Lead Scoring with Mautic optimizing sales funnels

Sooner or later the time comes when, with the resources available, the abundance of inquiries/contacts can no longer be dealt with in a reasonable time and with the necessary attention. At the latest now is the time to think about which of your contacts you want to focus on intensively / personally. Lead scoring helps to use the available resources efficiently and to optimize marketing funnels. In this post, we cover how lead scoring can be easily and quickly implemented with Mautic.

What is Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a commonly used tactic to evaluate leads/contacts objectively and according to predefined criteria. As an integral part of your sales funnel strategy, the evaluation should provide information about a lead’s willingness to buy. For this purpose, traceable customer (inter)actions or triggers (e.g. visits to the website, reading emails, asset downloads, etc.), are measured by means of lead tracking, their relevance for you is evaluated and made measurable by means of points.

Explained with an example, this looks like this:

• You have generated 100 website visitors on your homepage via a campaign
• Half of the visitors spend only a few minutes on your homepage and may not even visit other sub- or product pages.
  Nevertheless, the very fact that they felt “spoken to” by your campaign justifies awarding them e.g. 1 point each. Maybe they will visit your website again in the future.
• The other half is more interested in what you have to offer. They may look at several product pages, download documents or even sign up for newsletters or webinars. Some perhaps more, others a little less.
• For each of these interactions, you award a defined number of points. Depending on which interactions contribute more or less to the willingness to buy, more points for some and less for others.
• Over time, leads will crystallize with a higher score because they have engaged more intensively with your offer. These should now receive your close attention, as you can assume that their willingness to buy is the highest. The likelihood is high that all that is needed is that final, personal push to close the deal.

Lead scoring in Mautic supports actions and triggers

Your advantages thanks to lead scoring

1. Higher conversion- / purchase-rates
2. Efficient use of resources
3. More time for other tasks

If you want to learn more about sales funnels, you can find more info in our blog post: Creating Sales Funnels.

When does lead scoring make sense

The short answer: Always and from the beginning onwards.

The long answer: Even if your leads are manageable at first, the time will come when you’ll start thinking about your available resources. Be it, because your leads are overflowing, be it because you want to focus on other issues as well.

Lead scoring highlights at a glance which of your contacts are interested in your offer and how much interest they have without having to study their interaction history for a long time. In addition, lead scoring also tells you which actions and triggers are performing well (contributing to conversion) and which are not.

Lead scoring with Mautic / Aivie helps to optimize your sales funnels, sharpen your touch-points / customer journey and use your time and resources efficiently. That’s why lead scoring with Mautic should be an important part of any scaling strategy.

Lead Scoring Strategies

Generally, in Aivie you are free in how you set your scoring strategy. However, scoring from 0 – 100 points seems to be common practice. This gives you the granularity and flexibility you need in your scoring.

Interaction-based / automated point allocation

Think about which interactions are relevant to your sales funnel and which are particularly indicative of the most positive buying decision possible. These should usually be “rewarded” with a higher score. Such interactions can be grouped into “lead magnets” or “trip wires”. Think about which lead magnets and trip wires you can use in your sales funnel.

Interactions with a higher points score could be:

• Downloads of assets (white papers, product sheets, presentations, etc.)
• Sending or opening of emails
• Submission of contact- or subscription forms
• Demo / Test requests
• Shares / comments on Social Media channels
• Product purchase
• etc.

Interactions with a lower points score could be:

• Homepage visit
• Opening of emails (with no follow-up interactions)
• Likes / follows on Social Media channels
• Landing page visits (with no follow-up interactions)
• etc.

In section 4, “Implementing Lead Scoring with Mautic,” we’ll go into more detail about how points can be awarded based on actions and triggers.

Manual scoring

In addition to automated scoring based on the actions and triggers of your contacts captured by Aivie, your scoring strategy can also include manual scoring. This is helpful if you want to focus your resources even more on specific contacts or target groups.

For example for contacts which:

• work for a specific company
• work within a certain industry
• have a specific job function
• have interesting connections
• talk very positively about your products/services (e.g. on Social Media, etc.)
• etc.

Manual scoring should however remain the exception. In addition, the criteria applied for manual scoring should be clearly defined and not too extensive. Otherwise, this can quickly lead to arbitrariness and a lack of traceability in the scoring, especially if there are several system users.

To ensure that manual scoring in Aivie is also documented at the contact level, it can be helpful to assign the selected contacts to specially created segments. These segments are then the entry points for “manual scoring” campaigns. Thus, the time of the point award, as well as the reason for it in the contact history can be tracked at any time.

Points and Stages

Lead scoring primarily helps to identify particularly interesting contacts. But it can also help lead contacts from one stage to the next along the sales funnel. For example, a contact who has already earned a reasonable number of points in one stage but still has not moved on to the next stage on their own, could be persuaded to do so through appropriate measures or campaigns.

A concrete case for this could be: A contact has already looked intensively on the website and also downloaded an asset. Because of this, the contact has already gained a certain number of points. The interest in your offer seems to be there, but that’s as far as the contact got in your sales funnel. It can now be helpful to motivate such contacts who are “stuck” in the sales funnel to move on to the next stage by employing a “motivation campaign”. For example, a follow-up E-Mail where you thank them for their interest and offer further information or assistance.

If the transition to the next stage has taken place, it is now possible to set the number of points back to zero. The decision is all yours based on your lead scoring strategy. This can be done manually, but also automatically as part of the “motivation campaign”. This results in a lead score of 0 – 100 for each stage.

Implementing Lead Scoring with Mautic

In the menu item “Points” you can implement your lead scoring with Mautic / Aivie. You can choose between Actions and Triggers and thus implement your strategy step by step.

Points-Actions

Aivie supports the following Actions for scoring:

• Asset download
• URL visit
• Landing page visit
• Form submission
• Email sent
• Email opened*

Note: Apple’s “Mail Privacy Protection” feature coming in IOS 15 will cause email opening rates to be reported incorrectly in Apple’s email app in the future. A fact that marketers will have to deal with in the future and therefore bring even more relevance into their customer communication. On the plus side, more relevance inevitably leads to higher quality leads. This is also a topic in our blog on Double Opt-In with Mautic. Therefore, make sure that your email recipients are encouraged to click on a link in the email. This, in turn, leads the contact to a landing page, for example, which makes the interaction traceable again and so points can be awarded.

Create a new Points-Action

For a new point action, select the desired action (e.g.: “Submits form”), assign a name (this appears in the contact history) and the number of points to be awarded. As a rule, the latter is a positive number. If needed, also a negative point score can be assigned. In addition, the awarding of points can be limited to only certain actions. For example, this points-action is then only valid for selected forms.

Triggers

Point actions come into play to award points when contacts generate certain interactions. Triggers, on the other hand, are used to trigger actions in Aivie, once the contact has reached a set number of points.

In the example above, a “high-Interest” trigger is defined, which determines that contacts with a minimum score of 80 appear in red in the Aivie contact list.

However, actions can also be triggered in Aivie. For example, informing an Aivie user by email as soon as the contact has exceeded the minimum number of points – as shown in the example below. These “high interest” contacts could now be followed up in person to close the sale.

Summary

Lead scoring strategies are an important tool to optimize resources in the long run. Their development and implementation is iterative, variable over time, and must be adapted to the respective company circumstances and target groups. There is no “one-size-fits-all,” but the right lead scoring strategy offers valuable benefits:

• Optimizing resources
• Maximizing conversions
• More time for other tasks