people are sometimes not convinced on a first visit. However, follow-ups via marketing emails can help stimulate a return website visit before they considered buying anything.
By determining what criteria is most critical to the business, a lead scoring system can be set up to rate subscribers based on that fixed rating system. Using this approach, scoring across an entire newsletter subscriber list becomes both uniform and consistent.
For sales teams, they don’t need to be inundated with poor leads that won’t convert into sales. This creates low-performance numbers for individual sellers and the sales manager.
Instead, they need qualified leads that have scored well on criteria that matters to them. Characteristics that can be scored include things like a company job title (to determine if they’re in a decision-making position or not).
You can also use gender, how they became subscribers, and what actions they have taken. These actions might include scoring based on subscribing via a certain landing page or where they’ve clicked through on the website.
How does lead scoring function?
Once you have decided on the important characteristics, you can then assign them points which are automatically updated and reflected in a customer’s score. The marketing team can then set a minimum score before assigning the customer to an individual sales associate. Depending on the company, they may contact the customer by phone if they’ve already supplied their contact details and have agreed to be contacted in this way.
By having your marketing department staff only invest time into the most promising, high scored subscribers, they can pay greater attention to those potential customers. They optimize their personalized attention with the customers most likely to bear fruit while others can continue to receive regular subscriber emails.
Does the score stay static once it’s been determined?
Once a score has been set, it is likely that it can change. As the person interacts with the company’s website, they may perform an action which is part of a high or low scoring criteria. As such, their score might go up (or down) based on their latest actions or behavior.
Marketing staff can receive updates on new people who have just reached the minimum score necessary for them to get more personalized marketing messages. Alternatively, just one criterion that has changed could be enough to trigger a certain response from the company.
That could be downloading a PDF product brochure, for instance, which indicates a greater level of interest in the products offered by the company compared to someone who opted into a newsletter but hasn’t shown greater interest beyond that.
Lead scoring is an excellent way to better categorize potential customers for marketing purposes. It also improves sales staff performance by optimizing where they devote their marketing time.
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