Labels help you and your colleagues to quickly identify and understand the status of a contact, rather than having to interpret a numerical score. If a contact is marked Red hot then it’s clear straight away that they are a very promising lead.
Scores are the numerical value associated to labels. Contacts are allocated a score based on their engagement and suitability. To start assigning scores to your contacts, you need to create and activate your Contact scoring rules. Contact scoring rules are built based on segments.
Before you start
Things you need to know:
Contact scoring is a purchasable add-on and not automatically available on all packages. You may need to add it to your account.
Enable contact scoring
Once Contact scoring has been added to your account, it must be enabled before it’s ready to use.
Contact scoring must be enabled by the main account holder.
To do this:
Expand the User menu, then go to Settings > General > Account settings.
Select the Enable contact scoring checkbox under the heading Features.
Select SAVE SETTINGS at the bottom of the page.
A message confirms that your account details have been changed successfully. You can select the set this up link in the message window to get straight into setting up your Contact scoring labels.
To access Contact scoring, expand the User menu, then go to Settings > Contacts > Contact scoring.
To set up labels, select the Labels tab.
Create contact scoring labels
You can set labels for the overall score - calculated from the average of the engagement and suitability scores - or you can set labels for when engagement and suitability scores reach a number that you define. Toggle to the relevant tab at the top of the Score labels area to set your preferred label type.
You can edit the wording of the labels if you don’t want to use the system defaults, as well as amend the score threshold that needs to be reached for the label to be applied.
We apply the following labels and scores by default to both the Overall and Engagement and suitability options:
Label | Score range |
Cold | 0 |
Cool | 20—39 |
Warm | 40—59 |
Hot | 60—79 |
Red hot | 80 and above |
These are typical labels and score ranges used by many businesses when contact scoring. We advise starting out with these defaults if you're using contact scoring for the first time, until you start to get more of a feel for how it works. It could well be the case that you'll want to tweak things as you gain more experience of the feature.
A score can't be set above 100. You also can’t set a label with a higher score than the label that is above it.
For a label to be active, select the checkbox next to it. To make a label inactive, clear the checkbox. If you make any changes, select SAVE to confirm.
To edit a label, type the new label into the field. You can use any label names you want, as long as it's meaningful to you and your colleagues, for example Promising instead of Warm, or Poor instead of Cold.
To change the scoring range for a label, either use the arrow icons to increase or decrease the score, or type the number you want into the field. Only whole numbers can be used. After making any changes, select SAVE.
Changes to Contact scoring labels
After saving a change, you see a confirmation message which states that your changes may take up to 24 hours to take effect. This is because contact scores are automatically re-evaluated once every day. Therefore, a change does not take place immediately, but at the next scheduled evaluation. Evaluations happen 24 hours after your first rule is set as active, so a change could be a maximum of 24 hours away from taking effect if it was made just after your last evaluation
Using Contact scoring labels, you can create segments based on labels, for example to identify all of your Red hot leads to pass to your sales team. Labels can also be used as criteria for enrolling contacts into programs. They can even be used for dynamic content variations.
Learn more in Contact scoring in segments, programs and dynamic content.
Create contact scoring rules
Expand the User menu, then go to Settings > Contacts > Contact scoring.
Select the Rules tab.
If you have any existing rules, they're listed here.
Select NEW RULE.
The Add rule panel slides in from the right. There are three sections to complete to create a rule:Condition
Scoring
State
1. Condition
This is the segment that a contact must be present (so, in effect, the criteria they must meet) to be scored against this rule. You can create a new segment or use an existing one. You can create segments to set scores based not only on behaviour like email opens or clicks, but also ROI, survey completions, or any data you store in Contact data fields. If you have Web Behavior Tracking set up then you can set scores based on page views, downloads, and so on.
To create a new segment, select NEW SEGMENT. This opens the segment builder.
Read more in Create a segment.
To use an existing segment, select EXISTING SEGMENT and then select the checkbox for the segment you want to use.
Once you’ve created or selected your segment, select APPLY.
You’re returned to the Add rule panel, which now displays your segment. If you need to, you can delete the segment using the delete icon or edit it by selecting EDIT SEGMENT.
Contact scoring applies to all segments
Contact scoring applies to contacts that are present in all chosen segments in the contact scoring rule's condition. This means contacts in one segment but not any other defined segments in the condition are NOT scored.
Do not use multiple segments that could conflict with each other in a contact scoring rule. For example, contact age 18-25 and 26-30, because it would be impossible for a contact to be present in both. Instead, you should add multiple contact scoring rules for each of these segments.
2. Scoring
To set up scoring, select SET SCORING OPTIONS. You can set scores for Suitability and Engagement.
To add a score, you can either use the arrow icons to increase or decrease the score, or type the number you want into the field. Only whole numbers can be used.
Once done, select APPLY.
3. State
To enable or disable the rule, select ACTIVE or INACTIVE, then select APPLY.
Your new rule now appears on the Rules tab, along with any other rules you have created, whether active or inactive.
After saving or editing a rule, just as with labels, your changes may take up to 24 hours to take effect.
On the Rules tab you can:
Search for a rule
Delete a rule
Copy a rule
Edit a rule
There are no limits to the number of rules you can create.
A tip for creating Contact scoring rules
We recommend avoiding rules that are based upon sending, opening or clicking specific campaigns or clicking specific links. This leads to a lot of rule maintenance, as you need to create, manage and update these rules individually, especially when certain campaigns or links are no longer relevant and may affect your contacts' scores in a way that no longer makes sense.
Instead, consider using link groups, so you can make one rule covering a range of links. You only need to assign a link to a link group to include it in the rule.
Learn more in Using link grouping to group campaign links together.
View your contacts' scores
There are two ways you can view your contacts' scores:
on the Contacts page, or an individual list page, you can select up to four contact scoring options to view.
on the Single customer view you can view the contact scoring label on the customer Profile page.
On the Contacts page or a list page
To view contacts’ scores on the Contacts page:
Go to Audience > Contacts.
If you want to view scores for contacts in a particular list, go to Audience > Lists, and select the list.Select Display in the top right.
Select the checkboxes for the options you want to view. Choose from
Contact scoring: Engagement
Contact scoring: Suitability
Contact scoring: Contact score
Contact scoring: label
Once selected under Display, these columns are also included in any exports.
On the Single customer view
Go to Audience > Contacts.
Find the contact you want to view, then select the contact.
On the Single customer view, you can see the Contact score label in the customer profile box on the left.
Troubleshooting Contact scoring
If you find that you’re generating a large number of hot contacts, but the feedback from your Sales team is that these contacts are not interested in your products or services, you’re probably wondering what’s going wrong.
At this point, you need to re-asses your score settings; it’s normal for Contact scoring to initially be a process of trial and error.
A common issue is allocating disproportionate scores for minorly significant actions — for example, opening a single email. If you apply a score of 20 to this behaviour, and the threshold for a hot contact is 60, then just three opens would qualify this contact as hot, but in reality, they’re unlikely to be a hugely promising lead.
You can address this issue in two ways:
Increase your scoring thresholds, meaning that your contacts need to engage a lot more, or be far more suitable from a demographic perspective, in order to qualify as hot.
Change your score settings for rules. If you were adding ten points for meeting a given rule, reduce this amount to make it more difficult to attain certain score thresholds.
When Contact scoring is set up to work effectively, the majority of contacts are likely to be in low scoring categories. This is a good thing, as it shows that it takes significant levels of engagement and suitability for contacts rise up the rankings, giving you confidence that they are genuinely good leads.