Preamble
Before going into the details of using points, let’s take the time to understand the stakes, the good and bad practices.
Indeed, scoring is not essential or relevant for everyone. Let us remember that the main objective is to bring important contacts to the forefront -normally because they are hot- in your contact database.
This feature is therefore very useful when you have too many unqualified prospects and you want to extract a list of the most interesting ones for your sales team, for example. If you do not have many leads (in heavy industry in B2B, for example), this feature becomes unnecessary.
On the other hand, if you have a huge amount of traffic or downloads on your site and the flow generated is greater than your salesperson’s capacity to handle them, then this feature makes perfect sense.
The second challenge is to properly weight contact scoring. Indeed, you will need to determine what is important to you. Is it their age, their role, their location, their level of expertise in your product or service. Or is it the fact that they attended a webinar, downloaded a resource or attended a trade show. Of course, it will be a combination of all of this, and it will be no small task!
The challenge is therefore to manage to assign a weight to each of these criteria by defining a point target to be reached for which the contact is considered sufficiently interesting.
Finally, keep in mind that sometimes, to bring the most important contacts to the forefront even when you have many of them, there are other simpler ways than scoring. You can simply ask the contact’s maturity level directly by asking them through an automated campaign!
Create a point action
To record an action to which you want to add points when a contact performs it, you must go to the main menu on the left, points > action management.
There, you can create point actions. Then click on new.
You then have 3 things to configure. The name of the action of course, the number of points you want this to add to your contact. Note that you can add or subtract points. And finally, the action to associate. Here, you have the possibility to choose from resource download actions, emails, landing pages and forms.
Keep in mind that a point action is triggered only once per contact.
Finally, if you want to add points based on your contact’s profile -if they are a marketing director for example- you will need to go through a segment and a campaign.
Add points via campaigns
It is also possible to add points to a contact with campaigns. This can serve two purposes:
- To add points based on the contact’s profile: in this case create a segment for this profile and a campaign that will be used to add points to this profile
- Or to add points during your nurturing campaigns, for very specific actions.
To do this, create a new campaign, choose your campaign source segment, and you will find in the list of available actions, “modify the contact’s points”. Then choose the number of points to add to or remove from the contact.
Add points via forms
You can also add point actions directly in the “action” tab of a form. It is very simple, create or edit your form, click on the Actions tab, add a new “modify the contact’s points” action.
All contacts who submit this form will be assigned the associated points. Note that the points will be assigned on each form submission. Thus, a contact can obtain the same number of points several times if they submit the form several times.
If you want this to be triggered only once, configure this action directly from the points menu, as we did earlier in this video.
Define point triggers – triggers
The goal of scoring is to be able to bring certain contacts to the forefront and to trigger automatic actions when the contact reaches a certain number of points.
To do this, you can configure point triggers. Go to the main menu on the left, Points > Trigger management.
When you create a new trigger, the setup is done in two steps.
First, decide when the trigger should be activated by choosing the number of points to reach. Also ask yourself whether you want the contacts to whom this trigger will be applied to be included retroactively, or only from today onward. To do this, enable or disable the “trigger for existing contacts” button.
The second part of the configuration is done in the events tab. Here, you will choose what will happen for the targeted contacts. Here, you can update the contact’s segments, modify their campaigns or synchronize them with your CRM, for example.
View contacts with a certain number of points
Sometimes, it is useful and important to have, in just a few clicks, visibility on contacts according to their point level.
I therefore strongly recommend creating a few segments with point thresholds. These segments update in real time and if at any time you want to access contacts who have 100 points for example, it is done in 2 clicks!
Conclusion
Feel free to watch and rewatch this tutorial when you start configuring your marketing automation account and your scoring rules. Also find all our other tutorial videos by subscribing to our YouTube channel!
