How to best incorporate specific emails into lead scoring

[LStokes]

Hi All!

I am hoping that this isn't a silly question, as I don't feel that this thought is too outside the box...

I am looking for some insight on how to best incorporate specific emails into lead scoring so that it may be scalable for the buying journey. A client would like to assign lead scoring to individual, specific emails. The idea would be to create marketing email templates that are associated with a dedicated lead score. Templatize/automate everything, essentially 😅  This is specific to what the client wants and this would be much more scalable than manually having to score each individual email. 

All that to say, is there a way to arrange this? Please help 🙂 Thanks everyone!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @LStokes,

Unfortunately, there currently aren't any nice workarounds. HubSpot does not let us apply scoring points in a linear way, depending on how many results a scoring filter has, e.g. 10 points for 10 emails, 20 points for 20 emails etc.

If you want to have a system that scales, you would still have to manually define each threshold, as in: how many points you want to award for 10 emails, how many for 20, how many for 30 and so on.

Manually selecting each email is obviously not an optoin. The best workaround that I have found is creating a contact-based workflow that increases a custom number property by +1 whenever there is a qualifying email interaction on that contact. (But even here, you would still have to add each email to the enrollment criteria of the workflow. You're just making the score itself less messy.) You could set up these custom number properties for each type of email you would like to count / award points for.

Unfortunately, this only works going forward, not historically.

My general recommendation would be not to obsess over marketing email interactions too much. How these interactions are measured is not 100% reliable. I don't have the context of your score, of course, but I'd recommend challenging whether individual emails actually need to be scored.

Best regards!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @LStokes,

Unfortunately, there currently aren't any nice workarounds. HubSpot does not let us apply scoring points in a linear way, depending on how many results a scoring filter has, e.g. 10 points for 10 emails, 20 points for 20 emails etc.

If you want to have a system that scales, you would still have to manually define each threshold, as in: how many points you want to award for 10 emails, how many for 20, how many for 30 and so on.

Manually selecting each email is obviously not an optoin. The best workaround that I have found is creating a contact-based workflow that increases a custom number property by +1 whenever there is a qualifying email interaction on that contact. (But even here, you would still have to add each email to the enrollment criteria of the workflow. You're just making the score itself less messy.) You could set up these custom number properties for each type of email you would like to count / award points for.

Unfortunately, this only works going forward, not historically.

My general recommendation would be not to obsess over marketing email interactions too much. How these interactions are measured is not 100% reliable. I don't have the context of your score, of course, but I'd recommend challenging whether individual emails actually need to be scored.

Best regards!

[franksteiner79 · Accepted solution]

Hey @LStokes 

I'd agree with @karstenkoehler's recommendation, especially since Apple's privacy changes, correctly measung engagement with marketing emails is a bit of a grey area; particurly if your engagement metric is "email opens" instead of "email clicks".

One other approach I have seen and implemented for customers is working with lists. Let's assume you have a series of lead nurturing emails which provide additional information on topic A. You could create an active list for anyone who has clicked a CTA or specific link in one ot the nurture emails for topic A. And then use membership of that list to assign a lead score.

This approach wouldn't offer a weighting, unless you start working a list per email and then use and rules to assign larger scores. But then Karsten's suggestion of increasing a "count" property becomes equally as feasible.

Hope that helps.