Most people are familiar with the credit report commercials featuring the hapless musician driving a used subcompact because his FICO score is too low to get a car loan. While amusing, the message is a serious one: The higher the score, the better.
The same concept can be adopted by marketers to effectively drive more revenue. By incorporating the concept of scoring engagement, you glean insight into the buying readiness of a prospect or customer.
Engagement scoring enables marketers to focus precious resources on prospects who are most likely to become customers, and to gain insight into current customer relationships that could yield additional revenue opportunities.
Determining an Engagement Score
An engagement score is a numerical figure assigned to an individual or company based on activity and behavior. The more a prospect or customer engages with your brand, the higher the engagement score. Marketers assign points to specific actions, such as clicking a link in an email or visiting a webpage, and prospects earn an engagement score based on their corresponding behavior.
To set up an engagement score model, database marketers must first identify which prospect and customer interactions reflect highly valued engagement. Is an email link click worth more than attending a webinar? Is a face-to-face meeting the most valuable form of engagement? Each company is different, but looking at historic activity data will help determine the scoring rules.
Once the scoring rules are set, your organization will need a system to track activity data, calculate engagement scores and visualize engagement levels so it is easy to see where prospects and customers are in the customer lifecycle.
Steps to Increase Customer Engagement
Once an engagement scoring model is in place and a system to manage it is implemented, there are four steps that will help boost engagement scores:
- Focus on activities that drive engagement.
- Personalize marketing efforts. Our own studies show that personalizing emails results in greater response rates. Personalization includes inserting a person’s first name in the email or sending an email from an actual person instead of a generic email address.
- Offer something of value. Giving prospects and customers a reason to interact with your brand will drive interest and engagement. This can come in the form of a white paper, study results or a coupon.
- Nurture contacts once they are engaged. Close more sales by targeting already-engaged prospects with marketing tactics. Interaction with customers post-sale is important to encourage loyalty and create additional revenue-generating opportunities.
Look at engagement score trends and evaluate which activities are driving the most engagement. Modify the marketing mix to do more of what works best.
Troy Burk is CEO and founder of Right On Interactive, a customer lifecycle marketing automation software company based in Indianapolis. Reach him at tburk@rightoninteractive.com.