Lead Management Archives - Act-On

Lead Scoring: Tools and Tactics to Convert Customers

Act-On — Mon, 29 Apr 2024 17:22:47 +0000

Now that we’ve covered the basics of lead scoring, and how to build your model, let’s tackle the last topic in our 3-part lead scoring series: lead scoring tools. Lead scoring is a process and a framework, not a tool — but technology makes it possible to implement at scale. Here are the lead scoring tools you can expect to use in your quantitative quest.

Lead scoring tools: lead enrichment

Lead enrichment tools like ZoomInfo supplement your first-party data (like form fills and website tracking) with third-party information.

While you don’t need lead enrichment tools to implement lead scoring, they can make it easier to gather and populate your records with clean, verified data about your prospects’ demographics and firmographics. And the more data you have, the more effective your lead scoring will be.

^{Lead scoring tools for marketing can help you build better relationships with prospective cusotmers.}

Lead scoring tools: Marketing automation

Unlike lead enrichment, marketing automation tools are a must-have: your marketing automation platform is where your lead scoring actually happens.

To support advanced lead scoring, a robust marketing automation platform will:

Store and organize your contact data
Develop and deploy lead scoring models
Monitor and track lead engagement across your website, email, social media, and other channels
Automatically update lead scores based on behaviors or added datapoints
Sync contact and lead scoring data with your CRM so the sales team has clear visibility
Provide reporting and lead scoring analytics

However, marketing automation tools don’t just support lead scoring to smooth handoffs to sales. You can also use lead scores to deliver more relevant and targeted marketing campaigns.

Segmentation (the secret superpower of lead scoring)

The whole practice of marketing automation depends on segmentation: automatically categorizing audience members based on demographics, firmographics, or behavior.

If that sounds exactly like lead scoring, you’re onto something. Lead scoring is a type of segmentation. And while it’s commonly used to determine MQL thresholds, lead scoring can also be used as a layer of segmentation to power marketing automation. What’s more, AI-driven lead scoring and AI-powered segmentation are pushing lead management into new, exciting directions.

Lead scoring tools: Lead nurturing

Marketing automation uses segmentation to execute lead nurturing programs at scale. Lead nurturing means continually engaging with a would-be customer over time, sharing content and messages that educate and inform them about topics related to your products or services.

Lead scoring, segmentation, and nurturing are a powerful combination. By segmenting audiences based on their lead scores, marketers can deliver content according to the lead’s progress along their buying journey through stage-specific nurture campaigns.

That’s exactly how our team structures our lead nurture campaigns here at Act-On. As Suzy Balk, Sr. Marketing Campaigns Manager, describes, “When you have a lower lead score, we offer thought leadership content. We want to communicate ‘Here’s what we do — and we know what we’re talking about.’ Our intention is that you continue to take a look at Act-On and the other content we have that supports your business. Then, as your lead score grows, we start to introduce more mid-funnel and bottom-of-funnel content — maybe some case studies around the impact of marketing automation.”

^{Finding the right lead scoring tools for marketing is business critical for lead generation teams.}

Once a lead gets close to the MQL threshold, Suzy introduces content that would help them cross the metaphorical finish line: offering a demo, introducing the pricing page, or other bottom-of-funnel CTAs. At that point, a lead has engaged with multiple pieces of content, usually across different channels, and our team has gathered enough information through progressive profiling to determine that they’re fairly likely to be interested in our marketing automation platform.

“It’s a lot less intrusive to introduce a demo or CTA once someone has engaged repeatedly, versus if they downloaded one piece of content,” Suzy says. “It really creates more warmth and familiarity with us as a solution.”

Advance your lead scoring expertise

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this series: the basics of lead scoring and its many benefits, how to build your own lead scoring model, and the lead scoring tools you’ll need to implement it at scale. And, thanks to Suzy, we’ve shared a lot of lead scoring best practices, examples, and inside tips along the way. Take the journey a step further with our webinar on managing leads from pipeline to conversion.

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

Create, execute, and deliver personalized initiatives at scale with Act On’s marketing automation for financial advisors.

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Build a Lead Scoring Model in 9 Steps

Act-On — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:32:13 +0000

Now that we’ve covered the basics of lead scoring, let’s talk about building your own lead scoring model. Designing lead scoring models seems like a complex proposition. And if you jump into it without understanding the methodology or having the right framework, you aren’t going to see game-changing results (or a happy sales team). So let’s break it down. There are clear steps you need to take to build and implement a lead scoring model:

Assemble your cross-functional squad

As we mentioned earlier, lead scoring is a team sport. It’s only useful when all the relevant players are aligned, bought-in, and using the framework on a daily basis. So before you start your lead scoring model, recruit active participants to help develop your lead scoring framework from the ground up.

In addition to marketing and sales, Suzy Balk, our Sr. Marketing Campaigns Manager, advises that product teams should be included in lead scoring. “If you’re releasing new products or features, it’s important to know what those are because you want to pull in the people who will find them most valuable. So loop in Product, because they will have those insights.”

Know your persona

First things first: make sure your sales, marketing, and other relevant teams (like product) are in agreement on what your ideal customer looks like. This means having well-documented and up-to-date ideal customer profiles (ICP) and buyer personas, which will be essential in step five.

Define your ICP

Think of your ICP like the bullseye in the center of a dartboard. It’s the kind of company you’re going to aim for: the most likely size, industry, and location to benefit from (and buy) your product and services.

You won’t only sell to those kinds of companies — just like you’ll hit the segments surrounding the bullseye during a game of darts — but you’ll prioritize them in your lead scoring by assigning them the highest points.

Create your buyer personas

Your buyer personas are imagined biographies based on firsthand experience, market research, and customer listening. They describe the individuals working at your ICP companies, and give sales and marketing teams a fictionalized human to target with messaging, content, and campaigns.

They also give you a target for lead scoring models: you’ll assign points to prospects who most closely resemble your buyer personas when it comes to job title, location, experience level, and other demographic details.

Create a customer journey map

Just as you need to know who you’re trying to reach, you need to know where they interact with your brand along their buying journey. Get everyone aligned with a clear customer journey map: a picture of the most important touch points they encounter and steps they take as they move from would-be lead to loyal customer.

Customer journey maps include steps like:

Downloading a comparison tool
Reading an ebook
Checking out a pricing page
Contacting the sales team or requesting a demo
Completing a purchase
Renewing a subscription

The most effective customer journey maps also represent the customer’s mindset or emotional state at each stage, highlighting potential pain points or concerns that marketers can address. These maps can be incredibly simple or very complex, with layers in a heavily matrixed spreadsheet, but having one in place will make assigning behavioral scores in step six much easier.

Plus, companies that use customer journeys are twice as likely to outperform competitors that don’t, likely because it helps teams hone their messaging and content to answer specific needs and questions that arise during the buying process.

Set your lead score scale

Let’s be real here: in a lead scoring model, the numbers are entirely made up. The whole framework hinges on the relative importance of each piece of information or behavior.

You’re trying to answer one question: How important is this factor in terms of indicating likelihood to purchase?

So before you start assigning points willy-nilly, get a reasonable scale in mind. Are you scoring each datapoint on a scale of 1-5? 1-100?

If you’re new to lead scoring, we suggest keeping it simple with a 1/5/10/15 scale:

^{The 1/5/10/15 scale is a great lead scoring model to start with, even if you end up adjusting and building on it.}

Keep in mind, you’ll also be assigning negative lead scoring points (-1, -5, -10, etc.) to certain attributes or behaviors that indicate a prospect is highly unlikely to buy.

Assign demographic and firmographic scoring factors

Now’s the time to put your ICP and buyer persona data into play. Assign your relative scores for the attributes that matter most to your business, such as:

^{Use firmographic factors in your lead scoring model, not just demographic considerations.}

Remember our two imaginary Act-On leads, Debbie (the marketing director) and Tyson (the small business owner)? Let’s score their hypothetical explicit data:

Debbie, the Director of Marketing

Manufacturing industry: 10 points (this industry is undergoing a digital transformation, so we’re seeing a lot of interest from these companies right now)
2000-person company: 10 points (pretty close to our ICP)
“Director of Marketing” title: 15 points (exactly matches up with our buyer personas)

Tyson, the small business owner

Restaurant industry: 1 point (not totally irrelevant, but not our ICP)
1-person company: -15 points (solo entrepreneurs don’t usually have much budget for marketing software)
“Owner” title: 1 point (too general to tell us much about the individual, and not one of our buyer personas)

Make your list of firmographic and demographic lead scoring factors as comprehensive as possible for your business, and remember — you can always come back and update your framework later. Do not let perfection get in the way of progress, especially if you’re just getting started.

Assign behavioral lead scoring factors

This is where, in our biased opinion, the lead scoring model really gets fun. By tracking behavior over time, you can assess how interested a lead is in your product, how far along they are in that buyer’s journey, and whether they’re ready to stop reading and start talking.

“Most companies are going to have top-of-funnel content to establish themselves as thought leaders,” says Suzy. “A one-time download of that kind of content doesn’t mean anything from a sales-readiness perspective. If it happens, consistently, now that’s a different story — and that’s where lead scoring comes in.”

Pull out your customer journey map and start to assign points to the different behaviors you can track for your leads. Prioritize the steps that matter most for your business, and get specific about which behaviors show the strongest signal of interest in purchasing:

Events or webinars
- Registration: medium signal of interest
- Attendance: stronger signal (because showing up demonstrates a more serious interest than merely signing up)
Website visits
- Homepage: low signal
- About page: medium signal
- Pricing page: stronger signal
- Careers page: negative signal (this person wants a job, not to buy your product)
Content downloads
- Introductory guide: low signal
- Thought leadership or trends content: low signal
- Strategic how-to content (not product-specific): medium signal
- Product comparison: strong signal
- Product implementation guide: stronger signal
Traffic or referral sources
- Organic search (product-specific term): medium signal
- Organic search (non-product term): low signal
- Linked from product review site: strong signal
- Customer referral: strong signal
Social media interactions
- Post like: low signal
- Page follow: low signal
Tradeshow booth visits
- Scanning badge for a raffle entry: low signal
- Engaging in lengthy conversation: medium or strong signal, depending on the context
Demo requests
- This is usually a “go straight to sales” action, and should immediately surpass your MQL threshold (more on that in a moment).

Let’s look at another lead scoring example with Debbie and Tyson. Here’s how we would score their implicit data, respectively:

^{So that’s Debbie with a lead score of 56, and Tyson with 6 points in our lead scoring model. Sounds just about right!}

Don’t neglect negative lead scoring

We’ve mentioned negative lead scoring above, but it bears repeating: use negative points to keep unqualified leads out of your sales team’s workflows.

Here are a few more examples of when to apply negative lead scores:

Job titles

A “student” is probably not your buyer persona, and likely warrants a negative score. But an “intern” may be doing research for their employer, and shouldn’t be disqualified altogether.

Missing key data points

If a lead leaves important fields blank, like a phone number or company name, they likely aren’t ready for a conversation.

Email domains

Instead of requiring a business email domain to download content, simply use negative scoring to de-prioritize leads who use personal or .edu emails. You can also de-prioritize leads from your existing customers’ email domains (they would be relevant for customer success, but not sales) or competitors’ domains (you can’t stop the spies from checking out your content, but you can make sure they don’t waste your sales team’s time).

Location

If you don’t provide your service or product to their location, they will never be your customer — so downgrade their lead score accordingly.

Need more ideas? Just ask your SDRs. They know what red flags to look for, and will be delighted to share their expertise.

Set your MQL threshold

This is it. The big moment. Time to set your threshold: how many points should a marketing lead accrue in your lead scoring model before they’re ready to hand over to sales?

Pro tip: make sure this decision is not made in a silo.

Take a look at your assigned points and start doing math on your meeting room whiteboard or your favorite remote collaboration tool. Mock up some scenarios in your shared spreadsheet.

Get sales and marketing to agree:

How many bottom-of-funnel content downloads?
How many email clicks?
Which industries?
What job titles?
When are these leads ready to talk to sales?

Once you have the answer, set your MQL threshold.

Adjust your direct-to-sales activities

Now, go back and look at your behavioral lead scoring again. Some of these activities might be direct triggers to sales, such as requesting a demo or filling out a “contact us” form. Adjust that relative scoring to your MQL threshold to ensure every lead who raises their hand to talk to sales does exactly that.

Account for leads that return to marketing

Even with the best lead scoring model in place, certain leads will be handed over to sales that aren’t quite ready to purchase. Maybe they’re highly interested in your product, but are under contract with a competitor for another year. Maybe they provided misleading information when filling out their forms, or don’t have the budget. And maybe they just never answer an email or phone call, going radio silent for no discernible reason.

Unless the sales team disqualifies those leads, they are typically returned to marketing for continued nurturing. In that case, Suzy suggests implementing a “cooling off” period before a lead can be handed off to sales again. “For us, when you’re returned to marketing, you can’t return to sales for 120 days,” he says. Their lead-scoring slate is wiped clean, and they can’t reach MQL status until that time window is up — unless they fill out a demo form.

Evaluate your lead scoring model, adjust, and repeat

Congrats! Check the box and give yourself a cookie. You’re all done with lead scoring. Forever.

Just kidding. Lead scoring is not a set-it-and-forget-it program. It’s an ongoing process — and that’s why it works so well.

“The great thing about lead scoring is that it’s a model,” says Suzy. “So after you get some results in, you can always go back and make adjustments. You don’t have to — and shouldn’t be trying to — find the perfect model that will work forever.”

Continue to work with your cross-functional lead scoring squad to monitor progress, track success, and refine your model over time.

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How to evaluate lead scoring models

Get continual feedback from your sales team on how the lead scoring model is working — both qualitative and quantitative.

To gather qualitative input, have regular meetings, ask about specific channels and campaigns, and keep a conversation going between sales and marketing about what’s working and what’s not.

To measure quantitative success, build a disposition into your CRM that requires specific input from sales when they disqualify a lead. Suzy advises making this field a dropdown list of set options, rather than an open text field, to make analysis easier.

“Maybe the company is too small, maybe the title wasn’t a good fit after all, or maybe they seemed like they weren’t a real person because the SDR couldn’t find them on LinkedIn,” says Suzy. “Here at Act-On, we have a definitive list of possible status reasons that we ask the sales team to use, and a notes field where we can capture additional data.”

Suzy also suggests paying close attention to opportunity creation metrics. By tracking what factors are common across leads that are successfully turned into opportunities, you can identify what factors should be weighed more heavily in future lead scoring.

For example, if the data shows that a large percentage of your opportunities are created within a certain industry, you can go back and adjust your lead scoring to rate that industry highly. Suzy recommends evaluating job titles regularly, too.

“It’s common for companies to prioritize VPs and the C-suite in their lead scoring,” says Suzy. “But I wouldn’t even call those roles ‘decision-makers’. More often than not, a manager or a director makes the call, and brings their decision to the C-suite for approval. So you might be scoring high on the VPs and C-suite, but they typically aren’t the ones who start, engage, and move the buying process forward. And you won’t know that’s the case unless you look at the opportunities and see where they’re being created.”

When to adjust lead scoring

Suzy recommends a regular cadence for updating your lead scoring model—at least quarterly. “Look at your lead scoring regularly and make sure that you’re accounting for changes in the business, new products being released, or larger shifts like a recession.”

Look forward to our next article in this series, where we’ll round up the best lead scoring tools to use in your marketing!

What is Lead Scoring for Marketing and What Are the Benefits?

Act-On — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 22:59:10 +0000

Imagine going on a blind date. All you know about the person sitting across from you is their name, maybe what they do for a living, and that your cousin Helen thinks you might get along.

But before you have a chance to ask any questions or get to know them better, they give you a big smile and say, “It’s so nice to meet you. I’d love to show you around my apartment. When’s a good time for you to come by this week?”

How inappropriate! But not entirely unlike when a colleague sends you a link to a gated ebook, you give your contact info to download it, and then get a phone call from a sales rep the same day. You don’t want a demo of their software — you haven’t even had time to read their content yet.

Luckily for marketers, lead scoring exists. Lead scoring helps organizations move prospects along their buying journey in a structured, strategic way — which is especially helpful considering how complex buying journeys have become.

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According to research from Gartner, B2B buyers are spending more time researching online, and less time interacting directly with sales — as little as 5-6% of their total buying journey. And it takes an average of 20 touches with a brand before a prospect becomes a potentially successful lead for the sales team.

For marketing and sales teams, that handoff is a potential minefield. Too early, and everyone wastes time. Too late, and potential deals may slip through the cracks.

Lead scoring helps sales and marketing teams navigate handoffs by providing a quantitative approach to qualifying leads: assigning a predetermined number of points to a lead based on certain characteristics or behaviors. Marketing and sales teams can look at a prospect’s lead score and determine whether they’re ready for a sales conversation or need to be nurtured. For example:

Junior employee downloaded an introductory guide to your general area of expertise? Keep them engaged with more content, and add a few points to their score every time they engage.

Senior manager visited your pricing page, downloaded a product comparison sheet, and watched a video demo? Score those strong purchase indicators highly and send these white-hot leads to sales.

No guesswork, no gut instinct — it’s all in the numbers.

In this guide, we’ll dive into how lead scoring works, how to build a framework, and the marketing and sales superpowers it can unlock.

How does lead scoring work?

Lead scoring helps organizations avoid the potential headaches of passing leads from marketing to sales — but that only scratches the surface of what a strategic lead scoring framework can deliver.

First, a very quick overview of how lead scoring works. (We’ll give a step-by-step guide to building a lead scoring framework in the next chapter).

Marketing and sales teams usually manage lead scoring within their marketing automation and CRM software, and lead metrics are divided into two categories: implicit and explicit.

Explicit data is provided intentionally by your lead, such as company, location, industry, and job title.

Implicit data is observed behavioral information, such as webpages visited, email engagement, content downloads, or form completions. Smart marketers can use these behaviors to deduce what topics a prospect may be interested in, and how close they might be to purchasing.

Every piece of data your team gathers about a lead “earns” a certain number of points. Once a lead crosses a predetermined threshold, they become a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and your automation software hands them off to sales for one-on-one conversations. The points you assign will depend entirely on your business and your audience.

Lead scoring examples

For example, at Act-On, we sell marketing automation software to SMBs and enterprise organizations. Our leads might look something like this:

Debbie is the Director of Marketing at a 2,000-person manufacturing company. She entered our funnel through a partner, visited our homepage and about page, downloaded a guide to implementing automation software, and signed up for a webinar about comparing marketing automation providers.

Tyson is a small business owner. He wants to improve marketing for his local food cart, and entered our funnel through a Google search for “how to do email marketing”. He downloaded our “Introduction to Email Marketing” guide, but never interacted with any of our subsequent nurture programs.

As you can imagine, Debbie the Director of Marketing racked up quite a few points in our lead scoring system, and an Act-On sales rep is primed to reach out to her with some personalized information about our platform.

And while we wish Tyson the small business owner well, his lead score is quite low — and our sales team will never waste a moment of anyone’s time trying to sell him advanced marketing tools he doesn’t need.

(Keep Debbie and Tyson in mind. We’ll use them as examples again.)

Marketing Automation for Management Consulting

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The benefits of lead scoring

Now, let’s explore the host of benefits lead scoring delivers — for everyone involved.

A better experience for your leads

Just like overeager blind dates, it’s a big turnoff for prospective customers when a brand comes on too strong or too fast.

For leads at the very beginning of their buyer’s journey, premature sales conversations are intrusive and unwelcome. Lead scoring helps give your prospects the time they need to get to know your brand. This creates a positive experience and builds trust over time, rather than rushing into a sales conversation with a skeptical prospect who has no understanding of what your brand stands for and the value you can deliver.

Less wasted time for your sales team

Qualifying leads takes time. Lead scoring helps your sales team spend their valuable hours more efficiently.

“Having no lead scoring in place is really damaging to a sales team,” says our own Suzy Balk, Sr. Marketing Campaigns Manager. “A good sales rep is going to spend at least three minutes digging into every lead that comes in: what the company does, confirming an individual’s role, and understanding what pain points may exist that resonate with your solution. If your company has a lot of leads coming in, that multiplies out to a lot of time.”

Better follow-up on MQLs

Usually, marketing’s biggest beef with their counterparts in sales is failing to follow up (or follow up fast enough) with their leads.

Now, not to take sides, but if your sales team is swamped with unqualified leads…unsatisfactory follow-up is going to happen. Busy sales reps aren’t going to prioritize marketing-”qualified” leads if you’re actually sending them marketing-”questionable” leads.

With lead scoring, the sales team can have confidence that marketing is handing over leads who are relevant and ready for a conversation. A survey from Gartner reports that 64% of sales reps are more likely to follow up on marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) if the qualification criteria is agreed on in advance.

Which brings us to…

Improved sales and marketing alignment

Sales and marketing alignment isn’t easy to achieve. But lead scoring is a team sport.

Marketing and sales leaders have to work together to agree on the overall framework and specific scoring criteria used to move a prospect along their buying journey. Getting these teams in the same room and on the same page about what makes a qualified lead helps improve communication, collaboration, and accountability.

Better nurturing for marketing

Lead scoring isn’t just about reaching a certain threshold and transitioning ownership from marketing to sales. It also helps marketing teams improve their lead nurturing programs by using lead scores as a layer of segmentation. (More on this below.)

Higher conversion rates for everyone

All these benefits add up to one clear outcome that everyone will celebrate: higher conversion rates for MQLs.

When the sales team talks to a prospect who’s already visited multiple pages across your company’s website, engaged with emails, and interacted with content at different stages of the buyer’s journey, they’re talking to warm leads who are much more receptive to a conversation and closer to making a purchase.

That means a shorter, smoother journey along the sales cycle, a higher likelihood of that lead becoming an opportunity and – eventually – more closed deals.

Now that we know why lead scoring is important and what it can deliver, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty: how to make it happen by building a lead scoring marketing framework. You can also jump ahead to the third part in this series, all about which lead scoring tools can help you improve your marketing.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Everything You Need to Know

Act-On — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 17:28:37 +0000

At Act-On, we know that understanding the marketing qualified lead (MQL) meaning is an essential first step, but how you define MQLs is equally important. Done right, it lays the groundwork for success. Your sales team wants hot leads, right? And lucky you! Because it’s your job to provide them. But filling the pipeline with fantastic leads isn’t always easy … and doing so requires a delicate balance between quantity and quality. Get this wrong and the impacts can be felt downstream, with fewer sales conversions and lackluster revenue.

MQL meaning

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect who has shown interest in your company’s product or service by engaging with your marketing efforts, such as downloading content or attending webinars. MQLs are potential leads that need nurturing before being passed on to the sales team for further qualification.

Most organizations define leads in three stages, with MQLs being the first:

Marketing qualified lead (MQL): Lead accepted by marketing for additional nurture.
Sales accepted lead (SAL): Sales accepts the lead and agrees to take action.
Sales qualified lead (SQL): Lead that passed the point of qualification by the development team or sales, and is moving into an opportunity stage.

We’ll focus on the nexus between marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads. That’s the common ground for sales and marketing teams of all sizes.

Why it’s important to define the lead as qualified

The marketing qualified lead definition is the point at which marketing determines that a lead requires additional nurturing. The first and most important thing to do is for sales and marketing to agree on what a “qualified lead” means. Without a common definition, the two teams work from different playbooks … and that can undermine your results.

Nest, let’s explore the steps to defining MQLs:

Develop a shared definition for MQLs

Partner with your sales team leaders to develop a crystal clear MQL definition to know what they are and what they are not. What often happens instead is that the marketing department defines each of the lead stages but salespeople aren’t in on the process. And that creates a disconnect. When you align on this one critical element, everything downstream flows much easier.

^{It takes teamwork to define marketing qualified leads (MQLs) for your organization. Meet with sales and compare notes until you’re aligned. Photo by Austin Distel}

Use your buyer personas as a starting point

Fifty-six percent of organizations report generating higher-quality leads when using buyer personas, and 36% report shorter sales cycles. With this in mind, it’s no surprise just how powerful using personas is for your marketing efforts. But they’re also a fantastic starting point to help define your MQLs.

Why?

You can use the criteria included in your personas to develop your MQL definition (such as industry, job title, etc.). This information, along with behavioral data, can also help define when an MQL is ready to make the leap to SQL.

For example, online behavior, such as engaging with email marketing, attending a webinar, or downloading multiple white papers, can help you better understand where a buyer is on their journey. You can break these data points out to determine the minimum criteria required for an MQL and the criteria to make the transition to an SQL.

Gather feedback from sales

Sit down with your sales team and ask questions like: “What is a sales qualified lead (SQL) for you?” and “What leads are the easiest for you to make contact with and qualify?”

This doesn’t mean that marketing will have to deliver only these types of leads. Still, it’s critical to get as close as possible to a shared definition that is agreeable to sales.

And you want that definition to align with marketing. So, when salespeople get a new lead, they’re not saying, “Hey, they totally aren’t ready to buy,” or “They don’t really meet our qualifications for a good lead.”

^{Trying to define MQL meaning? It’s all about getting feedback from sales and leveraging personas. Photo by Windows}

Identify key demographic and firmographic qualification factors

Demographic and firmographic characteristics, such as industry, company size, and location, should inform your MQL definition. Collaborate with sales to validate these criteria, ensuring you account for all relevant factors.

Tip: Reviewing buyer personas with your sales team can reveal unexpected qualification factors, improving the accuracy of your lead generation efforts.

Use behavioral data to refine lead scoring

Prospects often indicate their readiness to buy through their actions. Monitor behaviors like time spent on your pricing page, webinar attendance, or multiple downloads of white papers to track interest levels. Incorporating behavioral data into your lead scoring system will help identify when an MQL is ready to move to SQL status.

Tracking this data across channels provides a more complete picture and the data points can be used in lead scoring, giving you the ability to score your MQLs more accurately.

Furthermore, some organizations ask, “Would you like to be contacted by sales?” on their registration forms to make it easy for a lead to self-identify as an MQL who is ready and willing to talk to sales – right now.

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Balance quantity vs. quality of MQLs

It’s essential to find the right balance between generating enough leads for your sales team and ensuring those leads are highly qualified. Overly broad MQL definitions lead to wasted time on unqualified leads, while overly narrow definitions may leave your sales pipeline empty.

Work with your sales team to strike the ideal balance between quantity and quality in your MQL strategy.

Revisit your MQL definition quarterly

Defining MQLs isn’t a one-time task. Regularly revisiting and refining your MQL criteria ensures you stay aligned with changing business needs, especially during major events like product launches. Aim to review your MQL definition at least quarterly to stay ahead of the curve.

However, the hardest part of this process is getting it done to begin with. But it’s a wise investment that pays sales and marketing departments back significantly with improved lead quality, shorter sales cycles, and an easier time meeting quotas.

And if you need a little more help attracting new prospects, we’ve got you covered. We outlined our favorite strategies in our eBook “How To Attract More Prospects.”

^{Back to the drawing board? Don’t be afraid to revisit your MQL definition twice a year. You’re always learning more about your qualified leads. Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash.}

FAQs

What is an MQL?

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect who has shown interest and engagement with your marketing efforts, signaling potential for a future sale. MQLs are typically nurtured before being passed to sales for further qualification.

What is a sales accepted lead (SAL)?

A sales accepted lead (SAL) is a lead that has been reviewed and accepted by the sales team after being passed over from marketing. It represents a transition point where the sales team agrees that the lead is worth pursuing and is ready for further qualification or engagement.

What is a sales qualified lead (SQL)?

A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect who meets specific criteria linked to their likelihood of purchasing. Unlike MQLs, SQLs have shown higher interest in your products and services, increasing the chance of a conversion.

MQL vs SQL, what’s the difference?

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that has engaged with your marketing efforts but may not be ready to buy, while a sales qualified lead (SQL) has displayed a stronger likelihood of purchasing, making them ready for direct sales outreach.

How to Set Up a Lead Nurturing Campaign (Infographic)

Act-On — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 18:27:00 +0000

How to Convert More Leads Into Customers

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The Great Wealth Management Transfer Is Coming… Are You Prepared?

Act-On — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As the American economy braces for a nearly $70 trillion wealth transfer from Baby Boomers to their loved ones, many financial advisors are scrambling to get in front of the great wealth transfer but aren’t sure how to attract and educate this younger generation of investors.

Worse yet, some financial advisors don’t seem to recognize the urgency of the situation.

As Andrew Osterland from CNBC put it, “For financial advisors, the transfer of wealth from Baby Boomers to heirs over the next two decades is a bit like climate change. The consequences may eventually be huge, but it’s easy to ignore in the short-term.”

Further complicating the situation, studies have found that more than 80% of these green investors will take their business elsewhere after they inherit their loved ones’ wealth and assets.

Of course, depending on your financial advisory firm’s position in the industry, you might view this as an emergency or an opportunity (or perhaps both).

Regardless of your perspective, you need to take swift and deliberate action to position your firm as the go-to shop for young investors — those individuals and families who suddenly have a great deal of money and assets but lack the experience to grow that wealth consistently without a trusted wealth manager.

Experts agree that the biggest barrier to navigating the great wealth transfer successfully is how financial advisors are currently communicating with these youthful, tech-savvy investors versus how they want to be communicated with.

In the past, financial advisors would simply work with aging investors to bridge a relationship to their heirs through traditional word-of-mouth referrals.

Modern investors don’t want any part of that. They want to be educated and inspired along a tailored and immersive customer journey.

So, how can financial advisors begin to tackle this challenge (especially those financial advisors who don’t know how to create great digital experience)?

First, you need to ensure you have the proper infrastructure in place to speak to your target audiences. Next, develop a sound marketing strategy that caters to your strengths and promotes your brand. Lastly, and most importantly, you should research and invest in a practical, powerful marketing automation platform.

Here’s why.

Marketing Automation Allows You to Identify and Track Potential Investors

It’s important that burgeoning investors become familiar with your brand and begin to think of your firm as a trusted resource they can come back to again and again as they become more sophisticated investors. It’s great for their parents to sing your praises, but they want to visit your site to find out for themselves and learn more about your firm’s reputation among other investors and industry experts.

And since most modern investment journeys begin with a simple Google search, financial advisors should be prioritizing content creation and distribution, as well as search engine optimization (SEO), to appear in these searches and direct organic (non-paid) traffic to their website.

But driving traffic to your site isn’t enough. You want to understand exactly who these people are so that you can continue marketing to them.

Unfortunately, 97% of website visitors are unknown.

And while tools like Google Analytics and Kissmetrics do a great job of showing you how many people are visiting your site, where they’re coming from, and which pages their viewing, they can’t tell you who they are and how to contact them.

With marketing automation, however, you can identify and track your website visitors to learn their interests and preferences and deliver targeted campaigns with more personalized messaging and relevant content.

Act-On’s Website Prospector tool helps you turn unknown visitors into known leads and then automatically alerts you when these specific prospects visit your site — down to the page or piece of content they’re viewing. You can use this information to score your leads accurately and launch targeted campaigns that speak directly to your potential investors’ interests and challenges.

Scoring your leads according to digital behavior also empowers you to gauge their likelihood of purchase. From there, you can adopt an account-based marketing approach to hone in on the best candidates.

Perhaps best of all, you can trace the data back to your content and SEO strategy and update accordingly over time!

Marketing Automation Allows You to Engage Potential Investors

Financial advisors can also use marketing automation to generate great leads by gating informative and educational content behind adaptive forms on dedicated landing pages. By creating the kind of useful content that young investors are so hungry for, you can exchange these collateral assets for invaluable contact information that allows you to nurture potential investors until they’re ready to discuss their wealth management options — and beyond.

Here’s how you can use landing pages and forms to fuel your demand generation and lead nurturing efforts.

Create Landing Pages to Spark Enthusiasm and Prompt Conversions

A conversion is the online equivalent of someone walking into a boutique and asking to try on an article of clothing. It starts a dialogue with the consumer. And when people like what they hear (or the way a pair of jeans fit), they’re far more likely to buy — and continue buying. So conversions are the lifeblood of any good marketing strategy.

And the best way to generate conversions is to create compelling landing pages that get your prospects interested and excited about what you have to say and offer.

Any platform worth purchasing will include the functionality to create intuitive and engaging landing pages with simple drag-and-drop functionality.

With Act-On, you can:

Create your own templates with our easy-to-use landing page composer

Use one of our dozens of stock templates and easily update specific elements to incorporate your brand

Upload a landing page built with HTML and then easily modify images, text, buttons, and custom content using our content block controls.

Try to keep your copy short, sweet, and direct. Let the reader know exactly what they will receive in exchange for sharing their contact information. And to make sure your audience remains engaged once they’re on the page, use the same keywords that you initially used to get them there in the first place (both organically and through paid efforts).

Gate Your Content Using Adaptive Forms

The most critical element of any landing page is the conversion form, which you can use to gate content, new products, or special offers.

Because conversions are so important, you want to make it as easy as possible for potential investors to complete the forms on your landing pages. First, you need to place the entire form above the fold so the user can complete each field and submit their response without scrolling. Next, you want to include a prominent call-to-action (CTA) directly above the field to draw attention to this crucial portion of the page.

Most importantly, you need to limit the amount of fields in your form. This might seem counterintuitive since gathering more information leads to executing more targeted campaigns, but including too many fields could decrease the chances of conversion.

Thankfully, using adaptive forms with progressive profiling presents an effective compromise that simultaneously allows you to collect more information with fewer fields.

An Example of Progressive Profiling

Progressive profiling helps you learn more about your leads gradually over time by presenting supplemental questions incrementally based on previous actions and what you already know about them.

Let’s say a prospective investor visits your site and downloads an FAQ 1-pager on investing for beginners. Your form only asked for their first name and email address. Easy peasy.

Two weeks later, that same prospect visits your website and completes a form to view an on-demand webinar about the basics of mutual funds. Since your marketing automation platform already knows their name and email address, the form that populates to grant access to the webinar asks for their age and profession.

Every form completion stores this information and prompts the next conversion opportunity to ask a dynamically generated set of new questions.

That means fewer questions, better conversions, and more data!

Put the Finishing Touches on Your Landing Page

Finally, once you’ve perfected the look and feel of your landing page, make sure to add quality SEO components so that you can rank well in organic search as well as paid.

(If you’re unfamiliar with the basics of SEO, please click here.)

And to ensure you’re always striving to improve, you can A/B test multiple versions of your landing page by simply splitting your distribution lists at random. Once you have a workable sample size, look for areas to optimize and repeat the process!

Marketing Automation Allows You to Nurture Leads to Grow Your Assets Under Management

Getting potential investors to visit your website is great.

Getting them to complete a form is even better.

But turning a promising lead into an eager investor is where the rubber really meets the road.

You’ve done so much work to capture the prospect’s contact information; it would be a pity to lose them to a competitor because you didn’t properly nurture the lead.

Unfortunately, lead nurturing is easier said than done, but automating these campaigns is far more efficient and far more effective than doing so manually. In fact, according to The Annuitas Group, businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads.

By developing and launching automated programs with conditional logic (if a lead does this, automatically enroll them in that customer track) and dynamic content (if a lead is interested in this, automatically send them that), you can personalize the customer journey based on their actual interests and behaviors. This is especially great because new investors have so many questions and concerns, and lead nurturing is the best way to give them the answers and peace of mind they crave.

You should always be looking for new and innovative ways to speak to your audience in a way that addresses their specific challenges and answers their unique questions.

Grouping your prospects into segments based on their age, income, financial goals, line of work, online behavior, and engagement with your content and emails is a great way to accomplish this. Segmentation is an absolutely essential aspect of successful marketing because it allows you to deliver more targeted campaigns to personalize and streamline the customer journey.

Event-triggered email marketing is another vital component of lead nurturing. The instant a prospect becomes a lead (i.e., the moment of conversion), you should send an automated email acknowledging and thanking them for their action and delivering the collateral you said you would.

Also, instead of beating around the bush and making educated assumptions about their challenges and interests, why not just come right out and ask them? Include 4-5 options (stocks, bonds, retirement, etc.) in your thank you email and ask them to choose their own adventure.

From there, you can automatically send them email drip campaigns with content and messaging that reflect their goals and obstacles.

Lastly, you can also segment based on how you’re scoring your prospects. While many individuals think lead scoring is reserved for the B2B realm, modern marketers (especially in the financial sphere) are discovering that they can effectively score their B2C leads for more targeted marketing and outreach.

You can use marketing automation to develop intuitive scoring models that are unique to each persona. As your prospects’ lead scores increase (and they become more knowledgeable about their investment options), you can place them in gradually more aggressive lead nurturing programs to guide them through your sales funnel.

Act-On Is the Trusted Marketing Automation Solution for Financial Advisors and Wealth Management Firms

The pending great wealth transfer will leave a lot of money up for grabs and presents perhaps the greatest financial opportunity of the 21st century. Unfortunately, if you’re not speaking to potential investors the way they demand or creating the experiences they crave, you’ll likely miss out on most of it.

Luckily, there’s a clear path to success that is paved with outstanding marketing and messaging: marketing automation from Act-On!

At Act-On, we understand the difficulties inherent in the financial industry. We also understand how difficult it is for firms to differentiate themselves and their products from their competitors. That’s why we’re so committed to providing all wealth managers — regardless of size, skill set, or experience level — with the tools and resources they need to come out on top of the great wealth transfer and thrive in this age of digital disruption.

Our clients use Act-On each and every day to:

Gain crystal clear insights into prospect behavior
Remove manual processes to accelerate growth
Acquire new clients and more assets under management
Grow existing client assets and strengthen relationships

If you want to learn more about how we can help you financial advisory scale in tandem with the great wealth transfer, you should schedule some time to speak with one of our marketing automation experts.

Or, if we’ve piqued your interest but you’re not ready to commit to a one-on-one conversation just yet, we think you might like this eBook. It’s full of great information on how marketing automation can help financial advisors overcome their most common obstacles to success.

Using Progressive Profiling for a Frictionless Customer Experience

Act-On — Thu, 20 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How do you convert qualified leads on your website?

The whole process used to be relatively straightforward:

Create a landing page with a compelling offer and a form
Ask site visitors to complete the form to receive the offer
Follow-up with them immediately

So what changed?

Everything.

For starters, the sheer number of choices has exploded. If you were evaluating MarTech companies in 2015, you would have had to sift through about 2000 different solutions. Five years later, there are more than 7000 options — and the list keeps growing.

In addition, it’s easier than ever to find answers without speaking with a sales rep. Research by Gartner has shown that B2B buyers only spend 17% of their time meeting with potential vendors.

And finally, the rise of the subscription economy has shifted the balance of power from companies to prospects and customers.

What does this mean for your lead gen strategy? You can’t add any forms to your site with a “set-it-and-forget-it” attitude. Your visitors are looking for a highly-personalized, low-friction experience. And if they can’t find it on your site, they’ll bounce and look somewhere else.

So, how do you give them what they want?

Progressive profiling with the use of adaptive forms.

What Is Progressive Profiling?

Simply put, progressive profiling is the practice of asking your site visitors for a little bit more information every time they complete one of your dynamic forms.

The whole point is to meet prospects where they are in their journey. In a world of thousands of alternatives, you need to make it as easy as possible for prospects to find the information they’re looking for. This is where the drawbacks of long forms can outweigh any potential benefits.

Pretend you just heard about a company. It’s going to be a while before you’re ready to speak with a sales rep. You’re visiting their site for the first time and looking for something to download so you can do some research on your own.

Which form would you rather complete during your first visit?

These two examples illustrate the genius of progressive profiling. The first time someone comes to your site, you might only ask them for their email. But every time they return to your site and complete a new form, you can ask them for more information about themselves and their business. You don’t have to sacrifice landing page conversion rates to gain valuable information. With each new form your visitors complete, you can be more confident that they value your content. And every time they come back, you can learn more about them.

Adaptive (Dynamic) Forms: How to Make Progressive Profiling Work for You

Progressive profiling and dynamic forms go hand in hand. Marketing automation platforms like Act-On allow you to create a single adaptive form that displays different fields depending on how many times someone has come to your site and which pages they’ve visited.

Which form fields should you ask visitors to complete on their first visit? On their second and third visits? Here are some examples:

Form 1, Version 1:

… that’s it! There are plenty of marketing tools out there that can spit out first name and last name if you know someone’s email, especially their work email. But if you don’t have one of those tools, then you can probably guess what comes next:

Form 1, Version 2:

First Name
Last Name
Email

What happens the second time this person visits your site? Because you cookied their previous session, this time you can ask them a bit more:

Form 2, Version 1:

Company
Job Title
Industry (Drop-Down Menu)

On their second visit, potential prospects only need to complete these new fields. Their previous information is already stored in the marketing automation platform (and potentially already passed to your sales team’s customer relationship management (CRM) tool).

When someone completes a form during their third visit, you can be pretty sure they’re interested in your solution:

Form 3, Version 1

Which use case are you most interested in? (Multi-picklist)
When are you looking to make a purchase? (Drop-Down Menu)

Or…

Form 3, Version 2

1. First Name
2. Last Name
3. Email

What is your role at your company (Drop-Down; I oversee projects, I manage the team, I lead strategy, etc)
Which of our partner solutions interests you the most? (Optional, Free text field)

There you have it! With adaptive forms, there’s no need to keep asking for the same information! Instead, you can deliver more value with each form submission while reducing friction and frustration.

How to Adapt Progressive Profiling to Your Buyer’s Journey

Let’s say your company provides video conferencing solutions for technology companies with at least 200 employees. Someone visits your site for the first time and submits a form embedded in one of your landing pages.

You might send them nurture emails with subject lines like:

“Why Video Conferencing Matters”
“How to improve productivity with real-time collaboration.”
“Easy ways to lead better sales discovery calls.”

Each of these emails is designed to educate your potential prospects and invite them back to your site where they can learn more. At this point, you only know their First Name, Last Name, Email, and maybe their company name if you have the right software in your tech stack. You know they’re interested, but you don’t know why they’re interested.

But everything changes once they return to your site and complete the second version of one of your adaptive forms. Now you can unenroll them from the first set of emails and add them to a campaign with more targeted content. This new series of emails can reference the information they shared in the second dynamic form as well as the pages they visited on their return visit:

Why {{ Industry }} leaders trust video conferencing solutions
5 reasons companies like {{ Company Name }} prefer real-time collaboration
Tips for deploying video conferencing solutions in large teams

These new emails would draw on information from their second form submission: Industry, Company Name, and the size of their team. This is the real power of progressive profiling. As you get more and more information from potential prospects, you can tailor your messaging based on details they’ve already shared with you.

And every time they submit a new form, you’ll be able to recommend even more valuable content based on where they are in the buyer’s journey. By the time they complete the third version of one of your dynamic forms, you’ll have a much better understanding of their willingness to purchase.

So, how does this strategy result in more qualified leads?

Let’s say you opt for a long, complex form instead of an adaptive form with progressive profiling. With a longer form, your conversion rate will be lower due to greater friction. But that’s okay because you have way more information, right?

So you send them emails like the ones above that reference Industry, Company Name, and Team Size… and nothing happens. Your click-through and open rates remain stagnant because most of the people who have completed these long forms are not ready for this kind of targeted content.

All they wanted was education. Treating everyone who completes one of these forms like they’re at the same stage of the buyer’s journey is misguided. If you ignore progressive profiling, you risk derailing the conversation before it even begins.

By aligning your messaging with each person’s stage on the buyer’s journey, you can show potential leads you’re willing to meet them on their terms.

But this leads to an even bigger question. Let’s say you build out your content plan to address every stage of the buyer’s journey. Then you build landing pages with dynamic forms using a platform like Act-On. Finally, you design Google and LinkedIn Retargeting ads to re-engage people who have already visited your site.

What if they still don’t engage?

Then they’re not ready!

Many companies interpret a form submission as an indication of intention, or even attraction. But when someone completes one of your forms for the first time, all you’ve gained is their attention. That’s it.

Don’t treat everyone at the top of the funnel like they’re ready to buy. For every person who completes one of your dynamic forms but never engages with any of your content again, that’s one less poorly-qualified lead you don’t need to send to your sales team. That’s a win-win for everyone.

Use Progressive Profiling for Your Ideal Customer Profile

Progressive profiling can help you provide the right content to the right people at the right time. Anytime someone returns to your site and completes a new variation of a dynamic form, they’re moving from attention to intention.

But what happens when someone visits your site from one of your target accounts? What about someone who works for one of your existing customers?

This is where progressive profiling can give you a big advantage:

An individual from one of your target accounts visits your site for the first time. Once they complete a form on one of your pages, this can trigger a notification in your CRM for their account manager to engage with them on social media.
Now, let’s say they return to your site and complete a new version of one of your adaptive forms. This can automatically trigger a live chat session with their account manager, who can learn more about their business and schedule a demo on the spot.

Remember, the whole point of progressive profiling is to meet potential leads on their terms. No one likes to be called 2 minutes after downloading a whitepaper. Give individuals everything they need to research your solution, including time. This way, when you invite them to a chat or call them the next time they download one of your forms, they’ll be more ready to talk to you.

How Do I Add Progresive Profiling to the Forms on My Site?

You have a great story to share with everyone who comes to your site. So the last thing you want is to create obstacles for them.

With an automated marketing solution like Act-On, you can design everything from adaptive forms to landing pages and nurture emails in one central location. This all-in-one approach means syncing your data is easy and straightforward. And that makes it simple to launch your progressive profiling strategy across your entire site.

The right marketing tools will definitely make your job easier, but that’s just the beginning. When you implement progresive profiling within a comprehensive marketing automation platform like Act-On, you’ll create a better experience for everyone who visits your site.

Interested in learning more? We’d love the chance to discuss your strategy and how Act-On can help you take your marketing to the next level! Just click here to speak with one of our marketing automation experts.

Should B2C Companies Practice Lead Scoring?

Act-On — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Most marketers agree that lead scoring for B2B consumers is a crucial part of an effective marketing strategy. And they’re right! But that doesn’t mean that scoring your B2C leads isn’t important as well. In fact, depending on what your company produces and sells, your target audience segments, or your overall business goals, B2C lead scoring might be absolutely essential (which means you might be missing out).

Today we’re going to answer a few pertinent questions, including:

What is B2C lead scoring?
What are some B2C lead scoring best practices?
What are the benefits of B2C lead scoring?
What does B2C lead scoring look like in action?

Hopefully, by the time we’ve finished, you’ll have a firm grasp on whether your company should be scoring your B2C leads and how to do so. Keep reading to become a B2C lead scoring pro!

What Is B2C Lead Scoring?

B2C lead scoring is the process of assigning numeric values to actions taken by your direct consumers — and crafting customer experiences that reflect your lead’s growing (or declining) score to help them continue to advance through the sales funnel.

Business consumers usually take longer to research and purchase a new product or service than individual consumers and also have multiple stakeholders invested in the outcome. As a result, most of us think of lead scoring as a tactic reserved for B2B marketers as they gradually progress through a manicured sales funnel. However, as more and more consumers are turning to digital channels to conduct their own research and take control of the buyer journey, many B2C marketers are now incorporating lead scoring to better understand customer preferences and cater to individuals making more educated and considered purchases.

B2C Lead Scoring Best Practices

For many B2B companies, collecting firmographic data is absolutely essential. It allows them to nurture their leads based on things like their industry, position within the company, annual revenue, company size, and much more.

When marketing directly to individual consumers, however, firmographics are usually irrelevant. Instead, you want to be laser-focused on your prospects’ demographics (age, gender, location, income, etc.). For example, if you’re a financial advisor who specializes in estate planning, your baseline score for someone in their 60’s with a substantial net worth would be much higher than a newlywed in their 20’s trying to provide a little security for his new bride in case the unthinkable happens.

Even more than demographics, online prospect behavior and digital interactions with your brand will help you score and understand their location in the sales funnel and alert you to when more drastic sales tactics are appropriate. These behaviors commonly include things like:

Email subscriptions
Email engagement (opens/clicks/unsubscribes)
Lead magnet downloads (fact sheets/discount user codes)
Webpage visits
Live chat discussions
Social media interactions
Free trial submissions

If a prospect visits a website, interacts with a live chatbot, or downloads a contact form, these actions should increase their overall lead score because the prospect is exhibiting increased buying intent. Once a lead reaches a threshold of your choosing, you can either pass them to your sales team for individual outreach or take more aggressive sales actions through your digital channels.

If you operate an e-commerce site, you can use behavioral and buyer data to serve up more specific product recommendations as they continue to interact with your brand and purchase your wares. And you can even offer individuals a promo code via email or chatbot to motivate them to return to their online shopping cart and check out.

Conversely, if the lead unsubscribes from your email list or visits the “Careers” section of your website, they should be assigned negative points, as these actions imply they’re not interested in purchasing from your company. Or, if someone downloads a piece of content from your website and identifies as “Student” in your occupation drop-down menu, you should probably eliminate the contact, as they’re likely researching a class assignment and not actually interested in buying your product.

You should score each of these actions differently depending on how they indicate buyer intent for your industry. Work closely with your team members across departments to develop a system that works for your company, and continue to improve your efforts over time based on your results. You should also periodically survey your customers to find out what influenced them to take an interest in your product or make a purchase. You can use these answers to update your scoring model and then personalize your marketing accordingly.

Create a Lead Scoring Program in 5 Steps

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What Are the Benefits of B2C Lead Scoring?

While B2B lead scoring helps inform account-based marketing strategies to generate focused pipeline and minimize wasted resources, B2C lead scoring also helps marketers and sales professionals hone in on their ideal customer base — albeit direct consumers rather than business stakeholders.

Instead of casting a wide net and delivering one static message to your entire customer base, B2C lead scoring helps you to better understand the consumer’s interests and pain points, which allows you to communicate with them on a more personal level. This drastically improves the consumer marketing experience, prevents overselling from the outset, and builds trust and rapport between the consumer and the brand.

By focusing on the data points listed above, B2C marketers are able to put the bulk of their efforts into attracting and closing their typical customers rather than wasting time and resources marketing to consumers who aren’t interested in what they’re selling.

Simply put, if a lead isn’t qualified, why work it? There’s a strong possibility that you’ll alienate the individual by overdoing things too early in the process, damaging any future hope you have of converting the sale. Instead, focus on the low-hanging fruit with targeted messaging and campaigns for maximum efficiency, personalization, and results.

B2C Lead Scoring Example

Let’s say you work for a regional car dealership specializing in all kinds of passenger vehicles — sedans, mini-vans, work trucks, SUVs… you name it! Your owner just opened another dealership, bringing your grand total to six under the company umbrella.

As you continue to grow, you’re looking for new ways to improve the sales process. With the help of a practical marketing automation platform, you’ve recently developed an automated lead scoring system that you think will help indicate buyer intent. You’ve assigned point values to dozens of digital activities you expect your prospects to take and set your MQL threshold at 30.

A prospect visits your website and enters the model of the vehicle they’re interested in, along with their name and email address. Well, that’s a pretty good sign that they’re considering buying a car from you. Assign them 10 points, and enter them into an automated email campaign that focuses on that car and your dealership’s history selling and servicing them. If the prospective buyer opens one of your emails (3 points) and then clicks on the link you included in the message (7 points), they’re up to 20 points!

A few days later, they visit your website again, but this time they click on your “Directions” page. Boom! That’s 20 points right there because it indicates heavy intent, which means your prospect is now well past the 30-point MQL requirement. At this point, your sales team should reach out directly via email (or, better yet, SMS or phone call — if you’ve collected their phone number) to schedule some time for the prospective buyer to come in and test drive the car they’re interested in.

Implement Effective Lead Scoring Models With Act-On

Whether you market to businesses, consumers, or both, Act-On is the powerful and sophisticated marketing automation platform you need to take your marketing efforts to the next level. Marketers of all experience levels and skillsets can accurately and effectively score leads as your nurturing efforts guide them through a well-orchestrated sales funnel on their unique path to purchase.

Our easy-to-use software makes it simple to create and apply intuitive lead scoring that helps you create personalized content and campaigns for an immersive customer journey that results in better opportunities and more sales. You can even develop separate scoring models for different audience segments with multiple score sheets, allowing you to overcome dated one-size-fits-none scoring programs and tailor your scoring to each persona.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Act-On can help you score your B2B or B2C leads and deliver targeted marketing campaigns to businesses and individual consumers alike, please click here to schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts.

Or, if you’re not quite ready to have that conversation, please download our eBook, “How to Convert More Leads Into Customers,” to learn proven best practices and innovative techniques for developing compelling customer journeys that guide your prospects through a manicured and engaging sales funnel.

Create a Lead Scoring Program in 5 Steps

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4 Steps for Creating Engaging and Effective Lead Nurturing Campaigns

Act-On — Fri, 20 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Developing great demand generation campaigns that capture viable and targeted leads is a step in the right direction for any marketer, but your work doesn’t end there. In fact, for successful marketing departments and agencies, this is only the beginning.

In plain terms, our job as marketers is to generate highly qualified leads that eventually become lucrative revenue sources, but we all know it’s a little more complicated than that. The ability to create engaging and effective lead nurturing campaigns separates great marketers from merely good ones, and since you likely work in a highly competitive industry, every little bit counts.

That’s why, today, we’re going to focus on how to create automated lead nurturing campaigns that keep your audience’s attention, increase their lead scores, and result in better selling opportunities on your website and for your sales team.

Let’s get cooking!

1) Segment Your Leads for More Targeted Messaging

Your company probably offers several (or dozens, or even thousands) of different product and service lines that are designed to alleviate or eliminate specific pain points. Every lead is different, and every lead deserves personalized messaging. So if you’re delivering the same messaging, offers, and content to all of your leads, you’re not going to be making the types of connections that result in lasting and trusting relationships.

The days of batch-and-blast emails are over — at least they should be if you want to move customers through unique funnels that result in more sales and better revenue. Instead, you should create a system for grouping your leads into targeted segments. Doing so allows you to focus on specific challenges and solutions, which helps you relate with your prospects on a more personal level.

There are many different ways to segment your audiences, and this process will vary greatly by your industry. But regardless of your company’s vertical(s), you should be focusing on demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data to capture attention and generate clicks. For many organizations, this involves building out personas and then developing campaign matrices that include messaging and content that satisfies each stage of the customer journey (i.e., the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel) for each target audience. From there, you can use a marketing automation tool like Act-On to group your segments into organized lists that trigger relevant automated drip campaigns based on prospect and customer activities and engagements. This ensures that your communications are meaningful, useful, and targeted to the exact right audience.

2) Make a Great First Impression That Sets Expectations From the Outset

Your first email is always your most important email, so you need to make it count. A lot of companies send thank you emails after a customer completes a purchase or welcome emails when a prospect downloads a piece of content or signs up for a newsletter. However, not a lot of companies are sending these emails as part of a larger holistic lead nurturing strategy.

These initial emails serve as an introduction to your brand and are a great way to gain a foothold in the door toward an extended nurture campaign. At Act-On, our welcome and thank you emails set the stage for a long relationship that hopefully results in new customers and prolonged engagements.

First, we make sure to remind the recipient why they are receiving the email — whether it was triggered in response to a content download, demo request, pricing inquiry, or other engagement. From there, we offer additional information about other items of note that might interest the prospect (such as product add-ons, datasheets, etc.). And, in accordance with email deliverability best practices, we let each recipient know that we’ll be sending more messages with relevant and helpful content according to a predefined cadence. This last step sets expectations and helps prevent unsubscribes or, worse yet, having your emails cast into the abyss of the Spam folder.

It’s important to remember the value of a lead. You don’t want to spoil the relationship before you give it a chance to blossom by failing to follow up on an engagement quickly or coming on too strong with too many messages in a short timespan. Setting honest expectations and then delivering on your promises throughout the customer journey is a great way to establish trust and get leads interested in what you have to say and offer.

3) Focus on Education Rather Than Promotion

Now it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty. Content creators and strategists should pay close attention to this section.

The most common mistake we see marketers make is being overly promotional with their content and messaging, especially in their email campaigns. I think a lot of marketing professionals are so eager to capitalize on their leads that they make the cardinal sin of promoting their products and services from their personal perspective. Instead, you should be taking an empathetic approach with a sympathetic tone that proposes to help solve challenges by delivering informative and educational materials. If you don’t, there could be negative unintended consequences.

Buyers don’t want to be sold. They want to feel empowered to make their own decisions, and it’s your job to guide them to the right choice — even if that means losing out to a competitor. This isn’t to say you can’t be persuasive, but the focus should be on the prospect and not the product. Therefore, your job is to provide meaningful and actionable information throughout your email program that follows a clear path through the funnel.

Here’s a rough outline of how we like to structure our automated programs for handraiser form completions or content downloads here at Act-On:

Email 1 (within four hours of lead capture): A follow-up email thanking our new lead for their interest in our marketing automation solution or collateral asset.
Email 2 (3 days after email 1): A relevant blog that highlights a specific use case relative to the recipient’s pain points or walks them through a process that helps them solve their challenge.
Email 3 (5 days after email 2): A recent and relevant eBook or infographic on a thought leadership topic that relates to their primary interests based on the data we’ve collected so far.
Email 4 (7 days after email 3): A marketing strategy webinar that dovetails into how our solution helps improve campaigns and initiatives or a success story proving the value of our marketing automation platform.
Email 5 (2 days after email 4): A round-up email with links to all of the content we’ve previously shared, as well as a datasheet giving a general or industry-specific overview of how our solution can improve their marketing efforts. We also like to include a primary CTA button inviting the lead to take further action, such as requesting a demo or setting up some time to speak with a sales representative.

Once the automated drip campaign is exhausted, we place any contacts who have not taken advanced steps to speak with Sales into related email campaigns based on intent, interests, industry, and other variables. If a contact takes a handraiser action but then goes silent, we place them into our return-to-marketing automated program to continue to foster their interest in marketing automation — specifically, Act-On.

This way, we remain top-of-mind without being too intrusive.

4) Score Your Leads Accurately for More Effective Sales Exploration

Every action your leads take (or, in some cases, don’t take) should influence their overall lead score. Once these contacts reach a certain score, you should have a mechanism in place to pass them along to Sales for more personalized outreach.

To get a clear picture of your leads’ intent, you should be paying close attention to email opens, clicks, conversions, unsubscribes, and other key performance indicators your team values. Having full visibility and understanding into these engagements is an essential part of accurate lead scoring, which is the best way to take advantage of prime sales opportunities. It’s also a good indicator that some prospects might need a little more nurturing before receiving any outreach from Sales.

If your emails include links to content hosted on your website or dedicated landing pages, you should also be incorporating engagements on the digital properties into your lead scoring algorithm. For example, visits to certain product or service pages might prompt higher lead scores than, say, a click on your About Us section. You should also exclude certain pages from scoring, such as your Terms and Conditions pages or your Careers pages. Additionally, you should be tracking engagements on social media and factoring those actions into your lead scoring model.

As companies grow and diversify, the way they interpret and prioritize leads is often subject to change, continue to review and assess the efficacy of your lead scoring program at regular intervals. Work with your sales team to get a clear understanding of their version of a truly qualified lead and optimize and augment your scoring model to align with their processes and goals for better efficiency and success.

Learn More About Act-On’s Marketing Automation Platform

Lead nurturing is an essential part of the marketing funnel — perhaps the most important of all! But without the right platform and processes, it’s nearly impossible to get it right. Worse yet, if you try to do all this work manually, your team will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to segment your leads and execute your nurture campaigns with no guarantee of success or even that you’re sending to the right person or account.

Act-On’s marketing automation platform is designed to help marketing departments of all shapes, sizes, and skillsets attract, convert, and nurture highly qualified leads that they can either sell to directly via their website or pass to their sales team for more in-depth purchasing discussions. If you’d like to schedule a demo to get a better idea of the capabilities and benefits of Act-On, please click here, and we’ll be in touch!

If you’re interested in learning more about lead nurturing but not quite ready to speak with one of our marketing automation experts, please download our eBook, “How to Convert More Leads Into Customers.” In it, you’ll find a comprehensive overview of lead nurturing benefits, best practices, and techniques that go beyond email marketing to include inbound, webinar, and social media tactics that help you maximize your marketing success.

Shorten Your Manufacturing Sales Cycle With These 4 Lead Nurturing Tips

Act-On — Thu, 05 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Manufacturers can shorten their sales cycles by better nurturing leads before passing them over to sales.

It is hard to be a marketer, especially for those working in manufacturing. Global competition, trade wars (or tit for tats), changing buyer expectations and behaviors, and new technologies (that have wiped out historical competitive barriers) have forced small and midsize manufacturers to cut costs anywhere they can. And for many manufacturing marketers, their budget has a big red bullseye on it.

And typical marketing tactics also aren’t proving successful:

The best industrial sites only convert 3 percent of their traffic using RFQs and contact forms
Industry PPC click-through rates hover around 6 percent
And depending on who you ask, only 50 percent of your sales team is meeting quota

Compounding that frustration is the opportunity that lies ahead like an elusive oasis just out of reach. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates US manufacturing GDP will increase over the next decade by $350 billion in real terms.

While there is no easy button, I will bet you a beer your numbers will improve if you set up an automated campaign that nurtures your prospects through their journey.

Wondering what is lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with your buyers at every stage of their buying process (and your sales funnel). Too often, marketers are sending leads over to sales too soon. It’s estimated that only 5-15 percent of B2B leads are sales-ready when they first become known contacts.

These days, B2B marketers are getting superior results by using short- and long-term lead nurturing programs.

Forrester Research found that companies excelling at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads, at a 33% lower cost
Nurtured leads result in purchases that are 47% larger than those of non-nurtured leads, according to the Annuitas Group

A recent survey indicated that a mere 10 percent of companies were actively using lead nurture strategies as part of their demand generation and pipeline-management marketing, but, “even for those, implementing a more complex closed-loop system may feel intimidating and out of reach,” said Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing.

It sounds like a lot of work, but if you just take it step-by-step, you’ll find the automated nature of nurturing campaigns ends up saving you a huge amount of time and resources in a relatively short amount of time.

Customer Journey Mapping and Funnel Stages

I often write about the importance of knowing your buyer. Know that and you’re on your way to better understanding the customer’s journey. Know that, and you begin to focus on the funnel stages of your business. According to Phil Bosley, CEO of Tactical Marketing, nearly 70 percent of B2B marketers have not identified their funnel stages. As a result, he said, 65 percent of B2B marketers have not implemented a lead nurturing program.

So know your customer to know their journey to know your funnel stages to know how to set up an automated lead nurturing campaign.

The buyer’s or customer’s journey are the steps a potential customer takes toward purchasing your product or services. This journey can have many shapes, entry points, turns (including U-turns), and exit points. Generally, we define the journey’s phases as awareness, consideration, and decision. You can also think of it as unengaged, engaged, and sales-ready.

Marketing List Segmentation

If you’re blasting the same marketing message out to everyone, your pitch is going to be utterly meaningless to some people – upping the odds that they will never respond – because you now look irrelevant to them. Clearly, learning how to segment your lists will enhance your marketing results.

How to Convert More Leads Into Customers

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Use demographic AND behavioral data from your prospects to segment the folks you are marketing. If you aggregate people who have the same needs/desires into a segment, you can do a pretty targeted campaign to them and up the odds they will respond.

Email Cadence & Workflow

You have gotten a better handle on your customer, their journey through the funnel, and you are segmenting your lists accordingly. Now is the time to start building out your lead nurturing program. This includes:

Choosing a set of nurturing touchpoints: How many times do you want to contact a prospect?
Choose your content offers: Perhaps you start with an eBook, move on to a case study, and then invite your prospect to a webinar
Choose your cadence: Do you contact a prospect every week? Every two weeks?
Choose your contact methods: Does your entire campaign revolve around email, or do you contact some prospects by phone, direct mail, or other methods?

A very simple lead nurturing workflow may involve just a series of four or five email messages sent over a period of several weeks. A more advanced workflow may include multiple touchpoints, content offers, and communication channels, all over a much longer period, and with multiple variations. It’s a good idea to start with a simple workflow and then allow your campaigns to evolve over time.

If you’re using an adaptive marketing platform, like Act-On, you can take advantage of the latest technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, that can automagically segment, assign content, and send your emails.

Evaluating Your Lead Nurture Programs

Lead nurturing, especially when combined with an adaptive marketing platform, gives your company the ability to track and measure the effectiveness of your efforts. There are a few places to look for key performance indicators in a lead nurturing campaign, including:

Engagement: Email open and clickthrough rates are an obvious starting point for your tracking efforts.
Lead acceleration: How long does it take to move your leads between nurturing campaign stages, and how long does it take to move nurtured leads into the sales cycle?
Outcome metrics: How many nurtured leads that enter the sales pipeline turn into closed/won deals? What is the average revenue associated with those deals, and how long do they take to close?

Once you establish a baseline with these and other key indicators, you can look for trouble spots in your nurturing campaign, experiment with solutions, and consider your next steps.

A basic lead nurturing campaign using a handful of buyer profiles, a limited process flow, and some performance metrics is a great place to start.

How to Convert More Leads Into Customers

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