Crack the code: how to score and qualify anonymous users
Lead scoring is pivotal in modern marketing and sales strategies. It is crucial for businesses seeking to optimize their efforts and maximize results. By assigning a numerical value to leads based on their engagement, behavior, and demographics, you can prioritize and differentiate prospects, enabling sales teams to focus on the most promising opportunities.
Implementing lead scoring empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, improve conversion rates, and boost overall revenue. That makes it an indispensable component for any successful customer acquisition strategy. But how can you extract even more value from browsing session information?
The answer lies in qualifying visitors even before they sign up. This post will give you an overview of how to score anonymous users and understand the next steps of the buying journey for each of them.
What is lead scoring
Lead scoring is a process sales and marketing teams use to identify potential customers who are most likely to convert. It involves assigning a score to a lead based on their actions and characteristics.
Lead scoring allows you to allocate your efforts effectively. Instead of spending time and money on leads that are not likely to buy from your brand, you can concentrate on nurturing and engaging with the ones more likely to become customers. This saves you valuable resources and increases the effectiveness of your marketing strategies.
The numerical value can range from 0-100 and helps businesses rank the leads in order of priority to focus their resources on the most promising prospects. In addition, you can tailor your outreach to each lead's specific needs and interests. You should consider leads with the highest score more valuable and prioritize them for follow-up.
The main goal of lead scoring is to save time and make the most of the prospecting process. If you have a clear view of who are your highest or lowest-quality leads, you can be more assertive in your marketing campaigns. Businesses also use lead scoring to segment customers into groups to offer personalized and relevant content.
The benefits of lead scoring in driving conversions
Lead scoring provides a wide range of benefits that can significantly impact your conversion rates and overall marketing success. Here are some key benefits of implementing a lead scoring system:
1. Improved ROI
Lead scoring allows you to allocate your budget more effectively by identifying the most valuable leads to optimize your marketing spend and achieve a better return on investment. This ensures you maximize your revenue potential.
2. Personalized lead nurturing
You can use previous strategies to understand your leads' needs, interests, and pain points at a deeper level. Tailor your content and messaging to answer their questions and provide relevant solutions by tracking their behavior and engagement with your brand. This personalized approach to lead nurturing builds trust, establishes credibility, and increases the chances of conversion.
3. Better sales and marketing alignment
Lead scoring provides a common language for your sales and marketing teams. By defining and agreeing upon the criteria for lead scoring, you can ensure that both teams are aligned in understanding what constitutes a qualified lead.
4. Continuous improvement and optimization
One of the critical benefits of lead scoring is that it allows you to measure and track the effectiveness of your strategies. The data and insights generated through it allow you to identify improvement areas, optimize your marketing campaigns, and refine your lead qualification criteria.
Types of user scoring
To score a user, you can gather information about their interaction with your business. Collect data users input on survey and sign up forms, track email engagement, clicks, downloads, time spent on the website, etc.
It's reasonable to assume that someone who spends time on a particular product page, for instance, has interest in that item. As the lead progresses on the webpage, their score increases. Conversely, the score decreases if the lead fails to engage or shows disinterest.
Platforms like Hubspot and Salesforce do predictive scoring. They employ machine learning to parse thousands of data points to qualify users. The algorithm analyzes historical data from the customer journey and identifies patterns to help predict which ones are most likely to convert.
Scoring models can be classified into three types: explicit scoring, implicit scoring, and anonymous users scoring. Each type has advantages and drawbacks, so choose accordingly to your business goals, target audience, and available data. Let's take a closer look at each type.
Explicit scoring
Explicit lead scoring involves assigning scores based on information provided by the leads. This includes job title, company size, industry, and location. It is useful for businesses that clearly understand their ideal customer profile and can easily collect this information through lead capture forms, surveys, or preference centers.
Explicit lead scoring is relatively easy to implement and provides a good starting point for qualification. However, it has its limitations. Leads may not always provide accurate or complete information, and relying solely on explicit data may not capture the true intent or potential of the lead. Many businesses combine explicit with implicit lead scoring to overcome these drawbacks.
Implicit scoring
Implicit lead scoring involves assigning scores based on the observed behavior and interactions of leads with your brand. This includes website visits, content downloads, email opens, clicks, social media engagement, and more. Implicit lead scoring is based on the premise that actions speak louder than words and provides a more accurate and real-time measure of a lead's interest.
When a new user triggers any rule, the system updates the score accordingly. For example, a user who visits a pricing page multiple times might receive a higher score than one who only visits the homepage.
You must use marketing automation tools and tracking mechanisms to analyze this data. Implementing explicit lead scoring can be more complex than implementing explicit lead scoring, but it provides a more comprehensive and dynamic view of lead engagement.
We recommend you provide real-time alerts when a user reaches a certain score threshold, so sales reps can immediately contact the high-quality ones.
Scoring anonymous users
Scoring anonymous users is a recent development many CRM platforms have yet to provide. Anonymous data includes information not directly linked to an individual, such as their IP address, browser type, and location.
To score anonymous users, you need to track their activity and assign them scores in real time.
"Traditional" lead scoring requires users to provide their email addresses at least once. In other words, no score is attributed to them before they identify themselves for the first time.
But if you track events and find out a user read a specific blog post, you know they're interested in a particular subject, even if you don't know who they are. There's still an anonymous profile you attribute to them. It is enriched each time they interact with your brand.
You can score users long before they become leads and just after they register, attribute this score to their identified profile, and use it to personalize the content on your website.
But even if the person never registers, you can still score them and use this data in their anonymous profile to tailor website content.
Scoring users for personalization
Although scoring anonymous users works differently from leveraging registered visitors' data, you can still gather valuable data to personalize your website.
Once you score your users, you can segment them based on the attributed score. The ones with high scores, for example, might be closer to making a purchase. Therefore they only need a “push”, which you can provide using a coupon or personalized message. However, lower-score users need nurturing, and the ideal approach would be changing your message to motivate them and add value.
Another strategy you can use is to time your communication. Approaching users in different situations or using other channels may help you convert more because it means they are ready to take this next step. Email campaigns, educational content, or even phone calls can have a different impact if timed correctly.
Don’t forget to progressive profile your users and gather relevant information to improve communication throughout the process. Adapting your message to different audiences leads a business to successful engagement.
Matching anonymous users’ data to identified profiles
HubSpot's scoring system uses cookies to track the behavior of anonymous visitors to a website. Once a visitor identifies themselves by filling out a form, for instance, their anonymous behavior data is merged with their identified data to create a complete lead profile.
For example, suppose a user from Boston shows high interest in a particular product or service. You don’t know who they are. Still, you now have the data about the session of an anonymous profile located in Boston. If this user registers later on from the exact location, the information is added to their user profile. This means the new profile will be enriched with the data from the anonymous profile.
When they register for a demo, for example, even after several previous steps, all of the previous history – such as "opened page X", "then searched for product Y", "then clicked a banner" – is already recorded in their profile in platforms such as Croct.
Conclusion
Effective marketing campaigns lie in personalization. And scoring users facilitates it. It can help you effectively engage with identified and anonymous customers and guide them toward becoming qualified leads.
However, it requires careful planning, execution, and ongoing optimization.
With Croct, you can score your website's anonymous visitors in real-time, broaden your prospects, and close more deals. Our personalization platform helps you distinguish qualified visitors and segment your leads to offer more relevant communication.
Create your free account and connect with users today.