Ellery Fecunda
Read all my blogsIn our previous blog on SAP Hybris Marketing, we discussed the art of contextual marketing, the ability to get the perfect fit message in front of your audience at the right time and place.
Now that your audience knows what you have to offer, and you have their attention, it is time for the next phase. How do we get from arousing interest to a sale?
Lead management
After arousing interest with your audience, it is time to look closely at the response.
Imagine you are on a market selling t-shirts. First you shout ‘T-shirts half price!’ Before shouting it again, you check the response of the bystanders. If someone seems interested, you focus on this person before shouting the original message again.
This would be a good example of nurturing your leads. You feed the interested part of your audience with information in order to convince them to buy your product while at the same time weighing their amount of interest in your product and reshaping your offer.
When selling t-shirts on a market, this comes naturally. When working larger audiences (using advertising for instance), this becomes increasingly more difficult. This is where software such as SAP Hybris Marketing comes in.
What is lead nurturing?
Most visitors of your website will not buy immediately. They will first browse, gather information, compare products etc. Providing the correct information is important.
By closely monitoring your customer’s behavior, you are able to derive what the customer is looking for. You can find out about the customers interests and preferences. This knowledge can make a big difference when it comes to getting the right message to your audience.
This stage in the sales process is called a lead. We have information that a potential customer has shown interest in a certain product or certain kind of product.
By closely monitoring your customer’s behavior, you are able to derive what the customer is looking for. You can find out about the customers interests and preferences. This knowledge can make a big difference when it comes to getting the right message to your audience.
This stage in the sales process is called a lead. We have information that a potential customer has shown interest in a certain product or certain kind of product.
So now that we have identified the interests and preferences of our lead, it is time to ‘feed’ our lead with information and maybe even shape our offer to better fit the lead’s requirements. This is called lead nurturing.
We send our potential customers information and offers that match the interest and buying pattern of these individual customers, nurturing our leads to grow into orders.
What is lead scoring?
While gathering qualitative information about the interest and preferences of the customer, we should also gather information about how well our offer matches the customer’s requirements and how interested this customer is in buying from us. These could be considered the quantitative information.
So…
How well does our product fit the customer’s requirements?
How engaged is the customer with us?
The better the match and the more engaged the customer is, the higher the score.
In order to determine the score of a lead, we should first identify indicators of engagement and product fit.
For instance, lead scoring could be measured as follows:
- Visit the website: 1 point
- Click on a product: 3 points
- Compare products: 5 points
- Add to shopcart: 10 points
- Newsletter subscribe: 5 points
- Social engagement (i.e. likes on faceboook): 5 points
- Active contributor: 15 points
- Active reviewer: 10 points
Etc etc. The lead scoring mechanism can be simple and straightforward such as the above example, or can be a more complex algorithm. Also, maybe depending on the type of product or the type of buyer, multiple algorithms can be required to get the most out of your lead scoring.
Walking further down this line, you can even create an algorithm such as Kaposts content scoring algorithm where you actually monitor and measure which actions contribute best to your lead conversion from the idea that the first and last touchpoint in a leads journey are most influential.
When applying lead nurturing in a B2B environment, there are obviously more influencing factors in the equation, such as the role or function of the person showing interest in your products, which information has been requested.
Why is lead scoring important?
As a marketeer, it is your goal to serve your sales department only your most valuable leads.
Any lead that is not in the hotlead zone yet, requires your attention rather than the attention from sales. You should set goals to the conversion rate of leads that have been handed over from Marketing to Sales, and feel responsible for this conversion rate. Marketing and Sales should be a happy marriage so to say and work together smoothly.
Improve online conversion with SAP Hybris Marketing
SAP Hybris Marketing allows you to
- Identify, monitor and track the events that take place online within the customer journey.
- Define lead scoring events and analyse and determine the lead score for each individual lead.
- Implement actions based on the gathered data such as sending a custom newsletter, applying specific retargeting or even triggering an action in the CRM system (such as SAP Hybris Cloud for Customer).
Feel free to contact us if you would like further information on the features or have any questions related to the implementation of SAP Hybris Marketing
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