Best practices on lead scoring on any email open or click

[alexdaniels]

We would like to score anyone who opens/ clicks our marketing email communications. Currently we are scoring based on list membership and manually adding a "opened a specific marketing email" filter to the list. The issue is that we need to update the list every single time we create an email. Is there a way to set up scoring where a contact gets a score everytime they open *any* HubSpot email?

I'd also appreciate best practices for setting up scoring in general (less the actual values or what to score and more the scoring architecture). I come from a Marketo background and I'm having trouble setting up scoring in an organied and efficient way in HubSpot.

Thanks!

[Ben_M]

Scoring for Hubspot is done with the Scoring property(s) you have in your account. On your scoring property, you can have negative and positive attributes where you can look at opening/clicking emails, submitting forms, etc., etc.  I wouldn't recommend looking at just email clicks/opens alone though because the action only tells half of the story.  Recency of an action is just as important as knowing what that action was. For instnace, would you find a lead that opened/clicked an email within the last 2 weeks is more important that a contact whose last open/click was over 1 year ago?

As far as best practices goes, it really depends on your business and account level within Hubspot. For instance, in the higher tier plans you are able to have many scoring properties running and in the current instance I primarily work in, I have 2 scoring models running cohesively to generate a single score to share with our sales team.  This is a complex best practice that I would recommend running because it allows scoring to be multi-dimensional.

Regardless of what version you have or what you decide to build, I would always recommend scoring with frequency & recency on action-based properties, and then identify points that make it easier for sales to know who they are talking with. The goal of lead scoring is NOT to get contacts to score out. The goal of lead scoring is to get the right contacts to score out so that they can be identified from the pack.

[KWeese]

Hi Ben,

scoring on frequency and recency is also my goal, but it seems like you can't filter on, e.g., 2-4 marketing email clicks within the last 30 days. With the properties  "Marketing emails clicked" and "Last marketing email click date" you also capture contacts that have clicked only 1 email within the last 30 days. How did you solve this filter on frequency and recency within your scoring?

Thanks a lot!

[David_HubSnacks]

I find this blog is really good explaining "5 Tips for Creating a Lead Scoring Model that Actually Works"

https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/tips-for-a-lead-scoring-model-that-works

[alexdaniels]

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your reply! Sorry for the slow response. Can you elaborate on your two scoring models that you have running? What are the differences between the two? How do you compile them into a single score?

Thanks!

[Ben_M]

Hi @alexdaniels - The two scoring models I run are: Profile and Activity, or Explicit Data and Implicit Data.  So basically with these scoring models, I'm able to rank who someone is vs. their activity. This helps to compare like-profile people so sales can accurately prioritize who to follow up with.  For us, we don't use Hubspot as a CRM, so in our CRM, what we do is take the 2 pieces of data from Hubspot and concatenate them into a single score field.  We do a little bit of conversions in the background so we change the profile to a letter of the alphabet (ie: A-lead) and then the number after the A tells us the activity level of that lead.  From experience with working with multiple sales teams this has been very easy to relate rather than to explain a single score that tells everything about a lead.

[christine_v]

Hi @Ben_M,

We are trying to convert 2 scoring models (who they are and their activity) into one field to sync into Salesforce using something similar to you (A1, A2, B1, etc). Did you do the conversion from score to letter in Hubspot? That's what we would like to do ideally and wondering if I need to create an additional field to do this in. An example of what I'm trying to accomplish is: If demographic is >80 = A, if activity is >60 = 1, concatenate these into a field that I can pass to sales)... is this possible? Trying to figure out the best method in which to automate this.

[Ben_M]

@christine_v -  We do the score to letter in Hubspot via workflows as well as the score to number to get the A1/A2/etc.  We don't do the concantenation in Hubspot because as far as I know it's not possible.  So we store 2 separate values in our sync to Salesforce and those fields can be hidden in the CRM to users and then we display the concantenated field to the reps in Salesforce.

[Dordora]

Hi Ben, Would you mind ellaborating on which properties are you "time limiting" and what frequancies are you using? 

Also you talked about seperating "Profile and Activity" - would you mind giving a few examples as I find your approach to the scoring model interesting as the "Profile" properties are less avaialbe for "recency" measuring.

And how can you run 2 seperate models in HS? I am not familiar with an option of this sort. Thanks!

[Ben_M]

For time limiting it really varies depending on what you are measuring. For instance, a form submission is a hand raising opportunity that usually means someone is ready to become an MQL or that they are looking for something now so that time could be within a month or so. Whereas with email, the enagement with a brand is a much longer transaction so someone engaging over the last 3-6 months may have more value to us in understanding the engagement of our contacts.

The profile scores typically don't update often because as you state, there is a recency for them. So while it may be good to know that your contact who was a manager has become a VP, those changes don't happen overnight. But someone who is now a VP should have to do less to be on the radar of sales then someone who is scouting for information.

With regards to running multiple models, this really depends on your version of Hubspot as there are limits to how many scoring properties you can run at a time because this is one of the most system intensive fields of an automation platform, Hubspot aside.  However, with larger enterprise organizations I have worked with, it is not uncommon to run different models for different business units as the units may be looking at different audiences.