Some leads tell you they're ready to buy. Others just keep coming back. They visit your pages, click your emails and fill out your forms. In a big list, those people are easy to miss. Lead scoring gives contacts points when they match your ideal customer or engage with your content, so your team knows who to call first. Lead scoring is available on Plus and above.
You can score two kinds of information. The first is contact details, like job title, city or type of business. A vet clinic, for example, might give dog owners more points than other pet owners. The second is contact actions, like clicking a link in an email, visiting a page, filling out a form, sending a text or making a purchase. Pages that show buying intent, like your pricing page, are worth scoring on their own.
To set it up, go to Contacts, then Settings, then Lead Scoring. Click Add to create a scoring condition, pick a condition from the dropdown, and give it a point value. Repeat that for each rule you want.
Next, set the score degradation. It's the percentage a contact's score goes down each day, so recent activity counts more than old activity. A good place to start is about 3% a day if your sales cycle runs 30 to 90 days, like B2B, high-ticket offers or subscriptions. If it's 7 to 14 days, like ecommerce or impulse purchases, start at about 5%. Then click Save.
Every contact gets a raw score and a percentage. The percentage ranks them against the rest of your list. The highest score is 100%, and the median is 50%. Sort your contacts by lead score to find your hottest leads fast. A simple starting system uses a scale of zero to 100. Contact your high scorers right away, send medium scorers targeted content, and keep an eye on the low ones.
You can also use scores to segment your messages, send high scorers to your best reps with a lead router, leave low scorers out of costly campaigns like direct mail, and start a win-back campaign when a once-hot lead cools off. Check which score ranges your customers converted at, too. That tells you if your brackets need adjusting.
Automations make scores even more useful. Say a top lead looks at your pricing page but doesn't buy. Go to Automations and create a new automation from scratch. If you've turned on other objects, like Companies or Deals, you'll find automations under Contacts instead. Start with the Visits a landing page trigger, set to your pricing page. Then add a Condition that only lets through contacts with a high lead score.
Next, add a Purchases product goal for that product, and change the wait above it to let some time pass, like 15 minutes. Anyone who buys moves to the goal. Anyone who doesn't goes down a new path on the left.
On that path, add Notify With SMS or Notify With Email to alert your team, then finish it with an End element. Now a rep can follow up with a friendly, helpful note while the lead is still interested.
If you need more, you can build your scoring in an automation instead, or combine the two. Automations give you more triggers. They also let you reset a score after 30 days of no activity, subtract points instead of a percentage, cap scores at 100, and use decimal places. The Set up lead scoring article walks you through both setups.
So: decide what your ideal lead looks like, give points for the details and actions that matter, set a degradation rate that fits your sales cycle, and let automations flag your hottest leads. Next up: Ontraport Calendar.