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9 Tips to Help You Master Kentico Lead Scoring
Introduction
Sales and marketing teams love lead scoring because it helps them determine the sales-readiness of a lead. Or in another words, lead scoring allows sales team to assign points to leads in order to rank them in terms of "cold", "warm", or "hot". The more hot leads the better right?
The Kentico online marketing solution allows admins of a site to easily put a lead scoring system in place. It works by allowing a marketer or developer to create a rule that calculates a point value for each visitor's activity or behavior on the site. Defining these rules in Kentico is a pretty straightforward process, but there are a few gotchas. Whether or not you are currently using this functionality on your site, keep reading to find out some tips on how you can master Kentico lead scoring to benefit your organization.
1. Don't Forget to Set the Score Rules to be Recurring
Form submission activity is the best example here. I had a customer ask me why the contact scores never seem to get that high for a rule that they had set up. They didn't understand why over time the score was not moving that much, and that it just "felt wrong". The problem was that the rule was not defined as a recurring rule. This is a simple checkbox to enable the points to be recurring on calculation. It is just easy to miss because it is at the bottom of the page. Simply scroll down all the way on the edit rule page to see it, and make sure you check it (of course that is as long as you want to give out points for the same activity again and again).
2. Don't Forget to Disable Scores Over Time
The reason for this tip is that to many scores slow down the re-calculation time of the system. If you are scoring for an event that happened two years ago chances are that you no longer need to do so. Also as the contact database grows each a re-calculation becomes more of a performance impact on the system. Luckily Kentico 8.1 and higher is well equipped to handle a large amount of contact and scoring data. But just like any other software maintenance best practice, there is no reason to waste cpu cycles on information that you no longer need. Especially since it is a checkbox to either enable or disable a scoring rule. So disable the scores you no longer care about.
3. Utilize the E-mail Notifications Built-In Functionality of Kentico Lead Scores
Want your customer service or sales people to know when a Contact reaches a certain score? This is a nifty feature that allows your website to push information to your team instead of waiting for admin to remember to login in a check a report. When a contact reaches a certain score threshold you can automatically trigger an email notification to let someone know. This is basically the start of the marriage between lead scoring and marketing automation in Kentico. You can easily customize the email template that is sent in the E-mail Templates application. You can also can specify the from e-mail address in Settings -> System through the E-mails -> Send e-mail notifications from setting.
4. Use the Contact Status to Group High Scoring Contacts
Did you know you can make your own Contact statuses? Well you can, and most people overlook it. You can easily make a status that represents a Hot, Warm, or Cold lead in the Contact Management application under the Configuration -> Contact status vertical tab and then assign a status in bulk for contacts that arise from your lead scoring. Why would you want to do this? Well the Contact list screen has a built-in filter that then anyone who has access to the module could easily filter and sort Contacts by a status. Basically it makes it about 2 clicks to get a view of your hottest leads in the system.
5. Disable your Developer and Admin Accounts from Logging Activities
Want to really throw off your scores ? Well then you leave this setting enabled for your administrator or editor accounts. These are the people that are most likely testing the functionality more than once. Having your developers or administrators still count in the lead scoring module will basically artificially inflate your number of high scoring contacts. No one wants a false positive right? Wouldn't it be weird if your sales rep called someone in your app dev department? You can disable any user's activity tracking by unchecking the Log activities setting in the User -> Settings tab of a selected user.
6. Keep your Contact Database Optimized
We don't want to waste our time scoring contacts that only came to our site years ago right? Well check out my other blog post on deleting inactive contacts from your Kentico database. That's one way to keep your Kentico EMS site running as efficiently as possible, which in turn makes your lead scoring calculation more efficient.
7. Don't Ignore Negative Activities
I know the phrase "Negative Activities" probably brings back nightmares from your Calculus 201 or 301 class at school. Ok, well maybe that's just me, (stupid integrals and quadric surfaces, trust me it's a long story...). But the kind of activities I am talking about here are basically "bad" behaviors on your site. Did someone unsubscribe from an email, or are they looking for a job on your site? Those would be visitors that I would not want our sales team at BizStream spending a ton of time on. I recommend making sure they don't count, and again inflate your warm leads list.
These negative actions can easily be scored to remove points and not waste your sales team's time. Kentico's Email marketing application has the ability to track unsubscribes and page views to a specific page. I would set up a rule like this to subtract points if these two activities are performed. I'm thinking -2 points for unsubscribing would be a good measurement.
8. Don't Forget to Score on E-mail Activity
Creating a Scoring Rule for when a visitor opens a link in your Kentico email marketing efforts makes a ton of sense. So make sure you enable Link tracking and Opened email tracking on your email campaigns. This is especially useful if that link says something like "Click here to buy our product" or "Click here to get ahold of your sales rep". The scoring won't work if you are not tracking link clicks and opens first. It is simply a checkbox on the Configuration vertical tab of the Email campaign to turn this on. Once this is on you can score e-mail activity until your heart is content.
9. Easily View Your Top Contacts by Score
A common question that I have seen is how do I quickly see the results of my lead scoring results. My favorite way to do this is to use a Widget on the Marketing Overview application to see the top contacts. This application is a bit under-utilized by many Kentico sites. Basically it can act as the marketing dashboard for your site.
Out of the box it comes configured to show mostly web analytic types of data like total page views and top landing pages, but you can extend it very easily. To get a widget that shows your Top Contacts by Score click on the Add new widget button. From there select the Report table widget and click ok. This will add the widget to your dashboard and once the widget properties appear select the Top N contacts by score as the report table property. Click ok the Save & close button and you should now have a nice report on your dashboard that shows your hottest leads (leads with most points).
Remember though their Marketing overview dashboard is personalizable so this will show for just you if you followed these instructions. To share it will every admin you can configure the default Marketing overview dashboard in the Page templates application and then edit the On-line marketing dashboard.
Conclusion
Hopefully reading this list has helped you get a better understanding of what Kentico lead scoring can do. If you have your own favorite tips on how to use the lead scoring application please feel free to leave them as comments to this blog post. Thanks for reading!
