Lead score is generally not something that’s time bound, so if a lead engaged with you maybe 2 years ago, its lead score might still show 250, equal to a super engaged lead that came into the system just yesterday.
By Nilesh Patel
The Point: You need to quantify everything to run a successful business. Maybe this is how it started. You were told lead generation is not enough; you should keep your leads engaged too. You listened to the advice, and spent money on marketing automation, on relevant content sharing, and you started getting traction.
You measured your efforts too, albeit in a segregated manner, but you measured –number of people clicking your emails, downloading thate-book you shared, number of repeat visitors on your website, the average time-spent on your website, and the likes.
Then, why a separate metric, you ask.
Why Engagement Scoring & Engagement Index?
Because, even though you have quantified all your efforts and results, you probably don’t know what percentage of your total leads are REALLY engaged with you.
And, you probably also don’t know what to do next to further increase the engagement, if the engagement is not good enough.
Lead Scoring, and when is it not enough?
I am sure you have heard about lead scoring already, and some of you might be using it as well to qualify sales-ready leads.
This is how it is generally calculated. You assign different scores to different activities – like email opens, email clicks, website visits, unsubscribes etc. and you get a cumulative lead score.
This is a great metric to help your sales team segregate the hot leads from the cold ones. However, there are certain cases where lead score alone is not enough to qualify your leads, and that’s why we introduced the concept of engagement scoring and engagement index in LeadSquared.
Problem: Lead Score isn’t Time-Bound
Lead score is generally not something that’s time bound, so if a lead engaged with you maybe 2 years ago, its lead score might still show 250, equal to a super engaged lead that came into the system just yesterday.
Engagement score on the other hand takes into consideration the activities that take place within a pre-specified time frame – say 30 days. So, it gives you a more accurate picture of the actual and current lead engagement.
Using Engagement Score & Engagement Index to Guide your Sales Team
1. Identifying Sales Ready Leads
Salespeople are busy folks, especially when the lead inflow is decent.
If you don’t have an engagement scoring (or even lead scoring) system in place, your salespeople would spend a lot of time skimming through all the leads, and then making the follow up calls. Often, they would end up calling junk leads first, while the important calls might get delayed leading to lost opportunities.
With an engagement scoring system in place, this problem gets eliminated as they get an objective view of all the leads, and they know which leads to call first. Not only do they save a lot of time, but end up closing more deals.
2. Identify repeat sales opportunities from existing customers
In businesses, where repeat sales can happen, engagement score can really help your sales team identify and close deals from old customers. For instance, maybe you sold a travel package to a customer a year ago. If you start noticing renewed activity from this customer (and increased engagement score), he might be interested in buying from you again. A quick call from sales at this point might be enough to close this deal.
Using Engagement Score & Engagement Index to Guide your Marketing Team
1. Help them identify lead sources getting higher engagement
It’s a fact that leads coming from one sourcemight be more engaged than the others. You can check this in Google Analytics, when you see that the on-page time from sources like Facebook, Quora etc. is more than that from Adwords. But, that gives you a measure only of website engagement.
Engagement score on the other hand gives you a complete picture based on all the different activities of these leads, not just website visits, but email opens, email clicks and other activities you assign importance to.
With the help of engagement scores, your marketing team can identify the lead generation sources that they should invest more money in, to get leads that convert faster.
2. Take immediate action as soon as you see the engagement index dropping
By now you know that engagement index gives you an absolute percentage of your total leads that are engaged at a particular point of time.
It can help decide the next course of action for both marketing and sales. For instance, if 30% of the total leads in my database are engaged, then it tells me that I need to do more through marketing to get this number up, and it also tells me that these 30% should be the sales team’s priority.
3. Identify which of your services/offerings are doing better than the others
If you have segmented your customers properly, then you would be able to identify which of your services are a hit amongst people, and which ones can do better.
4. Businesses can find the stages at which the engagement starts dropping, and run nurturing campaigns relevant at that point.
You probably have defined the different stages in a lead’s lifecycle before it becomes a customer. Now, there would be some specific stage at which the engagement index starts dropping. Your marketing team can easily identify what stage it is, and send across content relevant at that stage to keep the leads engaged.
To Conclude
Engagement scoring and engagement index would give you a much better indication of not just the efforts of your sales and marketing teams, but it would also guide them in the right direction. It would help you make the best out of your current database, instead of just spending money on capturing leads that don’t translate to customers.
The author is CEO of LeadSquared.
What we do need to focus on is better customer experience, personalized user journey and making the interaction models more mature and intuitive. Our focus should be on the journey of adoption of marketing automation and how it is going to play out. If you are interested you can read more about it in our collection of blogs or try out our marketing automation tool on your own at leadmi .io