Should B2C Companies Practice Lead Scoring?
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.