In old-fashioned tales, the hero arrives at a crossroads where they must make a life-changing decision. If your company were a hero in one of these tales, one of its toughest choices would be how to improve customer experience management. We won’t tell you what might happen with your business if you choose to increase your budget versus do nothing and wait for a miracle, but we’ll offer a couple of secrets about the path of marketing analytics.
Marketing analytics as a basis for lead scoring
Here are a few instances when you should try marketing analytics to boost your customer experience:
– Your products are great, but customers show a low level of engagement or your churn rate has started to grow.
– You’ve collected behavioral data but haven’t used it to find insights.
– Your gut feeling on how to break down your advertising budget no longer works and additional efforts or resources don’t bring the expected results, or you’ve just
reached the break-even point.
– Your whole audience can be split into a couple of segments based on behavioral characteristics, and you understand that you should approach these audience segments
differently.
– You’re quite good at lead generation but fail at lead nurturing.
How can marketing analytics help you with these things? First, you’ll have to tailor your marketing analytics to your business. What does analytics in marketing entail? Mainly, three things:
1. Establish the connections between marketing, financial, and business metrics reflecting the current state of your business. Remember that marketing expenses are
always investments and should be profitable.
2. Collect, store, and process your marketing data carefully. Enrich your customer behavior data with data on ad costs, data from your CRM, and data from other sources
to reveal the truth about the whole customer journey across all possible touchpoints. Your data must be tied to the metrics you’ve created.
3. Build reports to visualize how your metrics change over time and to reveal insights.
These are the basic steps that allow you to consider data on past events. What else can you do to develop your analytics further?
– For real-time events, use automated marketing analytics. Shorten the time-to-value period for the data you collect and react automatically to trigger events with
preset actions.
– For future events, use predictive marketing analytics. Simply answer the question, Who will be our next customer and how will they get to the purchase?
After a successful initial setup, you should improve your analytics constantly. And as you can see, everything in analytics is about the customer experience and improving your contact with customers. Starting from basic analysis of customer behavior, marketing analytics makes you stop guessing where customers come from and helps you control multiple customer journeys for different segments of your audience.
Lead scoring as the best practice for customer experience management
Marketing analytics is all about measuring and estimating, and lead scoring gives you an additional dimension for measuring your customers based on the data you already have.
With lead scoring, your analytics system gives a score to each of your potential customers based on the past behavior of similar leads. This score is determined by the frequency of successful micro-conversions among similar leads who have already purchased.
Example: Someone who а) reads your blog, b) comments on your social media posts, and c) leaves a review or contacts a salesperson might have a much higher score in the lead scoring system than a lead who’s passively waiting for a discount and visiting the sales page on your website.
So what else can lead scoring offer you? We’ll mention a few questions you may answer with your lead scoring system:
– What leads are worth our attention in the first place? What leads will never buy from us even if we waste our advertising budget on them?
– What places along the customer journey are the narrowest to pass through, and how can they be avoided?
– How can we personalize the offer to each audience segment based on its level of activity?
Lead scoring helps you wisely invest your efforts into different steps of the funnel, helping each customer walk through the funnel and make a purchase. The customer journey is rarely linear, and thanks to lead scoring, you can make it more controlled by segmenting your leads based on behavioral scores.
The goal of segmentation is always to make more personalized offers and save your advertising budget. Thus, you get more profit while lowering your expenses.
Lead scoring also helps your business improve sales department performance while pointing to the warmest leads so your salespeople can make them immediate offers.
The main metrics of a lead scoring system
Here’s an example of which basic metrics you might consider for your lead scoring system for a B2B business:
– Predicted Accounting Rate of Return — How much will we gain if we convert this lead into a customer?
– Engagement Score — How attractive do we look in the eyes of the lead?
– Effort Score — What do we need to do to convert this lead?
All of these metrics can be added to your marketing reports and CRM. In the graph below, you can see an example of a lead scoring report. It definitely has valuable insights for the marketing and sales teams!
Look at the MQL segment: those leads have the highest predicted ARR and engagement values, but our efforts aren’t enough to satisfy their interest! This is a growth zone. Leads at the Opportunity stage have a really low level of predicted ARR and engagement while consuming almost 7% of our team’s efforts. Should we continue this strategy for now? Or should we move Opportunities to a higher-level activity?
These are the kinds of questions you’ll think over when your lead scoring system starts working.
To sum up: A starter pack of advice for those who want to try marketing analytics and lead scoring
– Start with proper data collection, cleansing, and unification. This accounts for a full 75% of your success. Even if you don’t deal with lead scoring, neat marketing
data will help you report meaningfully and will help your business grow.
– Use calculations and algorithms to obtain lead scoring metrics that are explainable to each team member. This will help you avoid mistakes and present information
clearly to all departments.
– Use solutions for sales that track emails and calls automatically. This will be easier than forcing people to manually enter replies to emails and records of meetings
into the CRM.
